The Value Of Email Validation

Why email validation is necessary

Your marketing team spends countless dollars and labor hours to get results.

After numerous paid ad campaigns and time spent convincing leads to sign up, you now have a lengthy email list. You can start creating highly targeted email marketing campaigns to help generate more engagement and sales.

But what if those emails are fake or untrustworthy?

Most brands use email marketing as a primary channel, particularly in the B2B space. Without an email bounce checker and validator, communications don’t reach the inbox. At best, an email might read as “delivered” but land in spam. At worst, it hard bounces when the receiving server rejects it entirely.

Companies see the potential power of email marketing and chase revenue. However, they often fail to appreciate the value of email validation and clean email with their ability to singlehandedly energize a campaign.

Even if you believe your lead collection process to be reliable, everyone will encounter some fundamental problems.

Problem #1 - People change email addresses frequently

The first problem is that an email list is ever-changing. Even if you validate your list today, it will degrade by 22.71% in a calendar year.

A once valid contact may undergo a position change or leave for a different company. Well-meaning leads may even misenter their email address when filling out your subscriber or lead sign-up forms.

A once-valid email address can become a dud and jam up your email communications. You continue sending your email marketing messages to this invalid address, only to see your bounce rate increase. You spend a fortune in ad dollars to obtain these addresses, while your content and offers never reach the actual person.

Problem #2 - It’s easy to fake a valid email address

There are ways around providing your actual email address when using a sign-up form.

Many internet users are privacy skeptics and don’t want to see their data bought and sold. This frequently happens, so we can never recommend purchasing an email list. Countless buyers purchase those lists, leaving you with nothing more than contacts that are likely to report you as spam.

Sites like TempMail allow you to to create fake emails effortlessly. ZeroBounce email validation helps you detect them instantly.

To combat data privacy concerns, many people use temporary addresses. They can receive and sometimes send mail like a standard address. Because it appears valid, it seems to be a worthy lead.

This fakery adds to the problem of email list decay.

Email marketing metrics reveal the value of email validation

Every contact in your email list has a dollar value. Every email you send to an address represents the time and money spent attempting to convert that lead. This includes investment in copy, graphic design, inbox placement testing, and campaign reporting.

Implementing email validation ensures that you identify which email leads are worthy of the investment. Let’s examine how cleaning your list will improve your email marketing ROI.

It’s an email bounce checker

Let’s face it - bounce rates cause most email marketers to panic.

Not only are you trying to understand why an email bounces, but a continuously increasing bounce rate can also lead to account suspensions. Quick access to an email bounce checker immediately demonstrates the value of email validation.

An email validation API will identify every type of problematic email in real time. Once it determines the invalid contacts, it prevents them from entering your email list. This leaves you only valid addresses, meaning your messages will be delivered successfully.

How ZeroBounce email validation works in real-time

You should also take your existing list to an online email validation tool once every few months. This will combat list decay and help prevent additional unnecessary bounces.

It protects your sender reputation

Every person or business that connects to the internet has an IP address. It operates like a physical address, allowing ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to locate and identify a device or local network.

ISPs and ESPs can monitor your unique IP address and observe your inbound and outbound traffic and related behaviors. An IP address also helps other online services determine whether to transmit data. This includes communications from web browsers or emails.

There are rules for what ISPs consider appropriate behavior regarding email marketing. This includes sending emails to valid addresses and sending relevant messages free of spam or malicious content. Adherence to these rules helps keep your IP reputation in good standing.

Conversely, sending outbound messages to invalid addresses or spamming users with poor content harms your IP reputation. Sending to invalid locations leads to a bounce, which alerts your ISP to negative behaviors. The occasional bounce is inevitable, but you’re likely to resemble a spammer in time without an email bounce checker.

ISPs take notice of your commitment to best email-sending practices. Thus, email validation has the power to preserve your IP reputation. By cleaning your email lists and removing fake addresses, spam traps, catch-alls and abuse emails, you ensure a higher rate of deliverability. This builds your IP reputation as a trusted and responsible sender.

An email validation service helps ensure you reach the inbox and avoid spam folders or blacklists.

In addition to this, remember that even qualified contacts change their emails frequently. Even if someone opts into your email marketing in good faith, they will unlikely report an address change. It’s up to you to resolve those changes.

You save money on email marketing services

Your business relies on email marketing platforms. These services assist companies in managing bulk emails and SMS messages so that you can reach more customers and test your content reliably.

However, email service providers generally charge you by email contact list size - not how many messages you send or receive. While you can’t avoid the cost of creative investment, you can quickly reduce monthly costs by scrubbing invalid emails from your lists. No more wasting your budget on bad data.

Clean and sort your email lists to save on ESP costs

You can create effective, personalized email content

List segmentation is the process of dissecting a more extensive email list and creating smaller groups based on shared attributes. One complete email list can lead to countless segmented lists depending on how deep you wish to dive into your campaign targeting.

While you can technically segment your email list without email validation, the results will be poor. As long as your email list contains fake, inaccurate, or junk data, it will skew your results. This prompts you to invest money into new campaigns assuming that these invalid addresses will lead to additional revenue.

Take the time to validate your list and remove harmful addresses. Then, segment your contacts by age, income, occupation, or purchasing history. The better you can target actual leads, the more likely your conversion rate will rise.

You gain improved audience insights

Email validation is essential. However, most platforms only offer a “valid” or “invalid” result. While it’s arguably safer to scrub all of the invalid results from your list, it’s possible that you could be losing money unnecessarily.The ZeroBounce email validation service is unique in that it offers in-depth AI scoring for each validation result. This can reduce costs in a few key ways.

Spam traps, for example, are always harmful to your email list. Online services create spam trap addresses to catch spammers that scrape the internet for addresses or buy email lists. They should not receive inbound mail; sending it to one will cause ISPs to mark your IP or domain as spam.

However, other email addresses are technically valid but may not register as such. Among these are catch-all emails. Some companies utilize catch-alls to capture incoming messages even if the sender did not provide a valid recipient. They can ensure that a business gets all critical incoming data.

Whether or not a catch-all email is helpful depends on the company’s use case. Individuals often do not oversee these addresses personally, making them less than ideal for your email marketing. However, some catch-all addresses connect with real people, making it more of a judgment call for your brand.

The scoring feature scores these types of emails on a ten-point scale, with one being the least likely and ten being the most likely to respond. You paid to acquire those emails, so reaching them is worth your while.

As you learn more about these addresses, you can scrub them from your list if necessary.

How to implement email validation

Implementing email validation is easy. You can begin with one of two methods and quickly use your new email bounce checker.

Method 1 - Manual email validation

First, upload an email list to an email validation tool. ZeroBounce, for example, allows all users to validate 100 email addresses from their list per month

After you upload your file, allow the system several minutes to validate each address. You can refresh the page to observe your results as they happen. Once the process completes, you’ll receive an email and an encrypted password to retrieve your results and protect your data.

Then, use your results to determine which addresses you need to delete. Use the ZeroBounce status code guide to help you through this process and to understand better why our system marks each address accordingly.

Method 2 - Check emails automatically via the API

Validating an email list one time isn’t enough in today’s digital marketing world. ZeroBounce’s email validation API allows you to validate new email addresses in real time. If the new address is fake or invalid as it enters the form, the API rejects it before it enters your email list.

Currently - the real-time email verification API is available to use in 16 unique programming languages. That list includes PHP, Javascript, C#, Android, iOS, and many others.

You can use languages like Java or PHP to verify an email address exists by integrating it with your favorite websites, third-party tools, or wherever you capture new email signups.

If you verify your email addresses with a language like PHP, you’ll receive the same informative details about your contact as you would with the bulk email verifier.

Here’s an API email verification message example:

  {
        "address":"flowerjill@aol.com",
        "status":"valid",
        "sub_status":"",
        "free_email":true,
        "did_you_mean":null,
        "account":"flowerjill",
        "domain":"aol.com",
        "domain_age_days": "8426",
        "smtp_provider":"yahoo",
        "mx_record":"mx-aol.mail.gm0.yahoodns.net",
        "mx_found": "true",
        "firstname":"Jill",
        "lastname":"Stein",
        "gender":"female",
        "country":"United States",
        "region":"Florida",
        "city":"West Palm Beach",
        "zipcode":"33401",
        "processed_at":"2017-04-01 02:48:02.592"
  }
  

An email verification API is helpful due to its high level of customization, letting you verify email addresses from anywhere, including your web browser to something more sophisticated like your company’s personal platform.

After you install the API, the email validation system will ensure that only valid contacts get through, keeping your email bounces low.

Reap the value of email validation now

If you want to improve your email marketing results fast, there’s no better answer than email validation.

In this guide, we learned the following:

• Email lists decay by nearly 23% annually
• Invalid and fake emails are the primary cause of email bounces
• Email validation reduces email bounce rate to 2% or lower
• Clean email lists boost your sender reputation and email deliverability
• Valid email contacts allow for better targeting and improved email content
• Clean email lists provide more accurate audience insights

You can get your company’s email marketing on the path to success today.

Try ZeroBounce’s email validation service today at zero cost. Get instant access to 100 email verifications and test our blacklist monitor and email deliverability tools monthly!

Get accurate insights about your email list with 99% accuracy - guaranteed.

Clean your emails with ZeroBounce