There is more to a successful email marketing campaign than meets the eye. Marketers go to great lengths to carefully craft the right content, but their job is not done there. They must ensure email templates are both desktop and mobile responsive, all embedded links are functional, and lists are properly segmented. Additionally, they’re responsible for tweaking scheduling times and performing A/B testing. While juggling so many tasks, many email marketers often overlook a crucial detail before campaign deployment: validating their list.Email verification is essential to campaign deliverability and overall performance. Without it, too many hard bounces or complaints can create a marketer’s worst nightmare. Failing to verify your data at the top of your funnel is like leaving your doors unlocked in a bad neighborhood, especially if you are working with data brokers or buying traffic to your site. Check out these reasons why validating all incoming data is essential.
1. Improve Inbox Deliverability
Your campaign is worthless if your emails do not reach the inbox. Inbox deliverability is directly correlated to your Sender Score, a system to identify if you are a trusted sender or a spammer. The bottom line is that better quality data translates to better performance.
2. Boost Engagement Rates
Once you start verifying your email data, you can eliminate accounts that don’t matter. Although your list size will be smaller, your engagement rate will increase. Sending to a list of customers who are actively using their email address means you will have a better open rate and CTR (click through rate).
3. Eliminate Hard Bounces
Hard bounces are a nightmare in the email marketing world. They lower your Sender Score and can even lead to getting blacklisted. Email verification is designed to check accounts to make sure they are real.Good quality email validation is not a simple database lookup. It’s a real-time check to make sure the username is a registered and active mailbox at the host server. A quick validation will give you peace of mind that your email list is safe to engage.
4. Reduce Spam Complaints
Spam complaints are prone to damaging the deliverability of your campaigns. A complaint usually occurs when the user is receiving too many emails from you or does not understand the unsubscribe process.The tolerable spam complaint rate is less than 0.1%. Some advanced email validation tools help identify users who frequently mark email communications as spam, giving you a heads up on which ones to engage sparingly or not at all.
5. Avoid High-Risk Email Accounts
Risky email accounts typically involve known litigators in the email marketing space, and email accounts linked to fraud or chargebacks. Sending to these email addresses could land you in some hot water, as marketers who have mailed to too many traps often find themselves on a blacklist. Using validation helps you steer clear of many of these rotten apples.
6. Identify Catch-All Email Accounts
If you are in the B2B space, you might be familiar with catch-all mail servers. Basically, they’re server configurations that accept email sent to any username, even if the mailbox is not created.The problem for digital marketers is that an email looks real, but it later gets kicked back. Using an email validation solution, you can know which mail servers are configured this way. Giving you the additional insight allows you to make the best choices for your email campaign.
7. Stop Temporary Accounts
Temporary email accounts, which are commonly used by fraudsters, last less than 48 hours and are randomly generated. Because they are real at point of collection, they can easily sneak past your double opt-in process.
8. Dodge Spambots
Spambots are known for flooding your contact forms with fictitious data. Some businesses use CAPTCHA to dodge bots, but that also frustrates users. When you know the difference between a real account and fake data you can beat the bots.
9. Alert and Convert Typos
On the form, verification will prompt a user when they make a mistake. Email addresses may look real to the human eye, but validation will detect what’s real and what’s not. If the user fat-fingers their contact data, they will get an error message, which will help you alert and convert invalid data into good quality contacts.
Email verification continues to become simpler to use, and Xverify has teamed up with Formstack to make real-time data verification even easier. If you already have a Formstack account and would like to add an additional layer of protection to your forms, you can get started here. Once your accounts are setup, check out the documentation on completing the Xverify-Formstack integration.
About the Author
Krista Barrack is a product specialist with Xverify, helping clients improve inbox deliverability through email verification and best practices.
