If you’re a young email marketer or someone who recently decided to step into this field, you’re probably spending a lot of time learning everything you can about email marketing, why people buy email list and how it works. And we know you’re knee-deep in information, trying to make sense out of everything you’re reading.
We hate to be the ones adding to that, but let’s see what we can tell you about email validation in this quick and essential guide.
What is Email Validation?
Email validation means checking whether an email address on your list is valid or not. Marketers also call it email verification, email list clean-up, or email scrubbing. You can do it in many ways, but our favorite is definitely using an email checker (but we’ll get to that).
Why Should You Clean Your Email Lists?
Having more people on the list doesn’t mean that your campaigns will perform better. On the contrary, they may perform worse. And it’s not only a matter of your campaigns’ progress. Low deliverability rates will negatively affect your sender reputation, leading to even poorer performance rates.
Not to mention, stale contacts could lead to potential spam reports.
How to Find a Good Email Validator?
There are so many different email checker solutions on the market that it can feel overwhelming. But, we recommend that you don’t just go for the cheapest option because it’s the most affordable, or give up on your search and just choose the first email checker you find. Do your research extensively.
This means looking into user reviews, maybe talking to some of your peers, and getting their recommendations. Finding a trusted company for email verification will be crucial for your verification success.
How Often Should You Clean Your Email List?
There’s no simple answer to this question. The cleaning schedule will depend on your emailing frequency, bounce rates, deliverability rates, click-through rates, the number of spam reports, and so on.
We recommend that you clean up your existing list as soon as you get the perfect email checker. Then, later on, you should keep a close eye on your key performance indicators, and do clean-ups when you notice suspicious numbers. Besides that, figure out what works for you and do your regular cleaning each month, or quarter.
Is There a Way to Make Sure Invalid Emails Don’t Make Your List?
You can definitely take some precautions and use an API to filter email addresses in real-time. But don’t just set it up and ignore your email cleaning duties. While emails might be clean when they get to your list, after a few months they could go bad.
There’s a variety of reasons why. People may have left the companies they were working for, they may have decided to abandon their old email. Or they simply weren’t interested in your products or services anymore.
Wrapping Up
Email validation is essential for successful email marketing campaigns. However, if you decide to do it – make sure you do it meticulously. You’ll see your numbers rise, and your sender reputation will improve so that you can avoid that spam folder.