How Does an Email Validation Tool Work? Everything You Need to Know

Every email marketer will recognize the importance of a valid email address. For campaigns and advertisements to be successful, you need to be actually reaching your intended audience.

Tired of zero conversions after a well-thought-out marketing campaign? It’s likely that your emails aren’t even reaching your customer. 

It’s common for subscribers to make typos, like misspelling their name when they’re signing up with your business. In fact, 20% of email registrations contain errors. This leads to a nugatory email address, which is of no help to your business because it simply doesn’t exist.

For the best results and conversions, you’ll need to ensure that all the email addresses you have on file are valid and error-free, and that they exist. An email validation tool is the best way to do this.

Read on for more information on this handy tool and how it can support your business. 

What’s the Importance of Verifying Emails?

As any marketer knows, email addresses are data to convert potential customers. Most databases will have a mix of accurate and active email addresses, as well as defunct and invaluable ones. It is important for all businesses to do a routine email list cleaning to maintain clarity.

Nugatory email addresses will have the following problems:

• It isn’t a real person behind the email address because it doesn’t exist.
• The people who signed up for your program and want to receive your emails will not have access to them.
• You’re wasting time, effort, and money working on campaigns that are reaching no one.
• You will never know how well your marketing efforts are working, or if they are working at all.
• You will suffer from a damaged sender reputation.
• Defunct addresses can damage your inbox placement, as campaigns with many invalid addresses will automatically get directed to the spam folder by many ISPs

The bottom line? You’re losing value by not checking email validation and maintaining your email list hygiene. 

What Are the Consequences of Poor Email Marketing Practices?

The older mentality when it came to email marketing was ‘the more, the better’. Today, however, too many email addresses aren’t necessarily a good thing.

Many marketers will buy lists of email addresses taken from different registration sites, pages, or aggregators. People who do not wish to receive marketing emails may continue to get them as well.

These sketchy practices are not conducive to good business and ultimately will produce negative results.

They even are illegal in some regions, like Canada and Europe. U.S. law regulates commercial email practices by outlawing habits like not honoring unsubscribe requests or aggregator lists.

This is where email validation tools come in – a quick and easy method to identify invalid and risky addresses. 

How Does an Email Validation Tool Work?

An email address validation tool is an automated process that reviews an email address list and identifies the addresses using pre-set rules and data. Tools like this will look up the mailbox record of an email address to determine if it exists.

This will then sort the addresses according to the following categories:

• Valid: The email address exists, and it is error-free.
• Risky: The recipient exists, but it may not be entirely safe to send emails to this account.
• Invalid: It contains DNS, syntax, and/or mailbox errors.

Doing a regular email address hygiene check will go a long way for your business. It will remove undeliverable addresses or ones that generate spam complaints.

What Are the Benefits of Email Verification?

Email verification prior to conducting an email marketing campaign can lead to your conversions skyrocketing. Some other advantages include the following:

• The delivery rate will increase up to 98%
• Your bounce rate will reduce significantly, or altogether.
• It will help maintain a high Sender Score, which is a score an Internet Service Provider (ISP) uses to measure your reputation.
• You’ll save money and increase your return on investment as your emails are no longer reaching non-existent users.
• You’ll have a higher conversion rate.

What’s the Process?

To start things off, you’ll need to pick an email verification service. Following are the six steps every tool goes through when checking email addresses for you:

1. Checks address syntax
2. Checks that domain-specific rules are adhered to
3. Checks for improbable names such as famous, suspicious, or vulgar words and keystroke sequences
4. Checks that the record of the domain appears valid and accepting of incoming emails
5. Checks the existence of an SMTP server for the domain
6. Checks that the mailbox is working and functional

This is a great baseline metric to assess if your email hygiene tool will work hard for your business.

Basic Email Validation Tool

The main work a validating tool does is to weed out invalid email addresses. However, a number of bad addresses still can still pass through a basic system.

This is because the more basic tools will use client-side Javascript. This produces elementary tests that aren’t advanced enough to detect nuances within email mailing lists.

A basic tool for email hygiene will check the syntax of an email address (i.e. that the address contains a box name, an ‘@’ symbol, domain name and follows the minimum character count). By this logic, an address as fraudulent as ‘check@check.me’ passes as valid almost 100% of the time!

Advanced Email Validation Tool

This is why most businesses choose to use a more advanced web service, with a thorough and consistent approach.

Sophisticated algorithms are used to train the software with rules, code, and systems. This scans addresses beyond basic syntax to identify discrepancies that are hard to pick up manually or through a basic software system.

It will also utilize a real-time test by checking in with a remote telnet server. It does this by sending a micro message to verify that the email can be sent.

You Verified Your Emails – Now What?

Now that your software has trawled through your emails and done the hard work, you have two main options. You will get a report for each address, so you could choose either of the following options:

1. Remove the invalid email address: This a must-do. If you forget to clean out your list after the validity check, your sender reputation score gets worse. This could prevent new emails from reaching potential clients as well.
2. Study: Don’t bother with the email addresses that are classified as ‘invalid’ by the system. However, the ‘risky’ addresses could potentially provide value by generating clicks or conversions. You might want to keep these addresses a little longer in your list, just in case they end up generating favorable activity.

Another important step to do after the entire email verification process is to go back a month in and do a cleanout. Bulk verifications are great, but email experts do suggest verifying your lists regularly, at a maximum of a month to two-month span.

If you have a list that’s longer and older, you might need to verify your addresses more frequently. 

How Do I Choose an Email Validity Service?

All email verification tools will do the job, but some will save you time and disappointment by doing the job better. Here are some features to look for when shopping for a provider:

1. Email address analysis that is beyond just validity and invalidity
2. Easy to use
3. Real-time verification
4. Accuracy guarantee
5. Compliance with data laws
6. User support
7. API integrations with ESPs
8. Good industry history
9. Excellent customer support and transparency in pricing
10. Data transmission security and protection

An excelled provider will have all these qualities and will aid you with accurate, reliable, and tangible results.

Who Is It For?

Email address hygiene is important for any business, no matter your size. It can benefit large-scale companies that are typically high-volume senders with millions of emails on their marketing lists.

It can also benefit small and medium-size senders who send marketing emails three to four times a month, without a very high volume of email addresses on file.

There you have it – the complete guide to boosting your business through email validation. While the verification tools can be simple or sophisticated, the best provider will exploit the latest technology to weed out all the bad and bogus addresses on your list.

Remember, don’t just stop at a bulk email verification. Maintain your address hygiene by doing routine checks. This will also prevent any damage to your reputation and ensure high-quality audiences as well.

To learn more about Email Oversight and our advanced email validation tool, check out our blog here.