Every marketer who has worked on an email or outreach campaign at least once, knows that email marketing is a proven and specific marketing method, the best thing about it is metrics — every step of your email campaign can be surely measured.
The most familiar steps in every campaign are delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. These cover the overall success of any campaign. Management and smart optimization of the campaign let you control all of these metrics, thus bringing your results to new altitudes.
Sadly, there are metrics many people often forget about, it including the very first step of your email campaign, email address validity. The more precise your initial email list is, the better your campaign’s show will be. More importantly, this short metric can improve your results dramatically or simply ruin the whole campaign.
As you can see the value of email verification should not and can not be undervalued.
This article will examine what email verifiers are, what’s behind the software or service, and how they enhance the results of email campaigns. We will show you a genuine experiment of the email verification process, and show you how to choose an optimal email verifier for your marketing needs. Let’s get this verification party began.
What are email verification services?
Email Verification services are desktop tools or online services (both software-as-a-service or plugins) that allow marketers and salespeople to verify a single email address or a complete list of email addresses, and be certain the contacts exist, working, and valid.
Nowadays most email verification services are represented as online services, and the reasons are quite simple, it can be reached anytime, anywhere, and from any device. They don’t need any additional resources besides an internet connection and can be easily maintained and updated by the developer and vendor of the service. But the most important reason is that you can use multiple stable servers for verification, and do not run the verification process by using your IP address.
The best illustration of a modern and feature-rich email verification service is Clearalist Bulk Email Verifier — it’s an online verification service that enables users to verify single emails and email lists in bulk, Clearalist also gives you 100 free credits to verify email.
Now that we have explained what an email verification service is, let’s take a look at what’s behind the system and how it works to verify and validate all the email addresses.
How email verification works
Even though many people have heard about email verification services, or maybe used some of them, not all simply understand the technical aspects of the service. We will show you how it works by explaining the main technological features and verification steps, this will let you easily learn how email addresses are validated.
The main email verifier features and validation steps:
Step 1 — Syntax check — Syntax analysis makes it possible to check whether an email address is spelled accurately, has no spaces, commas, and all the @s, dots, & domain extensions are in the right place.
Step 2 — Domain check — Domain check enables you to be sure the domain name the email address is hosted on really exists, is registered, and working well on the hosting domain.
Step 3 — Email ping — this is the most complicated step of email verification. Email ping is the technical method of an email verifier service pinging the exact email address with an EHLO message, then awaiting the reply from the email server. The received server response will confirm the email address really exists on the server and is active.
Reasons to verify emails
There are quite a few reasons why an email address may not be running anymore or be considered invalid. Some reasons are technical, others relate to the social factor, things change, anything can happen. Let’s take a look at the most obvious reasons you should always verify your email lists.
1. The person changed the email provider/service. Apparently one of the most common reasons. For example, if a person used their email provider’s email service and then switched to Gmail or vice versa. Or a person shifted from one popular inbox provider to another. Most importantly, even if the first email address is still “working”, a message sent to it will never be read.
2. The person changed the email ID within the corresponding provider. In another familiar scenario, a person keeps using the same email provider but switches to another account with a different email address. Let’s say the email address used first was [email protected] and then the person switched to a more appropriate email address at [email protected]
3. Person switched position within a company. In many organizations, especially bigger ones, employees have different email address types according to their jobs. Low-level employees, mid-level employees, and C-level employees normally have different formats of email addresses, and if the person switched positions from a mid-level manager to a C-level decision-maker, or from a hands-on expert to a manager, the previous email address can quickly become invalid, thus making your email messages bounce.
4. The domain is dead. It’s a common technical reason. If the website is unreachable, the domain is dead, or a mail server on the domain’s server is down, you won’t be capable to deliver your message to the recipient. It is a good hint that the company is out of business, so make sure to filter out email addresses that are invalid for this quiet reason.
What emails should be verified?
That’s a good enigma. The solution is simple, every email address and email list must be verified. You understood the reasons described above, and you clearly understand that any of these can happen at any time. So the more regularly you verify your present email lists the better, and always verify your new email lists.
Some people verify only new email lists or email lists generated from untrusted sources, which is good, of course, but does not reduce the risk completely. You should always verify new email lists, even those bought or produced from highly trusted sources (such as expensive third-party databases and vendors). You should also verify your existing email lists from time to time (once a month is sufficient).
Email verification is a must-have method, and you will see more evidence of how important it is and how much time and money it can save you.
How to pick an optimal email verification service
Now that we’re clear with what an email verification service is, how it works and why we need to verify emails, let’s move on to some quick guidelines on how to choose an optimal verifier and what it should include.
- Online Service — the optimal choice is an online email verifier, that works as software-as-a-service (SaaS). It doesn’t need any of your computer resources, it can be reached anytime, anywhere and from any device, and you don’t use your own IP for the verification process (rather it uses the service’s IPs which work way better).
- Scalability — your email verification service should be able to verify both single email addresses and bulk email lists. Though checking bigger email lists takes longer, it is still done almost immediately.
- Corporate and personal emails — your email verification tool should be fit with verifying both corporate email addresses located on the company’s domain and private email addresses found on public email providers (such as Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo).
- Various Email verification mechanisms – You cannot depend on just one, your email verification service should allow you to verify emails by running different validation methods, such as syntax check, domain check, and email server ping.
- Integrations with other services– These are the best features, because email verification is utilized within an email marketing process, and it’s great to have your email verifier attached to or integrated with other elements, such as email sending tools, email generation tools, email list management tools, etc.
Practical part — let’s run an experiment!
Now let’s get to the most fascinating part — a practical experiment where we will explain to you how an email verifier saves you time, money and optimizes your resources and the overall process of email/outbound marketing.
For this analysis, we generated 1000 email addresses (leads) from various sources and then verified them to show you how an email verifier cleans a list and improves overall campaign metrics.
The email addresses generated above consisted of both corporate emails (hosted on the company’s domain) and private ones (hosted on public server providers).
After verification 340 emails turned out to be invalid. That’s 34%! These included dead domains, inactive servers, and inactive email accounts. The verification process took us 1 minute 20 seconds.
Tools we used for generation do not extract incorrectly spelled email addresses, so we saved a bit on checking for the incorrect syntax, which is good.
34% is an okay number of invalid email addresses, whether they are produced on the web or from a database. But how much does it cost you as a specialist or a business owner? Check out the calculations below.
It’s worth every single penny
Let’s talk about numbers and business now.
- $0.006 — normal price per email address verification across multiple verification tools that are accessible on the market.
- $0.0007 — price per email address verification through Clearalist Email Verifier.
- $0.015 — common price per email delivery across multiple email senders that are accessible on the market (both bulk email sending services & smart outreach services).
It costs $6 on average to verify 1000 emails or $1 with Clearalist Bulk Email Verifier.
Now we have 660 valid email addresses to use in our outreach campaign. The best thing is that we don’t need to deliver our message to those 340 invalid email addresses. We spent $1 to verify 1000 emails and saved almost $5 on email delivery.
Imagine if you run campaigns daily, or you deliver to more recipients, that’s a decent amount of money saved! By verifying email lists a normal company that often runs email campaigns can easily save $100–300 a month.
But you are not just saving money, you are maintaining another important asset, your technical reputation as a sender.
By verifying email lists and delivering your email messages to valid, real, and working email addresses you develop a lot of parameters:
- Delivery Rate (or Bounce Rate)
- Open Rate
- Reply Rate
- Conversion Rate
- Click-Through Rate
High metrics can increase your technical performance and overall business results, and low ones can destroy all your efforts.
As you can see now, email verification is a win-win process — it protects your money, saves your reputation, and saves time. It is worth every single penny spent!
Have a great day. Happy Cleaning!
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