Many might consider emails to be an old marketing tool used in the early days of e-commerce, but it is still a vital and powerful platform that enables communication with customers. Today, it has 3.8 billion users worldwide and that number is only expected to grow in the future, making emails and email marketing one of the top channels for driving traffic and generating engagement and business.
Email marketing can offer a staggering 3400% Return on Investment (ROI), yet some businesses experience returns that are way below what they expected. This might be because of the quality of one’s contacts or subscribers, meaning that the list has addresses that are incorrect or are spam-traps. This might hinder your mail deliverability and ROI, so if you want to increase the effectiveness of your campaign and in the process bring up your ROI, it is important to keep your email list clean by establishing good mail hygiene and verifying addresses.
What is Email Verification?
It is a process that helps you ensure that your contact list is error-free and accurate, utilizing a unique link that makes certain that an account belongs to a real user and not an internet bot. It is great for building valid contact lists, but also for ensuring that the addresses you have are active and that they belong to actual people you want to reach.
Why is it essential for your business?
A major part of your email deliverability is your Sender Score which helps determine whether your email will end up in a users inbox or the spam folder. The lower your score is the higher the chance your mail will be marked as spam. Here are some ways email verification helps in improving and maintaining a good Senders Score.
- Removes hard bounces
A bounce happens when your mail isn’t delivered to the sent contact and hard bounces mostly happen because the address no longer exists. They might be the main reason for a drop in your score so cleaning your list regularly might be a good idea. You can use services like TheChecker to check old contacts and even validate newly acquired ones to prevent creating any additional hard bounces.
- Decreases Spam Complaints
Even if you’re sending quality content to users and your complaint rate is low, spam complaints still might occur. There are email verification tools that can detect emails of users that frequently mark mails as spam. This way you can clean up your list and ensure a lower number of complaints.
Email verification also helps protect your reputation which depends on factors such as how often your emails have been flagged as spam or how many of them bounced back. By verifying your list, you will make sure to send emails to consumers that will not reject them.
- Prevents you from getting blacklisted
Getting blacklisted will prevent your messages from being accepted by servers and it might be another reason that your Sender Score drops. Maintaining clean lists is essential for minimizing the risk of being placed on a blacklist so make sure to always keep your data clean by knowing your data sources and cleaning your contact list regularly using email verification.
Social media and smartphone apps might mislead many marketers to believe that email marketing isn’t as effective as it once was. This can’t be further from the truth since people who buy products through email tend to spend 138% more. It is still an important and powerful tool, but only when done correctly, so always use the right and best methods to achieve a successful email marketing campaign.
Kim Marks 
Rhydian Choi