Email marketing has the potential to generate a significant return on investment, exceeding 122% in many cases. However, this is only achievable if the strategy is implemented correctly. The foundation of a successful email marketing campaign is a clean and deliverable email list. The initial step to ensure this is through email validation, but what is email validation all about, and what are its benefits? How can it be performed effectively?
In this post, I will provide answers to these questions, allowing even beginners to kick start their email marketing campaigns with confidence. So, let’s dive into the details.
What is email validation?
Validating your email list through email validation has several benefits:
- Improved deliverability: Email validation helps ensure that your emails are delivered to real and active email addresses. This can reduce the number of bounces and undeliverable emails, which can negatively impact your sender reputation and email deliverability.
- Cost savings: If you use a third-party email service provider, they may charge you based on the number of emails sent. By validating your email list, you can avoid paying for emails that will never be delivered.
- Better engagement rates: By sending emails only to real and active email addresses, you increase the chances of your emails being opened and engaged with by recipients.
- Avoidance of spam traps: Email validation can help you avoid sending emails to inactive email addresses or spam traps, which are email addresses used by internet service providers to identify and block spammers.
Overall, email validation is an important step in ensuring that your email marketing campaigns are successful and that your email list is reliable and deliverable.
Why You Must Validate Email Addresses
If you have collected email addresses and conducted an email campaign without email validation, you will likely receive hard bounces for invalid email addresses. Even if some email addresses are valid, sending emails to invalid ones can damage your sender’s reputation, leading to decreased email deliverability. This can be a significant problem for an entire email marketing team. Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure that your email list is clean and deliverable through email validation to avoid these issues.
Email validation works by verifying the validity and existence of an email address. The process usually involves several steps that vary depending on the email validation service you use. However, the basic process involves checking the email format, domain name, and email server response.
First, the email format is checked to ensure that it is correctly formatted and doesn’t contain any errors. Next, the domain name is verified to ensure that it exists and is registered. Then, the email server response is checked to confirm that the email address is deliverable.
Email validation services use different techniques to verify the email address. Some services use a syntax check to ensure that the email address follows the standard format. Others use domain checks to verify the domain name and identify common email patterns associated with spam.
Some email validation services also use SMTP checks to verify the email server’s response and confirm that the email address is deliverable. They send a test message to the email address and check if it bounces or if it is accepted by the email server.
Overall, email validation is an essential process that ensures your email campaigns are successful and reach your target audience. By verifying your email list regularly, you can keep your list clean and improve your email deliverability and engagement rates.
How Does Email Validation Work
Email validation typically involves a series of checks to verify the authenticity and deliverability of an email address. Here’s a brief overview of how it works:
- Syntax check: The first step in email validation is to check if the email address is properly formatted and doesn’t contain any typographical errors. This step involves checking if the email address includes the “@” symbol, has a domain extension (.com, .org, .net, etc.), and doesn’t contain any illegal characters.
- Domain check: The second step is to verify the domain of the email address. This involves checking if the domain is registered, active, and has a valid MX record. An MX record is a DNS record that specifies which mail server is responsible for accepting email messages for that domain.
- Mailbox check: The third step is to check if the email address has an active mailbox. This involves sending a message to the email address and checking if it bounces back or is accepted by the recipient’s mail server. This step may also involve checking if the email address is a catch-all address or a temporary email address.
- Role-based email check: The fourth step is to check if the email address is a role-based email address. Role-based email addresses are generic addresses such as support@domain.com, info@domain.com, or sales@domain.com, and may not be associated with a specific individual. Sending marketing emails to role-based addresses can lead to high bounce rates, low engagement, and poor deliverability.
- Reputation check: The final step is to check the sender’s email reputation. This involves checking if the sender’s domain and IP address are not blacklisted, have a good sender score, and have a history of sending legitimate emails.
Email validation can be done manually or through automated email validation services. Automated email validation services use sophisticated algorithms to validate large email lists quickly and accurately.
How to Verify Email Addresses Without Sending Emails
Email validation is an important process that verifies the accuracy and existence of an email address. An email address consists of two parts: the private information and the domain name. The private information can include uppercase and lowercase alphabets, special symbols like @, _, -, and full stops. The domain name can include dots, hyphens, digits, and letters. Valid email addresses typically follow this format, like john@umbrellamarketing.com, blogger@abc.news.net, or hellow@mywebsite.com. On the other hand, invalid email addresses may have consecutive dots, a domain name that begins with a dot, special characters that are not allowed, or missing the @ symbol.
Validating an email list manually can be time-consuming, so it’s best to use JavaScript code to verify if email addresses are valid. This process can help you decrease hard bounces, avoid risky email addresses, improve primary inbox deliverability, and boost your email marketing reputation. It’s recommended to validate your email list regularly, especially when you add new recipients, see an increase in bounce rates, or experience low open rates.
Here is a basic JavaScript code snippet to validate an email address:
function validateEmail(email) {
const re = /\S+@\S+\.\S+/;
return re.test(String(email).toLowerCase());
}
You can call this function and pass an email address to it as an argument. It will return a boolean value indicating whether the email is valid or not. This function uses a regular expression to match the email address pattern.
Keep in mind that this code only checks if the email address is correctly formatted. It does not verify if the email address exists or if it is deliverable. For a more comprehensive email validation, you will need to use an email validation service or API.
Email Validation Tools and Services
There are tons of email validation tools and services in the market right now. All of them have different top features. Some validate one information, and some do other. Here are the top free email verification tools.
ZeroBounce
ZeroBounce is a widely used email verification tool, with clients such as TripAdvisor. It offers various verification processes, including single and bulk email validation, and provides important customer data.
In terms of pricing, ZeroBounce offers a monthly validation of up to 100 emails for free. For more, pricing ranges from $39 to $249 per month. For unlimited everything, you would need to contact them for pricing.
EmailListVerify
EmailListVerify is another popular email validation tool used by companies such as Shopify. They claim to have validated over 5 billion email addresses to date, and they offer seamless integration with third-party platforms and support for various file formats.
In terms of pricing, EmailListVerify typically charges $0.004 per email address validation. However, they frequently offer significant discounts, so be sure to check for any promotions before making a purchase.
Important things on email validation
- Importance of email validation for email marketing: Email validation is critical for the success of email marketing campaigns. A high bounce rate due to invalid email addresses can damage your sender reputation and lower your email deliverability. By validating your email list, you can ensure that your emails reach your intended audience and improve your email engagement rates.
- Email validation best practices: To ensure accurate email validation, there are some best practices you should follow. These include using a reputable email validation service, avoiding manual email validation, verifying email addresses at sign-up, and validating email addresses periodically.
- Risks of not validating email addresses: Not validating email addresses can lead to significant risks, including a high bounce rate, decreased sender reputation, and a higher likelihood of your emails being marked as spam. These risks can ultimately harm your marketing efforts and waste resources.
- Data protection and email validation: When validating email addresses, it is essential to consider data protection laws and regulations such as GDPR. Be sure to obtain consent from individuals before collecting their email addresses and ensure that their data is processed securely.
- Email validation and lead generation: Email validation is an essential part of lead generation. By ensuring that the email addresses you collect are accurate, you can improve your lead quality and maximize your sales and marketing efforts.
Conclusion
Validating email addresses is an important step in email marketing as it helps avoid a bad reputation for your company or domain name and reduces the bounce rate. The process of email validation involves checking the spelling, format, syntax, and DNS of your email contacts. While I have provided the JavaScript and HTML code for email validation, beginners can use email validation tools or services like Email Validator by H-Supertools, which is free.
By validating your email list regularly, you can ensure that you have a clean deliverable email list, boosting your reputation and improving email deliverability. If you have any questions or doubts about email validation, feel free to ask in the comments below, and I’ll do my best to answer them.
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