Running an email campaign without confirming email addresses is like throwing a dinner party where half your ingredients have passed their expiration date. Yuck. Similarly, working with old, poorly built lists will just waste your time and screw up your numbers. The good news is, it’s pretty easy to check the validity of your email address list, so you can kick off your campaigns with (justified) confidence.
Email validation vs. email verification – what’s the difference?
First, there was validation, and then there was verification. Because validation was the first way of checking email lists, many sales people are more aware of it. But times have changed, and verification is now essentially a must-have.
Basically, validation is a “ping” where a digital message is fired off at a certain email address, and the target email server sends a ping right back, in a process known as “handshaking”. Through the magic of technology gobbledygook, the return ping will tell you if the address exists, if it is being used, and if it accepts messages. Validation checks that the email address after the “@” is real, but it doesn’t confirm that the personal part that appears before the @ is actually working. So validation does not tell you what the address represents, because it could be all sorts of sketchy things like a “spam trap”, a “complainer”, a disposable account, or a bot.
On the other hand, verification tries to tell whether or not the address is one of these bogus accounts, or if it represents an actual person. Verification is often more expensive because more steps are taken to produce a better list. Different companies use different methods to get this info. Some use lists of previously verified emails, while others use multiple handshakes and different servers. What you get at the end is a list that is (hopefully) free of bogus accounts.
Why is it important to verify an email address?
An email campaign is one of the most cost-effective sales tools out there. Running a good one depends on a lot of factors, like catchy subject lines and logical CTAs. By knowing how to verify emails with a quality service, you can get a much bigger bang for your buck.
Maximize delivery rates
What is the response rate to your emails? It’s impossible to say when a bunch of them are caught in a “honey pot” (yet another nonfunctional place for them to end up). Without taking the steps to confirm an email address through verification, you can bet that about 15% of your messages bounce or wind up in the spam account of some server instead of a human’s inbox.
Improve messaging and conversions
Hmm… you’re not getting the response you were expecting to your email campaign. Is it because the email was three pages long, and you spelled “customer” as “costumer”, and that there was no CTA at the end? Or was it because 30% of them were never read since the email list was full of fake accounts? When messaging isn’t given a decent chance to convert the audience, then making text changes and split testing won’t give you a proper sample size. It becomes much more of a guessing game when not enough actual contacts let you know, through a lack of response, if your emails have content that is appealing.
Achieve better ROI
To get overly technical, return on investment = money earned / money spent. If you are paying for lists, and for all kinds of other email-related efforts on top of that, you better see that it’s all worth it. Obviously, if a good percentage of the emails on your list are bogus, then you are paying for nothing.
Stay out of email purgatory
Those dreaded ISP blocklists are real. Somewhere in cyberspace, there is a machine that monitors how many of your emails are identified as spam. There are a bunch of reasons for a low “sender score”, and one of them is a constant flow of emails to unknown addresses. The result is a bad email reputation and a greater chance that your emails will be shooed away from inboxes.
3 ways to verify an email address without sending an email
So we agreed that verification is important, right? Now you’ve got to implement it! Let’s look at some ways to go about this:
1. In-House
Larger companies might have the resources to verify email addresses in-house. You’ll need someone to do fun things like IP address and DNS lookups, server pinging, and syntax inspection. They can also try email permutation in case they aren’t feeling creative.
2. B2B Database Companies
You can rely on some of the major B2B database companies. They have great resources and provide lots of contact information. But because of their size, they can be cumbersome and deliver results that might be outdated, with email lists that have old contact data.
3. Real-Time Email Finders
To get around this problem, using an email finder with real-time verification is your best bet. Services like the Lusha Extension filter email lists to guarantee that your campaign resources are up to date with high-quality contacts.
Key takeaways
- If you’re running email campaigns, run them more wisely by first checking the validity of email addresses
- Verification is better than validation, to increase the chances of reaching an actual human
- The optimal way to verify email lists is through a real-time service such as Lusha
- Once you’ve got a list you like and are ready to add them to an email cadence, use our free sequencing tool, Engage.
See how Lusha can speed up your workflow
