Email validation is the process of verifying an email address to ensure it’s a valid and active account capable of receiving your emails. It’s an essential step in email marketing to minimize bounce rates and keep your email list clean, increasing your deliverability and email engagement rates.
Adding email validation to your workflows can dramatically reduce hard bounces and protect your sender reputation. It’s a crucial part of your email program, and it’s easy to do with email verification APIs like Abstract’s.
There are many reasons to use email validation, but some of the most important are reducing hard bounces, improving deliverability, avoiding sending to risky addresses, and getting better email marketing metrics. Bounces can damage your reputation with ISPs and mailbox providers. They can also make it more difficult to reach your audience, causing open and click rates to suffer. This can impact your ROI and derail your business.
If too many of your emails are bouncing, or are going to non-existent accounts, your ISPs and mailbox providers may blacklist your domain. This will prevent your emails from reaching the inboxes of your customers and prospects, and could even cause them to mark you as spam. If your deliverability drops too low, it can be expensive to continue reaching your target audience and may cost you a significant amount of money in lost revenue.
Besides checking for hard bounces, email validation tools can also help you identify and remove risky or invalid emails from your lists. These can include temporary or disposable addresses, fake accounts, and catch-alls that are used to trap spammers. A good email validation service will look for invalid characters, such as underscores () between words, exclamation points (!) and ampersands (&).
The results of an email validation tool will give you a clear indication of the validity of an email address. Most validated emails will return the status of “Valid,” “Risky,” or “Invalid.” Some will provide more detailed results, including a score from 0 to 1, which indicates how likely an email is to be valid. This score can be helpful in setting your sender reputation thresholds.
You don’t need to check every email address in your database, but it’s a good idea to do email validation when you have a new list or if your hard bounce rate is too high. It’s also a good idea to run a validation when you notice poor metrics, such as low open and click rates. Email validation can help you weed out the bad addresses and improve your email marketing efforts by boosting engagement rates and improving your ROI.