Think that email verification isn’t all that important? Think again. The subscribers who receive your emails, as well as the overall quality of your email list, can make or break your email marketing efforts.
Why is email verification so important? If your list is full of dead-end email addresses, you’re throwing money out the window. It means you’re paying for subscribers that don’t open, click, or convert through your emails. That’s not helpful at all.
So what do you need to know about email verification to ensure your list is healthy, engaged, and revenue-producing? Let’s take a deeper look.
What is email verification?
Email verification is a process that identifies possible spam subscribers (and other email address red flags) before they result in getting your sending email address getting blacklisted.
Most email inboxes (like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo!, for example) evaluate every incoming email to help determine whether or not an email is spam. This helps improve the safety and usefulness of users’ inboxes.
Because of this, the email verification process is a proactive measure that helps keep your list of subscribers clean. This, in turn, helps improve everything from deliverability to security–and it’s generally an email marketing best practice.
Verifying emails is an email marketing best practice
When it comes to email marketing, verifying emails is a general best practice for a few different reasons. From deliverability, to proactive work around list decay, it can help you maintain a healthier, more active list. It helps with things like:
1. Deliverability
There are many factors that define your email deliverability, but one of them is the quality of your list. If your list of subscribers includes too many email addresses that bounce, it can hurt your inbox placement, meaning your emails end up in secondary folders or in the spam folder.
However, by verifying emails, removing fake signups, and generally following permission-based marketing practices, you can resolve many of those issues. This, in turn, drives up your open rates, and better open rates tell inboxes your emails are worth opening. Again, deliverability is improved.
2. List decay
For existing lists that have not been sent to in a while, a level of decay has already begun to set in. Going back and verifying your list of subscribers helps clean up your list, and from there, you can implement a real-time verification strategy that keeps the list clean as it grows.
Brandon Scott from BriteVerify said, “Real-time verification means actively taking control of your data quality at the very moment of collection. You can collect a list of 5,000 addresses and then verify them later to remove the invalids (end result = 4,500 good addresses if 10% are bad). OR, you can verify them immediately which allows the chance to get the invalid addresses corrected by the user/customer (end result 5,000 good addresses).”
3. Risk reduction
Carrying old, inactive email addresses in your ESP increases your risk if a data breach were ever to occur. By verifying emails and eliminating unnecessary addresses, you can be sure you’re only retaining the information of subscribers who are engaged as potential customers, advocates, and evangelists.
Improve the quality of your email marketing (and your ROI)
Beyond list health, email verification can also help improve the overall quality of your email marketing efforts and your general ROI. It does this by:
Reducing costs
Most ESPs charge based on the number of subscribers you have on your list–so if you have an unnecessary amount of inactive (or fake) emails on your list, that’s money wasted.
Email copywriter Anna Hetzel said, “What if you had 2,000 bad emails floating around in your list for no reason? Email verification will clean up your list and probably save you money. It’s not just marketing, it’s also economic.”
Boosting engagement and sales
Verification improves the quality of your list by both increasing the number of engaged subscribers (since they are taking extra steps to be sure they hear from you) and increasing your potential for sales and increased revenue through higher open and click rates.
Because of this, there are very few instances where you should not use email verification. “Your list quality and subscriber engagement matters so much more than the overall size of the list,” said email expert Val Geisler.
Improving segmentation
As you strive to improve your personalization efforts, look to the verification process for deeper data analysis amongst your subscribers. Through some verification tools, you can find out which subscribers are active, which are buying, and much more.
From there, you can leverage this data for more relevant, personalized customer journeys that make your emails more interesting for the verified subscribers on your list.
Tools for Simple Email Verification
So how can you start verifying emails today? Campaign Monitor users have a few different options for email verification.
- Kickbox: With scalable pricing based around subscriber count, you can use a tool like Kickbox to guide subscribers through a one-step verification process and to validate imported lists on-demand.
- QuickEmailVerification: This reporting tool helps you validate and analyze your current list of subscribers to ensure the health of your list and to empower you to learn more about your subscribers. Pricing is scalable, with one-time credits or daily credits available for purchase.
- BriteVerify: BriteVerify helps you remove invalid, risky, and inactive subscribers–while also empowering simple onboarding verification for new subscribers. They’re known to help reduce bounce rates by as much as 98%, and pricing begins at $0.01 per email address.
- CloudHygiene: This robust tool can help you identify email threats and verify email addresses at the same time. This is a good solution for brands looking for a multi-faceted resource that can do many things at once.
All of these solutions offer an easy-to-implement approach for rapid email verification. Explore each one in greater detail to see which is the best option for you.
Wrap up
Taking steps to verify the emails on your list means stronger ROI for email marketing efforts, a healthier, more active list, and greater security for you and your subscribers. Make plans to add verification as a part of your process for both current and new subscribers and enjoy the major positive impact this small step can have on your efforts.