Email validation is essential for successful email marketing, otherwise, your efforts might be in vain, and your email address reputation will be severely damaged (source).
How can you validate email online, why should you do this and what tools are available for these purposes? Let’s find out together.
Why Should You Verify Email Addresses?
When you combine an email database, you need to ensure that every contact you obtain is valid, meaning that it can accept your emails. Otherwise, your messages won’t reach the recipient and will be sent back. The number of such emails is measured in bounce rate.
A high bounce rate leads to big problems for marketers. Firstly, it spoils your sender’s reputation which will negatively affect your deliverability. Secondly, it simply decreases your ability to reach genuine leads that can convert you into your customers.
Regular email validation can help you to clean your databases and drop non-existent or fake accounts, and keep your bounce rate under 5%, which is considered adequate for every email campaign.
How Can You Check Email Address Validity?
It’s obvious that you need to know if an email is valid before sending it. So, how can you test email validity?
There are two main approaches: to do this manually or to leverage testing tools that are available on the market.
Manual methods imply that you send a validation email to your contact list and hope that they will reply and confirm that the email address is in use. On the other hand, testing tools provide different options on how to check if an email is valid, and hence, more reliable results.
Here Are Some Ways to Check If an Email Is Valid:
Way 1: Syntax Check
While syntax checking, the software checks the errors in spelling, duplicated email addresses, spam traps, service addresses, or disposable emails.
A small typo when you or your colleague write “.co” instead of “.com” will send an email to an invalid address, and a merge of two different databases may create duplicates in the database. It’s a simple mistake that can negatively affect your campaigns, but at the same time, can be easily mitigated.
Way 2: Domain Check
Another aspect to run an email valid test is to check the DNS record, namely the mail exchanger record (MX).
It works the next way: the software checks the validity of the MX record and its correctness to confirm mailbox activity.
Way 3: Email Ping
It is another way to test if an email is valid. This type of software uses an SMTP connection and sends a request to the chosen server to check if the email address exists. If the reply is positive, it means that the email is valid and you can use it. The other reply shows that there is no such address.
Wrapping Up
To ensure the efficiency of your email marketing, we suggest running email validation at least once a month and every time after you have added new contacts.