5 Reasons Why You Need an Email Verification Service

“Spam messages accounted for 53.95% of email traffic in March 2020” — Statista 2020. 

With over 50% of global emails being marked as junk, many email lists seem to be on life support. You have ticked all the right boxes — you got people to sign up for to your mailing list using excellent opt-in channels, you started engaging your audience using an established ESP (Email Service Provider) and you are doing great!

But along the way, the engagement drops rapidly and it seems as though email marketing isn’t working. Before we delve into reasons email verification is very critical to your email marketing strategy, let’s see what Email verification is first.

What is Email Verification?

Email Verification Services help businesses identify possible spam traps and other email address disparities before they are flagged by ESPs (Email Service Providers) – or ISPs (Internet Service Providers).

And being flagged by ESPs or ISPs can cause lasting damage to your email reputation. The email verification process involves a series of steps that help improve your email deliverability and reduce the email bounce rate.

How Email Verification Works

Email verification works like a spell checker. A spell checker helps you flag any word that you may have misspelled before sending an email or text message, and your recipient gets to flag it instead.

Imagine a client discovering that you misspelled a few words in a mail! That doesn’t look good on your reputation, right? You don’t want ESPs or ISPs discovering issues with your mailing list either. It doesn’t look good on your email reputation.

You send emails to a bulk of email addresses and you need to determine email hygiene and validity for every email on your list. This is where email verification comes in. Email verification helps you check for spam trap.

What’s a spam trap? You can’t tell the difference between a spam trap and a real email address, but it does not belong to a real person. ESPs and ISPs use it as a “trap” for spammers. Having one of these spam traps on your list can hurt your campaign.

Also, Email verification will help you weed out inactive, wrong and fake email addresses. This will consequently increase your success rate.

In a nutshell, an email validator or verifier is very useful in cleaning your list and determining the validity of the email addresses. An email verifier validates email addresses.

5 Reasons Why You Should Be Using an Email Verification Service Already!

• Save Money and Time
• People Commit Blunders
• Subscribers Can Change Email
• The Possibility of Your ESP shutting down
• Your Reputation 

Save Money and Time

Let’s discuss money first! And the time that you can invest in being productive in other things. Bran owns a media company and they use email marketing to engage a 500 client-base of small business owners. Last year, they had an average success rate of 4 percent.

Bran’s team uses an emailing software to send customized messages to their clients. So, considering the average success rate, that means 20 of their subscribers will take action. If the email campaign costs $50, then Bran’s team spent $2.5 for every successful campaign.

Bran’s team decided to use the same strategy and mailing list last year. However, there are a few factors to consider. A mailing list can reduce by 10% – 15% as a result of people changing emails (people can also change jobs, hence their work emails will change), or emails can be moved to another domain.

Therefore, Bran’s team has to realize that some things will not stay equal based on these factors. Some 75 subscribers will therefore not receive their emails if 15% of the email addresses do not work.

What Bran’s team need so as to minimize losses is email verification. That way, they can easily determine what emails should be removed from the mailing list and what emails they can engage successfully.

Your ROI is attached to your email deliverability. When you use an email verifier or validator, you can easily improve your deliverability.

People Commit Blunders

Humans are prone to making mistakes. You need to factor in this inevitability when drawing your email strategy. Emails are usually long and potential subscribers can make mistakes while filling in their details.

For instance, jonathanbarbados6@yahoo.com can be written as jonathanbarbdos6@yahoo.com. Can you spot the difference? Just a letter was omitted, but your emails will not deliver to a wrong address.

Hence, expect people to omit letters without taking a second look, misspell words, etc. You can use email verification to mitigate this.

Subscribers Can Change Email

According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), 31% of people change their emails in just one year. That’s a lot! These emails will likely remain active even after the user stops checking their inboxes. This highlights the importance of an email verification service.

The Possibility of Your ESP Shutting Down

What happens to a subscriber when a service provider shuts down? The associated email becomes inactive and it becomes impossible to receive or send emails. With an email verification service, you can know emails that have become inactive and remove them. 

Your Reputation 

Your sender reputation is usually determined by the domain from which you send emails. This means your sender reputation will follow every email you send from that domain.

Your email reputation, therefore, is dependent on your IP reputation, which in turn is highly dependent on your domain reputation. Hence, you want to find out what your domain reputation is. There are free tools that can help you check.

If your company offers email services, for instance, verification must take a centre stage. Your customers want you to deliver on their campaigns, by sending emails to the right email addresses. So, you should be able to weed out invalid and irrelevant addresses in real-time. The ROI of every campaign will be determined by the health of the mailing list and consequently, the deliverability of the emails you send.

Finally, email verification is a core part of email marketing. If it is an important tool in discerning your email deliverability and your deliverability determines your ROI, then you can’t afford to overlook the significance of an email verification service.