What Is Email Verification? Plus Why Need to Validate All Your Contacts
Have you found that your email metrics are not what they used to be? Are your numbers tanking for seemingly no reason?
If so, you might be facing a problem with email verification.
You should be checking email validity often if you want accurate metrics and real-time feedback of what your audience is actually thinking. With incorrect metrics and flawed response rates, you could have the wrong idea about what your audience is and is not interested in. It could mess with your entire email marketing plan.
That’s why we’re going to talk about what email verification is and why you need it. Keep reading for more.
What Is Email Verification?
Email verification is the process of ensuring that an email address or a list of email addresses truly exists. With this, you want to make sure that the email addresses are working and are valid.
Usually, email verification is performed via a desktop tool or software. Because of this, email verification services are viewed as online services. Therefore, they are easily updated by their developers and vendors.
All you need is an Internet connection.
How Does Email Verification Work?
Email verification is more complicated than looking up an email address or pinging said email address. This is why we don’t recommend that you try to validate every single email yourself.
Email verification is a multi-pronged process that involves some complicated steps. Let’s look at what really goes into verifying that an email is existing, working, and valid.
1. Check the Syntax
Checking the syntax of an email address entails checking the composition of the email address itself. You probably do this whenever you see new followers sign up.
You may notice that someone mistyped while spelling words like ‘gmail’ or ‘yahoo.’ You probably go in and fix those kinds of mistakes pretty easily.
However, there may be some syntax issues that you don’t notice whether it’s because it’s a name you aren’t familiar with or someone’s rendition of a random email address. You’re less likely to fix these kinds of issues on your own simply because you aren’t 100% sure if they’re issues at all.
When an email verification tool or software runs the syntax check, it will check for misspellings, including those that you may have missed. In addition, it verifies that the email address has no spaces, commas, or other extra characters. Plus, it ensures that the ‘@’ symbols, periods, and domain names are all in the right place.
You may think that these kinds of flawed mistakes aren’t common, but they’re actually a lot more common than you think. In fact, if you research the issue, it seems that every company has had the problem more times than they can count.
Don’t assume that everyone is going to give you a real address or even an address at all.
2. Check the Domain
The domain name is the section of the email address that comes after the ‘@’ symbol and before the ‘.com’ at the end. Some common domain names are ‘gmail’ and ‘yahoo.’ However, there are a plethora of email services out there.
By checking the domain, your email verification tool or software will be able to check if lesser-known domain names actually exist.
The validation service runs the list of emails to check if the domain that they’ve included is one that is being actively hosted. In addition, they check to make sure that the former part of the email address – the part before the ‘@’ symbol – has been registered and is working properly within that domain.
3. Ping the Email
Lastly, the email verification service will ping all of the emails on your list with an EHLO message. Whether or not the server responds determines whether or not that email is truly valid. If the email address is valid, the server will come back with a confirmation message.
The scale of this step varies with each email verification service you use. Some are very strict about their pings while others aren’t.
For example, one email verification software may accept any email address that comes back as a confirmed address, while another email verification software only accepts those emails hosted on business servers. This means that it won’t pick up on personal email addresses like those with ‘gmail’ as the domain.
When you’re looking for an email verification tool, be sure to look at how strict their validation services are. Depending on your purpose for using email, you may want to accept or reject personal emails.
Why Do I Need to Check Email Validity?
As you can see, email validity is a complicated process. It’s not easy, but it is necessary.
Let’s talk about why you need to validate all of your contacts.
1. Your Subscriber May Have Changed Email Providers
This is quite common. Whether the subscriber switched to a new work email address or decided to change their major email provider, it’s likely that you won’t see that change reflected in your email list.
Changing the email provider changes the email domain name. For example, the email may go from cats123@yahoo.com to cats123@gmail.com.
What’s even more complicated is that the email that they used to use is still valid. You’ll still see the email address as valid even though not a single email is being opened.
2. Your Subscriber Changed Their Email ID
On the other hand, your subscriber could’ve changed their email identification rather than their email domain. This changes the portion of their email address that comes before the ‘@’ symbol.
This change often happens when someone realizes that an email they made at a young age doesn’t suit them anymore. They could’ve had a funny name when they were younger and started realizing that a more appropriate email address would include pieces of their legal name.
Whatever the reason, this won’t automatically change on your mailing list and prevents that subscriber from getting your material.
3. Your Subscriber Used a Now Discontinued Domain
Email domains don’t last forever. Domains go down, become discontinued, or ‘die’ as some in the technical world like to call it.
If this happens, it likely means that the company has shut down or is no longer working with email.
An email verification service can help filter through those email addresses previously belonging to that domain. This prevents a large rush of bounced emails.
4. Your Subscriber Is Using a Domain That’s Down
If an email provider that a subscriber is using is down due to a technical issue, your normal server may not pick up on that. It will simply see that an email has come back, presuming that it’s because that email address doesn’t exist or isn’t valid.
An email verification service can help you recognize servers that are down temporarily rather than those that are down permanently.
Making this distinction is crucial for keeping valid subscribers on your list. It may upset your most faithful subscribers to see that they have been taken off of the list because of their domain going down.
5. Your Subscriber Changed Jobs
If your subscriber signed up to your email list using their work email, you might be in for a surprise when they no longer work for that company. Once they leave, that email address will likely be deleted, causing any emails sent to it to bounce back to the sender.
If they worked for a company that transfers email addresses based on position, you may end up sending emails to the wrong person. For example, the manager of the communications department may get the same email no matter what their name is. Let’s say it’s communicationsmanager@ABCcompany.com.
This means that your emails may be getting sent to the wrong person. So, on your side, you’ll see that emails are being sent to the email, but you won’t realize that it’s to someone who didn’t sign up for your emails in the first place.
6. Your Subscriber Moved Up in His/Her Company
Many companies change their employees’ email addresses based on what kind of or what level of position they are in. If your subscriber signed up to your email list using their work email, it’s likely that they won’t manually change it before their email is changed by their employer.
Once they’ve changed positions, it’s likely that their old email is going to be deleted. Therefore, you’re going to have emails that are meant to go to them bouncing back to you.
Where Can I Find Email Verification Services?
Email verification is exceedingly important. Being able to perform all of these steps and take into account all of the technical issues that can happen with email addresses isn’t easy.
That’s why you need an email verification service like ours.
By using our email verification service, you’ll be able to improve your email metrics and understand your email audience more. Clean email lists are the key to getting the most out of your email analytics. In turn, you can ensure that you’re giving your email audience exactly what they want by looking into what the content that they’re interacting with the most.
