The main goal of an email marketer is not only to collect contacts for marketing and advertising purposes but also to ensure that their subscriber list is clean.
What is a Valid Email?
Over time, email accounts can become inactive, and addresses that are no longer used, or have been assigned to people who don’t exist might appear on your email list. All of this can be harmful to both the marketing campaign and the business.
A valid email is an email address that is in use by a real person who will see and open your messages. It should not have any syntax errors and should be active and in use in order for the messages to be correctly delivered.
Getting a failure to deliver notice is often a sure way to determine whether or not an email is valid, but this can lead to a high bounce rate, which can damage your campaign and reputation. Simply put, a valid email is an email address where the username is a real mailbox in the domain.
What is a Valid Email Format?
Invalid email formats can render an email useless. Often, these errors can occur when the subscriber is entering their email address to sign up to an email newsletter, or in the case where the emails are being manually entered into email marketing software by the business.
The good news is that there is software available that you can use to ensure that all emails are in the right format, as an error message will be displayed otherwise. A valid email will contain the mail prefix and the domain.
Email Prefix: This is displayed to the left of the @ symbol. For example, it might be your name, business name, or any other combination of words that you chose when setting up your email address. The maximum limit for an email prefix is 64 characters, including letters, numbers, and special characters.
Email Domain: The email domain is displayed to the right of the @ symbol and belongs to a postal service provider. Common examples include Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and iCloud. Some emails may have personalized domain names, for example, ‘[email protected]’.
The domain name limit is 255 characters, and will usually be followed by a suffix such as .com, .co.uk, or .net.
How to Check if an Email is Valid?
The best way to check if an email is valid is to use premium services that can take on all the hard work for you.
You can also find out if an email is valid by checking the bounce rate for your email marketing campaign and making a note of any emails that have bounced back or failed to send because the email address that you tried to send the message to did not exist or was no longer in use.
However, bear in mind that sometimes email messages can bounce due to other reasons, such as a full mailbox, and this does not necessarily always mean that the email is no longer valid.
It’s also worth using a premium email validation service to check your email list as not every low-quality email address is going to be invalid. Even active accounts can be harmful to your reputation as a business and to your marketing campaign overall.
For example, you might want to remove active accounts from your list if they are temporary accounts that are used by scammers, high-risk email addresses that could be a blacklist threat or emails used by well-known complaint senders.
How Does Email Validation Work?
Email validation involves a range of different strategies to check for syntax errors and inform you of misspelt or incorrect email addresses that will need to either be corrected if possible or removed from your list.
An email validation service will scan your email list to check for any mistakes using artificial intelligence, tests, and complex algorithms to identify any email addresses that are unlikely to be valid.
Real-time network signalling will also be used to query a remote telenet server through micro-message sending that can be used to verify that the address is actively receiving email addresses without actually sending a message that ends up in the inbox.
The legitimacy of email addresses is also tested with a variety of different strategies. For example, checks can include looking for email addresses that contain vulgar words, searching for known disposable email addresses, looking for the signs of bogus email addresses, and making sure that the domain matches the mailbox name.
Both standard and sophisticated levels of email validation are available, allowing you to check for everything from ensuring that emails are correctly spelt and formatted to using advanced techniques to remove invalid, bad, and bogus email addresses from your list.
What are Email Validation Best Practices?
One of the easiest best practices to stick to when validating your email list is to verify your customer emails as soon as they sign up to your subscriber list. You can do this by immediately sending them an email to check if it has been received, or even go one step further and ask the customer to click on a link within the email to verify that they have received the message.
Using an email validation service on a regular basis is another best practice that all email marketers should adhere to. By regularly checking your email list, you can ensure that any invalid, misspelled, broken, or risky email addresses that could eventually cause problems for your business are removed from your list as soon as possible.
Flagging any suspicious emails to remove them as soon as possible will also help you get the best results from your email marketing.
Email verification software can be used to send notifications for any emails that are likely to be associated with scammers or spammers, companies, or groups of recipients rather than a real individual who is interested in the service and email content that you are offering.
What is a Best Email Validation Service?
Bouncer offers a free email verification sampling tool that you can use to determine if your email list needs to be cleaned up before you send any marketing messages.
Bouncer offers a reputable, secure service that is fully GDRP compliant. In addition to the fee verification sampling service, you can also access paid services that you can use for a more thorough verification of your entire email list.
It will search for spelling mistakes and typos, invalid email formats, and more serious issues such as known spam addresses or other high-risk email addresses that are best removed from your list.
Once you have gone through the verification process, Bouncer offers the option to purchase credits to automatically clean any emails that need to be removed from your list. You only need to purchase credits as and when they are needed, making it a cost-effective option for businesses of all sizes. The credits do not expire and you can purchase them in bulk to save even more money.
They offer full GDPR compliance and you can trust them to never share your email list or data with any other parties. If your business is located in the UK or EU, Bouncer can help you stay GDPR compliant with your email marketing.
Izabela is a leading contributor to the Bouncer’s blog. She is inspired to help companies all around the world to get emails into their recipients’ inboxes
