There are tools that let users find out instantly if an email address is deliverable. So why are tactics to verify an email address important? Below, we delve into what you should know about email verification and its implications.
What Is Email Verification?
When you have a business, you put in a lot of time and effort to collect lead information, especially email addresses. When you collect email addresses, you’re getting a connection to your leads that instant. You can send offers, newsletters, and slow-drip content until the recipients are ready to convert. This direct connection to leads is powerful.
Collecting emails isn’t easy, though. You usually have to incentivize users aside from just wanting to see your emails in their inbox. Not every email you get is going to be one you’re able to use as a connection to leads, either. That’s where verification becomes relevant.
The process to check and authenticate emails you’ve been given is email verification. You’re making sure that you’re going to connect to a real person if you send an email to that address or at least a real email account for an organization.
You can opt to verify emails as soon as they come in, or you might go through a current list of existing emails and run them all through.
If you use a verification tool, it may give you a health score for each address. A health or validity score looks at how long the email’s been dormant, if it’s role-based, the age of it, and if it’s valid. It’s not a perfect system, but it can go a long way to helping you flag emails you should take off your list.
The reason this matters to businesses is because they might give away a lead magnet someone is interested in, but that person may know they’re never going to make a purchase, so they might give a fake email address. In one study, around 60% of customers purposely provided wrong information at least once to a business as far as their email address. Around 10% of emails entered during the checkout process are also invalid, although this is more often due to typos rather than intentional behaviors.
While you can track who’s not opening your email pretty easily, there’s not an easy system for determining which users could be fake.
The Impacts of Not Checking Your Email List
If you don’t verify your emails, the consequences can include:
- Bad data: If you don’t check your email list, you’re not getting accurate data. You don’t know what your open rate really reflects. If, for example, you have a large percentage of fake emails, then you might think your subject line is the problem because of skewed data. Without good data, you can’t make smart business decisions. Your metrics are unreliable, and it can lead to a lot of wasted time and poor decisions.
- PPC campaigns: If you’re running a PPC campaign using an email list, then an unvalidated list is going to have a detrimental effect. For example, if you use a custom audiences ad on Facebook based on a customer list, think about how fake emails will give you a false concept of how many people your campaign is actually reaching. If you run campaigns based on lookalike audiences from your email list, Facebook isn’t going to have the needed information to target the right people.
- It’s distracting: If your sales team is trying to get in touch with people based on emails that aren’t real, then it’s taking them away from places where they could actually be creating value. You want to make sure your team is focused on the best opportunities, and sales verification is one way to facilitate this.
- Higher marketing costs: Businesses like email marketing because it’s effective, low-cost, and tends to have a high ROI. Your costs are going to go up, though, as your email list grows and it’s not well-maintained. If you have a lot of emails on your list, for example, that aren’t vetted and qualified, then you might be paying more for your email software than you need to because many have tiered pricing.
- Deliverability rates: If your emails aren’t getting delivered because you’re trying to send them to invalid addresses, you’re going to get low rates of deliverability and high bounce rates. Mail systems can start seeing this as you sending out poor-quality emails, and your emails are more likely to end up in spam folders.
An email verification tool is easy to use, and it’s a simple way to raise the likelihood that you’re sending emails to real people. You can qualify and rank leads, and you can also use them to organize and clean up your list.
