When setting up your company one of the fastest and most direct ways of marketing yourself to your customers is through emails. They are easily accessible by most of the public and are able to link people directly to your website.
However, sometimes, for seemingly no reason your interaction rates may drop, and your emails start going to people’s spam folders.
Why is this?
There’s a good chance that it’s because your emails are being sent to invalid email addresses – ones that are old and unused, or ones linked to fake accounts. Without these email addresses interacting with you, it can give the appearance that your company isn’t relevant, and your emails are no longer promoted.
This is where email validation comes in. Email validation can help you get rid of these invalid email addresses to keep user engagement and your reputation high.
What is email validation?
Email validation is where every email that is or tries to subscribe to your mailing list is verified as to whether they are legitimate. Valid email addresses are ones that are still in use, aren’t misspelled, and aren’t created by bots.
We want to avoid invalid email addresses because they can lower our sender’s reputation, and mean that more of our emails are sent to spam instead of to our audience.
Why is it important?
The most basic reason why email validation is important is that it keeps your sender’s reputation high.
Your sender reputation is a reflection of how much people engage with your emails, how many bounce back, and how often you’re accused of being spam. You want to keep your engagement high and bounce back low. If you don’t, your reputation can take a hit, and it can be difficult to build a good reputation back up.
A high sender reputation is important because it shows to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocols (SMTPs) that you are trustworthy. If you are viewed as trustworthy then your content will appear in spam less often and is more likely to be pushed forwards to your audience.
If you have too many invalid emails in your list that means your engagement will be lower and you have a higher risk of bouncebacks. Sending emails to invalid addresses can make it appear as though you are a spam site in the eyes of ISPs and SMTPs. Therefore it is important to continually clean your email lists to make sure as many of them as possible are valid to keep that reputation high.
While important, it can also be time-consuming, which is why it is beneficial to find some kind of automated system to take the heavy lifting off of you.
How to apply it to your marketing automation platforms
By using an email validation tool you are able to easily and quickly identify any invalid email addresses and cut them from your send list, which will reduce any unnecessary bounces and keep your email reputation high.
There are two main methods of email validation – Real-time validation and Bulk Validation.
Real-time validation is applied when people sign up for your mailing list. When they are entering their email they may get a pop-up that says that the email address is invalid and to try another one. This can potentially cause some people to opt out of signing up but is a good way of making sure that the emails added are legitimate.
Bulk validation is where a bulk amount of emails that are already subscribed are methodically gone through to decide whether or not they are valid. This is a good way of catching any that made it through the first round of validation.
Both of these methods of validation can be easily automated to save you and your company time.
To use Real-time validation, when creating the place where people can sign up for the mailing list you can add different clauses to the process, depending on how restrictive you want to be with your list. For example, some companies only allow emails with more popular domains, such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. This can mean that some people with genuine emails under other domains are blocked, but it also means that you are lowering the number of invalid emails coming into your system. It is a choice then of how picky you want to be, and how much time you can spend later in the process to remove any invalid emails that made their way through.
You can apply a Bulk validation automotive system to your email list to get any of the straggler’s leftovers. Periodically the emails listed can be sorted into different sub-lists based on how likely it is that they are invalid. You are then able to choose to keep any lists or remove all that you find unneeded. With an automated system, some good emails will fall through the cracks, and some bad emails will remain; however, the time saved by using an automated system massively outweighs any negatives that may arise.
As your business gets bigger and more people are adding themselves to your mailing lists the more these automated platforms are important. So it is advised to apply them as early as possible when you have more time so they are already up and running when you become inundated with new emails.
Conclusion
Email validation is not only a good practice for your business but also a necessary one. To keep email engagement and reputation high you need the people on your mailing list to be invested in the content you produce. To make sure your statistics stay high you should make sure you are continually removing any invalid email addresses.
You can avoid getting invalid email addresses to begin with by applying a system when people sign up, where only certain domains are allowed. You can also apply a bulk validation system where all emails are periodically checked for validity – this is good for any valid email addresses which have since become unused.
