You’ve spent a lot of time building up your email lists, and now you’re ready to start sending out those emails. But what if some of your contacts are no longer using the same email address? Or maybe they don’t even exist anymore? If you keep sending to these bad addresses, it will hurt both your reputation and deliverability rates. So how can you make sure that all of your emails reach their intended recipients? The answer is simple: email validation.
What Is Email Validation?
Email validation is the process of verifying whether each address on your list is valid. An email address can be considered invalid if it doesn’t exist or if it’s not associated with a real person.
Email validators will check your list against internet sources to determine if an address exists, then they’ll determine whether the email belongs to a real person (with the help of email authentication). The goal is to prevent you from sending messages to non-existent addresses and therefore improving deliverability.
There are several tools like emailvalidation.io out there that allow you to validate an email list. Most provide free versions for smaller lists, but there are also paid options available for larger lists that require more thorough checks. You can also choose from manual or automated methods (which we’ll discuss later).
Less List Churn
List churn is when a company sends out emails and doesn’t receive responses from its audience. This can happen for several reasons: the email was delivered to an incorrect address, the person at that address didn’t choose to read it, or they erased it before reading it and did not mark it as spam.
Fewer Spam Complaints
Spam complaints are a major factor in email deliverability, and there’s no way to sugarcoat it: they’re the biggest threat to your email marketing campaigns. Spam complaints can cause your emails to be blocked by ISPs or blacklisted, which could mean that your emails never reach their intended recipients at all.
For some businesses, spam complaints are simply an annoyance—a small price to pay for being able to easily send out mass emails. But for more sensitive businesses like healthcare providers and financial institutions, high levels of spam complaints can put your business at risk. Bad email hygiene is one of the biggest factors leading to account suspension on most major ESPs (see below), so it’s important that you take care of this issue early on if you want your messages to reach their target audience consistently over time.
The easiest way for an ISP or a recipient’s mailbox provider (like Gmail) to notify them about a suspicious message is through what we call “spam reports” or “spam flags” (also known as “opt-out requests”). You should be familiar with these terms if you want your company’s deliverability rates increased; they’re basically notifications sent out whenever someone flags one of your communications as spammy—which means that they don’t want anything else getting sent from you if they see any similar content in future communications!
Higher Deliverability Rates Overall
Email deliverability is a factor in your relationship with your email marketing service provider. The better they can see that you’re sending emails to valid addresses and not spamming anyone, the more likely they are to allow you access to their service. It’s also important for your reputation as an email marketer because being labeled a spammer could be detrimental to future campaigns. For example, if a recipient marks an email from you as spam or, even worse—blocks it from their inbox—then this will hurt your deliverability rate and prevent future messages from reaching their intended recipients.
Why Should You Care when Your Emails Bounce?
When the recipient rejects your emails, it’s bad for your reputation. The recipient could get annoyed at you and think that you’re spamming them, which can cause them to complain about it to their friends and family. Worst case scenario: they unsubscribe from your list entirely.
This isn’t just a problem for you—it’s also a problem for your deliverability. As we mentioned earlier, getting marked as spam is one of the biggest factors in whether or not an email will be delivered successfully or not. Suppose someone marks an email as spam because they didn’t want it in their inbox (and there were no bounces). In that case, this will usually result in our system marking that sender as high risk, which means it automatically won’t be delivered to any other recipients until this sender has cleaned up their act!
What Happens to Your Reputation if You Continue Sending Bad Emails?
What happens to your reputation if you continue sending bad emails?
If you send email campaigns and continue to send bad emails, there are several things that can happen:
- Your emails will be marked as spam and blocked by ISPs and email providers. This means your recipients will never see them—they’ll be placed in their junk mail folders and deleted immediately.
- Your sender’s reputation will go down because ISPs consider this type of behavior suspicious. If enough people mark your messages as spam, it could lead to a domain-wide blacklisting of all of your email addresses (including good ones). This means that no one can receive any new messages from that domain until the situation is rectified.
How to Improve Your Email Deliverability with Email Validation
Use email validation to improve your email deliverability.
Email validation is checking each address that sends or receives a message, and it’s an important part of keeping your deliverability high.
But why?
If you don’t verify all of your addresses, you risk getting flagged by ISPs as a spammer because you’re sending to invalid addresses. When this happens, ISPs will block these messages from reaching their users’ inboxes and instead send them straight to the junk folder (also known as the “spam” or “bulk” folder). This can lead to lower open rates and fewer clicks—and ultimately fewer conversions from sales or signups for business owners who depend on their email marketing campaigns for revenue.
You Can Improve Your Deliverability Rates by Scrubbing Your Contact Lists and Removing Invalid Emails Before You Send Them
Email validation is checking your email list to ensure that all email addresses are valid. If an email address does not exist, it will bounce back with a non-delivery report (NDR). This can be problematic for your deliverability rate because ISPs often blacklist sender IPs and entire domains due to high levels of improperly formatted or invalid emails within a campaign.
If you’re going to send out hundreds or thousands of emails at one time, it’s important to do this step properly so that you don’t end up in blacklists yourself!