The Unexpected Benefits of Email Validation
Email marketers eventually learn that periodic email validation is a must. Many find out the need to validate email addresses after experiencing a frustrating storm of email bounces. However, email validation is not just about avoiding email bounces. There are a lot of benefits to email validation. Let’s see what else you can gain.
Unexpected email validation benefit: it saves on costs
At first, the baffled email marketer wonders, “What have I done to get so many bounces?” But they find out it wasn’t what they were doing but rather what they weren’t doing. They weren’t practicing email hygiene, which foremost means regular email validation. Email validation is an expense, but it frequently saves money.
How? Email services charge based on the number of emails on your list. If you’re sending emails to invalid or useless emails, you’re actually throwing money down the drain. With as many as one in four emails going bad in a 12-month period, trimming back your email list is a great way to cut costs.
Email validation can boost your metrics and ROI
You’ll likely boost every metric marketers use when you validate your list. For example, clickthrough rates (CTR), open rates, and ROI frequently climb because you’re purging ineffective contacts. In addition, some email marketers notice a morale boost when they see how much better their emails perform. It’s like they’re getting the real numbers.
You can’t make a sale to a dead-end email address. When you regularly validate emails, the quality of your list is enhanced. Better lists always lead to better results.
When you validate your email list, you reduce spam complaints
Ideally, your emails and everything you do should be miles away from anything that spammers do. Unsurprisingly, engaging in spam-like behaviors (like using spammy subject lines) can get you considered a spammer. It’s the adage: if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck.
A similar thing to avoid is the email users known as abuse or known complainers. These people love to mark the emails they get as spam. You could have done nothing wrong, but they still want to hit the spam button.
Any email validation service worth its salt will be able to root out the pesky people associated with these types of email addresses. It can’t be stressed enough: spam complaints harm your list health and results. It only takes a couple to give you worry about landing in the spam folder. Email validation will help you stay on top of them.
Email verification builds customer loyalty and name recognition
Do you subscribe to any emails from which you haven’t bought anything yet? Many people get an email from a specific brand and continue to get those brand emails even though they don’t make a purchase. It’s still good for you as a sender as it helps your reputation.
Email validation ensures that if someone subscribes to your emails and keeps opening them, they will still appear in the inbox. You can’t put a price on having a direct line to people who expressed an interest in your company. They may eventually make a big purchase or recommend you to someone who will.
If you validate your email list, you’re unlikely to get blacklisted
Email blacklists are no joke. Anti-spam organizations, in cooperation with internet service providers (ISPs), maintain lists of IPs believed to be spammers. The lists are collected and maintained in order to block spammers. Spam is such a pervasive problem, and blacklists go a long way toward keeping junk from showing up in your inbox.
So what’s the problem? Legitimate email senders sometimes end up on blacklists. A spam trap ends up on their list. It could be that it seeped in through a contact form that is not protected. Sometimes abandoned email addresses become spam traps and will wind up on your email list.
If you regularly check your email list, you should be able to find those blacklists and save yourself a lot of trouble. Ending up on a blacklist is a hassle you’re better off avoiding. Wouldn’t it be better not to be added to a blacklist in the first place?
You can verify emails in real time
Your readers are only human. They will make a typo! They transpose a letter or put one letter twice when they key in their email address. If that address gets added to your email list, it will result in bounces. However, there are even worse problems. Sometimes bots will infest an email list using those forms. You know you don’t want that, but you may think the email validator will catch it the next time you upload your list.
One of the benefits of a complete email validation service is that you can stop typos or harmful data from the beginning. You can connect an email validation API on all of your forms to block harmful data from ending up on your list in the first place.
Let’s say someone wants to take advantage of your freebie, such as an ebook or audio download. The supposed customer wants the gift but doesn’t want to give their actual email address. Instead, they use a disposable or temporary email address because they aren’t interested in your business. Unfortunately, those disposables bounce, sometimes in just a couple of hours. An email validation API would prompt them to enter a valid email address at the source. Same thing with typos because it checks the email in real time.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
Regularly checking your email list puts you in a more powerful position. You’ll always know where you stand and can keep any poor email data at bay. In addition, it’s better to be aware of what your list health looks like than to be unpleasantly taken aback.
There have been plenty of accounts of email marketers who neglect regular email validation and find out their email providers have banned them. Something like that is shocking and certainly interrupts your email plans, but you can avoid it. You can have peace of mind by regularly setting up email checking.
Email validation has many benefits. Most of all, it’s knowing that your efforts and resources will not be wasted.
Featured Image by Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels
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