Email marketing remains one of the most effective online marketing strategies today. And these statistics prove that:

• Around 4 billion users send and receive emails daily.
• Email marketers who employ segmented campaigns have noted as much as a 760% increase in revenue due to the strategy.
• Four out of five digital marketers would rather give up social media than email marketing.

As shown, despite the ever-growing popularity of social media marketing, many companies still rely more on email. And the reason could be that they believe it’s less intrusive. That is especially true when it comes to receiving messages from people the recipients do not personally know.

Importance of Email Verification and Maintaining a Clean Email List

Email marketing is only effective when the intended recipients actually get and act on the messages. To drive purchases, email marketers first need to ensure their distribution lists are free of fake or invalid email addresses, ones that can’t receive messages and, therefore, can’t convert into sales.

Here are three reasons why every organization that relies on digital marketing needs to clean and verify its email list.

Reason #1: Improve Email Deliverability

Email deliverability simply refers to a person or website's ability to send emails to subscribers’ inboxes. Many people hold this statistic in high esteem and see it as a benchmark for determining whether an email campaign is successful or not. While other metrics can help determine a campaign’s effectiveness, email deliverability is one of the strongest indicators.

But businesses can’t ensure email deliverability without asking subscribers to verify their email addresses. Only by avoiding sending messages to fake or invalid inboxes can any company maintain a high deliverability rating, a statistic that will keep it in the good graces of Internet service providers (ISPs).

Reason #2: Reduce Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is another important indicator to measure the success of an email marketing campaign. A high bounce rate negatively affects an organization’s email deliverability. Some email service providers may even suspend companies’ accounts if their bounce rates exceed a certain threshold.

Requiring subscribers to verify their email addresses can help reduce the number of discontinued, fake, and corrupted addresses from making it to a distribution list. That should help companies keep their bounce rates from going too high.

Reason #3: Retain Only Valid Email Addresses

There’s probably nothing worse than gaining a substantial number of email addresses only to realize that many of them are invalid or fake. Users can get temporary or fake email addresses from countless websites so they can receive special offers that usually require a subscription.

Asking them to verify their email addresses is a great way to clean up distribution lists. After all, a list containing valid email addresses is far more valuable and useful than one full of fake addresses. Email verification can help reduce the number of invalid email addresses in subscription lists.

To reiterate, email verification and distribution list hygiene are critical factors that all digital marketers should keep in mind because they can make or break campaigns.

Cleaning up an email list involves removing inactive or cold addresses that belong to users that will never convert into sales. The process ensures a good relationship between an organization and ISPs and email service providers (ESP). It allows companies to enjoy a high deliverability rating and a low bounce rate, send messages only to valid email addresses, and avoid spam traps. And all that adds up to getting better marketing results.

Businesses need to know that apart from tracking spam complaints, most ESPs use sophisticated measures to calculate opens, clicks, inactivity, and unsubscribes. Their email marketers should thus monitor client behaviors closely and understand that even the most engaged subscribers may lose interest over time. That said, instead of being assets, they end up as more of a liability.

Maintaining an email list can be complicated without the help of tools like email verification software. Statistics say that an email distribution list can contain hundreds if not thousands of addresses. If that’s the case, imagine the amount of time and effort it will take to go over a list one email address at a time. And also, which email lists require regular cleanups?

Which Email Lists Need Cleaning?

Companies keep several email distribution lists that require regular cleanup to become truly beneficial. Four of them are described in more detail below.

Response Lists

Response lists contain the email addresses of people who responded to an offer in some way. These respondents can be customers who made recent purchases or prospects who expressed interest in specific products or services.

Keeping the contact details of customers is critical because it’s always easier to sell more to people who already bought a company’s products or services. Staying in communication with prospects is also important since they are already interested. They may have bought similar stuff from competitors but are looking for better options and can, therefore, be swayed to change providers. Their email addresses are usually stored in so-called “warm prospect lists.”

More than cleaning, though, response lists need to be updated regularly, which organizations can do faster with an email verification tool. Email addresses that are no longer used by their owners are considered invalid, which email verification tools can spot faster than any person manually.

Compiled Lists

Compiled lists generally contain cold prospects. The email addresses in them come from various sources, including survey companies, telemarketing firms, and residential address databases. They are also known as “cold mailing lists,” as they contain the email addresses of people who do not know about their owners. That makes them more challenging to generate leads or sales from.

To reduce the chances that contacting the people on compiled lists lead to lower deliverability and higher bounce rates, a distribution list cleanup is also necessary.

Newsletter Lists

A newsletter is one way by which organizations can spread the word to both customers and prospects. It gives recipients useful information about products and services, such as tips, how-tos, or general news. As such, it can help build trust and loyalty with readers, which could translate into sales.

Like the other lists, newsletter lists require regular cleanup and updating.

Announcement Lists

Businesses also keep announcement lists to generate more sales. Announcement emails are used to send coupons, make product and service announcements, and give information on holiday specials and other discounts or incentives. All these are meant to entice recipients to buy.

Announcement lists should be cleaned up, too, if they are to prove more useful than harmful.

All of the lists above can have tons of email addresses and going over each of them is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Automation may help, which email verification tools can do.

How to Clean an Email List with an Email Verification Software

Email verification tools can help companies maintain a clean email list by:

• Checking for invalid email address formats: Email verification tools can identify if the email addresses on your list conform to Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards with the help of a syntactic validation engine.

• Pointing out misspellings: Email verification tools can check addresses for typos. They also determine if the addresses follow known fake email address patterns. This feature prevents users from sending messages to nonexistent inboxes that may dampen its deliverability rating.

• Verifying a mail server’s or a mailbox’s existence: Email verification tools check if an email address is active and so receive messages using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) from any sender.

• Identifying catch-all addresses: While catch-all email addresses, such as info@companyname[.]com, help companies receive all emails intended for employees who may have left them, for example, they don’t have the same effect on the senders. Catch-all inboxes are hardly opened because they’re not assigned to a particular user. That could translate to a lost marketing or sales opportunity. Email verification tools can tell users if an email address is a catch-all and may be best taken off their distribution list.

Digital marketers can use email verification tools to validate addresses in real time. Integrating them into existing address gathering apps to check every address’s validity before it gets added to a distribution database is an excellent way to maintain list hygiene.

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Email Verification API can help improve marketing campaigns. It is a must-have for doing regular email list cleanups to avoid potential damage to an organization’s reputation. An email marketing campaign, after all, cannot succeed if messages do not reach their intended audiences. Needless to say, a domain that gets blacklisted by either ISPs or ESPs can’t send an email to anyone.