9 Advantages of Real-Time Email Verification Services
Did you know that if over 10% of emails on your list are “bad,” and less than 44% get delivered?
Email marketers often struggle to increase the deliverability and open rates of their emails. That’s why data hygiene and email verification is such an important part of maintaining an effective email marketing strategy.
Even if you collect emails ethically and organically, you may still end up in a spam trap. This can have a drastic effect on the success of your email marketing.
Failing to keep your email list clean results in lost money, time, and customers. Keep reading to find out the benefits of email verification.
What Is Email Verification?
The email verification process helps to clean up your email list to reduce bounce rates and improve customer engagement.
Email verification is a service that email marketers use to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns. The process helps to separate out unsafe and incorrect addresses.
Part of email verification is checking for syntax errors. For example, addresses with missing ‘@’ signs would be flagged and corrected. Marketers can then choose whether to autocorrect syntax errors or delete emails altogether.
Once syntax checks have been completed, the verification tool checks if the domain is valid. If the domain is legitimate, then an advanced verification process begins and the email addresses are put into categories.
These tools often use complex algorithms and artificial intelligence to help with email verification. All of this helps to maintain list hygiene.
The full process of email verification includes the following:
- Flagging invalid email formats
- Catching syntax errors and correcting them
- Verifying every email domain
- Determining deliverability of each email address
- Flagging emails that are old or inactive
Many email verification tools carry out this entire process in real-time.
What Is Real-Time Email Verification?
Once you begin cleaning your email list and implementing verification services, your campaign stats will improve. Click-through rates often rise and bounce rates decrease.
This is great, but there’s one more important thing to keep in mind — your email lists are always changing. That means the quality of your lists won’t remain high forever.
Some email addresses fall into disuse and you may collect new ones that have misspellings or come from unsafe domains.
The best way to protect against this is by using a real-time email verification service. A real-time service will verify new subscribers immediately and help keep your list safe.
Here are nine important advantages to using a real-time email verification service.
1. Avoid Spam Traps
What’s a spam trap, you ask? A spam trap can be an email address that has been deactivated by an ISP but reactivated for their internal use. This is also known as a recycled trap. It can also be an email that’s designed to collect information about your sending habits with the purpose of blocking or listing your sending IPs and Domains.
Spam traps are designed to combat spam-like sending, however, marketers that don’t clean their email lists can also get caught. That’s why list hygiene and management is so crucial.
Spam trap email addresses can work their way into your lists. The negative ramifications of this include:
- Your sender reputation goes down
- Email providers blacklist your domain and/or your IPs
Neither of these things is good for your deliverability, open rates, or conversion rates. If your sender reputation is bad, this could cause a lot of your emails to end up in your customers’ spam folders.
Real-time email verification helps to block spam trap addresses from entering your lists.
2. Reduce Bounce Rate
Your email bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who don’t receive your messages. High bounce rates can impact your sender reputation and get you blacklisted by ISPs.
Soft bounces refer to minor, temporary issues with a user’s email. This could be a full inbox or a malfunctioning email server. Hard bounces, on the other hand, refer to serious issues like an incorrect domain name.
Email verification helps you discern which addresses are still active and which aren’t. Inactive email addresses may have been in use at some point and then abandoned by the user for whatever reason.
This information allows you to remove addresses that decrease your deliverability. Once you do this, your bounce rates will naturally decrease.
3. Save on Costs
Storing email addresses and sending email messages costs money. Marketers with large lists could save a lot of money by using email verification services.
Why? Because email sending services usually charge based on how many emails you send per month or how many subscribers you have.
Knowing which email addresses are unsafe, or inactive, helps you trim your list. This means you’re storing and sending fewer emails which directly affects the cost of your campaigns.
4. Improves Your Reputation
Marketers who regularly send out emails develop a reputation among ISPs and ESPs. This is referred to as ‘sender reputation.’
A poor sender reputation can cause more of your messages to end up in spam. Even worse, you cause find yourself on a blacklist.
There are several factors that determine your sender reputation. This includes how often your emails send up in spam and the percentage of your emails that bounce.
Using email verification you can clean your list and reduce bounces. This has a direct impact on your sender reputation and helps you run effective campaigns.
5. Improves Customer Engagement
Email verification improves the quality of your list and helps increase customer engagement rates.
Think about it. If you’re sending emails to incorrect or inactive addresses, you’re not going to generate much engagement. In other words, your emails won’t get opened, or even delivered.
Improving the quality of your email list helps you to better understand your customers and their needs. This allows you to craft more effective messages that bring in more conversions.
6. Provides Accurate Campaign Data
After the email verification process, you’ll be left with a list of addresses that are real and active. That means all actions taken by recipients (i.e. opening your emails, clicking through, etc) will be real.
This helps to generate accurate campaign insights. Having accurate data on your campaigns allows you to optimize them and increase conversion rates.
For example, A/B testing email formats is a lot easier if you have accurate data to lean on. A/B testing is a way to measure the effectiveness of your messages and call-to-actions.
7. Improved ROI
Once your email list has been cleaned and verified, you can remove inactive and unsafe addresses. This means you’re sending out fewer emails than before, to a more well-targeted audience.
This results in spending less money to generate more conversions. In marketing, this is known as ROI or return on investment.
ROI is a metric used in marketing to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign. You can calculate ROI by dividing your gains by your costs.
8. Provides a Reliable List to Your Sales Team
Organizations with large email lists employ full-time sales teams to manage and execute their email marketing efforts.
However, even the best sales team in the world can’t improve the open rates of an unmaintained list. To give your sales staff a fighting chance, you need to clean your list by using email verification.
Without a quality list to work with, advertisers can’t measure the effectiveness of their messages. This is rather like shooting in the dark. A list with dead and incorrect email addresses results in a waste of time and money.
Using a clean list allows your sales team to accurately measure important statistics. That way they understand the best way to improve their email marketing strategy.
9. Helps You to Improve Email Opt-In Methods
Most businesses and marketers collect email addresses from a range of different sources. Customers sign-up through free offers, subscribe forms, or product free trials.
Customers join email lists in many different ways. An important part of email marketing is understanding which method is most effective at gaining subscribers.
That’s where email verification comes in. For example, by using real-time verification, you may find that most subscribers from one of your website forms are actually fake.
Having these insights gives you the ability to fine-tune your email opt-in methods and increase your subscriber count.
Clean up Your Email List Today
Now you understand the benefits of real-time email verification.
A poor-quality email list can impact your marketing efforts. Your messages will end up in spam and you may even get blacklisted. An unclean list also makes it difficult to generate meaningful campaign data.
Email verification provides you with a way to ensure a quality email list. This helps keep your messages out of the spam folder and increases customer engagement.
EmailOversight provides email verification services with results that are 99.5% accurate.
Are you ready to get started? Contact us today to learn more.
