How to Validate Email Addresses?

Email marketing is often one of the best ways to convert your silent followers into potential paying customers, and a good marketing email can increase your leads and boost your brand reputation. But this can only happen when you have a valid email list. So, how do you know which emails are going to bounce back, and which will actually get received?

What is Email Data Validation?

If you send a lot of emails each day, you may have been in a situation where you sent lots of emails to various different email addresses, only to get several delivery failure messages back or to hear that the people you sent the messages to did not receive them.

Hopefully, this isn’t something that happens to you regularly, but if you want to avoid it, email validation is the best solution. Email validation is simply a process that verifies an email address to ensure that it actually exists and is valid before you send a message. It checks that you are sending messages to an email address that is deliverable with a reliable domain.

Why Use Data Validation for Email?

If the process of checking that email addresses can actually receive mail wasn’t enough to convince you to use email validation tools, then there are even more reasons why it is worth using.

Let’s say, for example, you have the campaign to send to two hundred people, but half of them come back with hard bounces due to the email addresses not existing, perhaps due to spelling mistakes. You might be forgiven for thinking that the people with valid email addresses will receive their mail, but unfortunately, it does not always work like that.

Too many hard bounces impact your sender’s reputation, and a bad sender’s reputation will harm your email deliverability rate. So even if you get lucky and some emails are valid, you might not even be able to get your mail to reach their inboxes, which can be bad news for your email marketing campaign.

Some of the main reasons to validate email addresses include decreasing hard bounce numbers, improving your sender reputation, avoiding sending mail to risky email addresses, improving your deliverability score, avoiding spam complaints, and getting better email marketing results with improved engagement rates.

Increase Delivery Rate

The delivery rate refers to the metric that indicates the number of recipients that have received your email. When you send emails, some may bounce and get lost along the way to the inbox. In the case of a soft bounce, this is usually temporary and due to reasons, such as the email file being too large or the recipient’s inbox being full.

However, hard bounces mean the message cannot be delivered permanently, and are dangerous as they increase the risk of your reputation being damaged and your email account being blocked.

Protect Your Reputation

Each email account has a sender reputation score, which contributes to your email deliverability rates. The higher this score, the more likely your messages are going to be delivered to recipients’ inboxes. Various factors impact this reputation, including your bounce rate.

Get Better Outreach Metrics

When your email list is verified, you are only sending messages to emails that are valid and deliverable. With this accurate list, it becomes much easier to analyze your email campaign statistics.

When Should You Use Data Validation Tool?

The good news is that you do not need to continuously validate any email addresses that you have on your list. The only times when you should use an email validation tool is when you get new recipients added to your list, your bounce rate increases or open rate decreases, or if you haven’t contacted your list in longer than a month.

While it is not something that you are going to need to do every day, experts recommend that you use an email validation tool on a regular basis – around once per month is usually a good idea, even if you have not experienced any issues. This helps you stay on top of the data that you have to make sure that it is accurate, clean and useful.

How Does Data Validation for Email Address Work?

Email address validation is a process of checking email addresses to ensure that they are valid and correct. In general, the first thing that you should do is check the spellings; ensure that everything has been spelt correctly and that there are no typos.

Then check for spam traps. There are lots of email addresses that are created for the sole purpose of capturing senders who are not following the best email marketing practices. Email Service Providers and Internet Service Providers will ensure that you do not have these email addresses on your list when you use an email validation tool.

Once you have done this, the next step is to check the email address format. Make sure that there is an @ included, in the right format. Do a thorough checking of the syntax. SMTP protocol is also used during the email validation process to ensure that a mailbox actually exists.

You can do email validation manually; however, this is likely to take much longer compared to using a tool, and the results still won’t be as accurate. Email validation tools are designed to check large numbers of email addresses in a short amount of time, so they are always the best option if you are dealing with a large email list with lots of addresses and want to save time and effort.

Data Validation API to Check for Disposable Email Addresses

A disposable email address refers to an email address that is often temporary and used as a way to avoid any unwanted emails. It might be a good option for users who want to set up an email address that they can use to sign up for things without having to check it all the time, but they are not good for email marketers.

This is especially true when you consider that some people use disposable email addresses to misuse online services, such as getting more access to freemium products. Because of this, it is a good idea to also employ a tool that you can use to detect any disposable email addresses in your mailing list.

This will be done by searching a database of disposable email addresses, checking if the email addresses you have appear in such databases, confirming that the domain name exists, and confirming the age and reputation of the domain name that is associated with the address.

Verify Emails without Sending Mail with a Data Validation Company

Gone are the days when you could simply send out cold marketing emails and hope that something lands somewhere. These days, it’s important to put in the work to make sure that your emails are opened and that your leads engage with the message and respond to it. To do this, you should verify emails and ensure that they are valid without sending any mail. 

There is a wide range of both free and paid tools available to help you verify email addresses without sending emails. However, many free tools can be tedious to use since they require you to click on one email address at a time, for example. Even worse, your data won’t be secured, as often such tools will take advantage of verified emails.

If you are collecting large numbers of emails for your list, a paid email verification tool can make sending outbound mail easier and more sustainable. Instead of spending hours before you send the mail to verify each email address, they easily allow you to work automated email verification right into your workflow.

Whether your email marketing mailing list is small or large, verifying each email on it is an important part of the process to ensure that your messages are reaching the intended audience.