In email marketing, the most valuable asset is your email list. However, what if many of those email addresses are invalid or inactive? This is where email validation becomes crucial for business owners and marketers. It ensures your emails reach genuine, interested recipients, so that you can achieve the intended goals and get more ROI from each and every campaign. How do you do that? We’ll talk about it briefly in this guide.
So, what’s email validation?
Without making things complicated, we can say mail validation is a process that checks whether an email address is accurate and active. Imagine sending out a big campaign email and finding out that many of your messages bounced back because the addresses were wrong. Not only is this frustrating, but it also wastes your time and resources. By using email validation, you can avoid these issues and make sure your emails are getting to the right people.
Email validation is a crucial part of online marketing and it works by checking several aspects of an email address:
- Syntax check: This ensures the email address is formatted correctly. For example, it checks if there’s an “@” symbol and a domain name (like gmail.com).
- Domain check: This step verifies that the domain of the email address (like yahoo.com) exists and can receive emails.
- Mailbox check: This checks if the specific mailbox (like [email protected]) exists and is active.
- Spam trap detection: Some email addresses are set up specifically to catch spam. Email validation can identify these addresses so you don’t send emails to them.
- Role-based email detection: This identifies emails like [email protected] or [email protected], which are usually not personal and often don’t convert well.
How to improve campaign performance
Improving your email campaign performance with email validation involves a few clear steps. Here’s how you can do it?
- Choose a reliable email validation service: Start by selecting a reputable email validation service like NeverBounce, ZeroBounce, or this email validation tool, which is our personal favorite. These services offer various features to clean and verify your email list efficiently.
- Upload your email list: Once you’ve chosen a service, upload your current email list to their platform. Most services allow you to upload lists in formats like CSV or Excel.
- Perform a bulk validation: Run a bulk validation on your uploaded list. The validation service will check each email address for syntax errors, domain validity, and mailbox existence and will also identify and remove spam traps and role-based emails.
- Analyze the results: After validation, review the results provided by the service. Pay attention to emails marked as invalid, risky, or inactive, and separate them from the valid addresses.
- Clean your list: Remove the invalid, risky, and inactive email addresses from your list. This step ensures you’re only sending emails to valid recipients, reducing bounce rates.
- Implement real-time validation: For new sign-ups, integrate real-time email validation into your forms. This will check email addresses as users enter them, preventing invalid addresses from entering your database.
- Monitor your metrics: After cleaning your list, monitor key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates. A cleaner list should show improved performance in these areas.
By following these steps, you can significantly improve your email campaign performance, ensuring your messages reach the right audience and fostering better engagement with your content. Check out this guide if you want a more detailed process of email validation.