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Why Email Validation Matters - Choosing Right Service

Why Email Validation Matters - Choosing Right Service
Why Email Validation Matters - Choosing Right Service

Are you on the market for an email validation service? Great! Taking care of your email list is the best thing you can do to help your email marketing thrive. But, with so many fish in the pond, making the right choice can be challenging. What's an email validation system supposed to do? You have to know what you need before you even consider taking out your credit card.

Read on to learn what makes a great email validator and how to spot one when you see it.

Why email validation matters

According to HubSpot, email marketing generates a return on investment (ROI) of $38 for every $1 spent. Not all businesses get to tap into that potential, and their (lack of) data quality has a lot to do with it.

Email validation helps you prevent this loss and, also, get more out of your email marketing. By removing bad signups and obsolete email addresses, an email validator improves your sender reputation and gives your delivery rates a boost. As a result, you'll be able to:

  • reach all of the people on your list: isn't that where email marketing begins?
  • get more accurate metrics: once you remove invalid and dormant addresses, you'll have a clear idea of how your emails perform.
  • create better content for your audience and adjust it based on your open and click-through rates.
  • increase your conversions without having to resort to any tricks.

Chanteuse Marie, experienced launch copywriter and funnel strategist, explains for Mailbird: "It's crucial that I'm privy to the health of my client's list when I'm working on an email copy project. If poor list hygiene goes unchecked or unresolved, no amount of great copywriting can save an email campaign from going bust. It's essentially a waste of dollars and hours."

How to pick the right email validation service

In the past five years, email marketing has seen a fantastic boom. It's no surprise that so many email validation services appeared on the market.

Before you make your choice, here are some of the features you should look for:

  • Accuracy. For starters, if an email validator doesn't guarantee you palpable results, keep searching. A reliable service will list its accuracy on its website - look for at least 97%. Furthermore, ask if there's a money-back guarantee.
  • Methodology. Not all email validation tools use advanced methods to detect bounces and other unhealthy data. In fact, some of them run a superficial analysis that's not going to improve your email hygiene much. A good email validator will remove misspelled and other dead-end email addresses, spam traps, abuse, temporary and catch-all emails.
  • Security: respectable businesses take GDPR protocols seriously, and so should your email validation service. Before you commit to a plan, talk to a respresentative to make sure your customers' data is going to be safe. A trustworthy company will never store that data.
  • Documentation and support. Especially if you're cleaning your list for the first time, you may need some information. Also, if any spontaneous issues occur, you want to have someone to talk to and get help right away. Some email cleaning services offer 24/7 customer support.
  • A clear breakdown of your results. Once the system isolates all bad data from your email list, you should be able to find out why is was bad. How many abuse emails did you have? What about spam traps and catch-alls? The results give you good feedback on your email marketing best practices and allows you to improve.
  • An email validation API. Once you create an account with an email cleaning service, you can validate your list in bulk, by uploading it on the platform. But a great email validator will also have an API available. This is a piece of code you install on your registration and signup forms to verify emails in real time. The API prevents poor-quality contacts from joining your list in the first place, thus keeping it accurate for a longer time.

How often should you use an email validation tool?

Your email data decays - no matter how good it is when you acquire it. Several sources, including Accudata, show that an average of 1% - 2% of your database becomes obsolete within just one month. So, when deciding how often you should clean that data, keep this in mind.

On the other hand, validating your list is essential:

  • before sending out a campaign after a long break
  • when your bounce rate exceeds the 2% industry standard
  • if you notice your metrics don't make sense. For example, if your emails seem to reach the inboxes of your subscribers, but your open rates are low, that could be because you have too many abandoned accounts in your list. Or, your reputation is suffering for another reason, and many of your emails are going to people's Spam folder.

"Any business deals with a certain level of uncertainty. The market fluctuates, technology forces you to upgrade your systems, or a new law imposes unwanted measures. These are all things you can't control. One thing you can control is how you manage your best business assets, and your email list is if one of them. Review it regularly, send outstanding content, and your email marketing will work," says ZeroBounce CEO Liviu Tanase.

Easy access to email validation, on Mailbird

If you're ready to give email validation a try, you're in the perfect place -recently, Mailbird integrated ZeroBounce into its platform. That means you can access the list cleaning service directly from your Mailbird account.

Here's how it works:

From now on, whenever you use your favorite email client, you can boogie on over the ZeroBounce website. Creating an account takes less than 60 seconds and it comes with 100 free email validation credits per month. Per month, every month? Yes, for ever.

A former journalist, Corina Leslie is the PR & Marketing Manager for email validation company ZeroBounce. You can find her on the ZeroBounce blog, where she shares her best tips on digital marketing, copywriting, PR and everything in between.

You can connect with Corina on her LinkedIn profile.