There is no 3-step miracle strategy that can guarantee your email marketing success. But there is one step that is crucial to getting your emails in front of your subscribers and helping you connect with them. Email verification is a growing practice among marketers, as it helps them email safely and achieve their conversion goals. Let’s try to understand why businesses clean their email lists and how developing this habit can boost your email marketing.
What is email verification?
Even if you’re not familiar with the term, you may already guess: it’s the process that determines whether an email address is accurate and belongs to a real human being. Emailing blindly, to contacts you’re not sure of, is not a good foundation for your email marketing. Email validation helps you get rid of the bad email addresses in your list and increase your delivery and conversion rates.
Email verification improves your sender reputation
Whether you like it or not, your email list is constantly degrading. You may be happy to see it grow, as the more contacts you gather, the greater your chances to boost your sales. But some of those contacts may very well be dead ends, or email addresses that are risky to your sender reputation. For example:
- typos that people make when trying to subscribe to your emails result in a misspelled, hence invalid, email address.
- some of your contacts may actually be spam traps. They don’t belong to real human beings, and their sole mission is to attract spammers and block them.
- some people use temporary email addresses to download a content offer from your website. These “leads” become obsolete after a short amount of time.
- catch-all email addresses are also risky because some of them are bound to bounce and affect your reputation.
- many people have a habit of labeling emails as spam. Every list has some abuse emails, and continuing to email them will eventually result in a bad sender score.
Email verification systems are the only ones that can detect all these types of email addresses and remove them from your list. The process can take a few minutes or a few hours, depending on the size of your database. But no other method is as accurate and fast as email verification to ensure your list is free of bad signups.
As an email marketer, your sender reputation is essential to your deliverability. So, making sure you follow email marketing best practices, such as cleaning your list, is paramount to your success.
Email verification gets your emails in front of people
Now that we’ve seen how email verification helps you improve your sender reputation, let’s see how that translates in your email marketing results.
Every email marketer’s goal is to reach the right people at the right time. They craft the ideal message hoping it gets in their subscribers’ inboxes and accomplishes its mission. The reason why your sender reputation is so important is that it determines how many people see your emails. In a nutshell: the better your reputation, the higher your deliverability and your chances to increase conversions.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are deploying serious efforts towards protecting email users from spam. So they use your sender reputation to decide whether you’re a legitimate sender or someone who ignores email marketing best practices.
If you use a messy email list, you probably have a high bounce rate and a good number of spam complaints. Because of that, ISPs are going to see you as a potential spam sender and limit your visibility in people’s inboxes. Your emails will either land in the spam folder, or, if your practices are really poor, won’t be delivered at all.
Email verification prevents that from happening. Furthermore, it supports you in building your sender score, and the benefits are indisputable:
- the more accurate your email list, the more of your emails will land in the inbox
- your open rates will be higher, and so will your click-through rates
- as bad emails are removed from your database, you get a clearer picture of how your email marketing performs
Email verification helps you connect with your subscribers
Most articles about email marketing talk about metrics and achieving a ROI that will put a smile on your face. These are all important aspects. However, it all starts with a true connection that your develop with your audience. No one can sell anything without first establishing familiarity and trust. Email verification helps you in this respect by removing useless contacts and allowing you to focus on genuine leads.
A clean email list is the best way to start your email marketing program. However, it won’t be enough to ensure a solid relationship with your subscribers. To reap the benefits of email marketing, there are some crucial steps you have to keep in mind:
- be gentle when promoting your products or services. People are sensitive to aggressive marketing messages and this strategy may backfire. Do your best to maintain a balance between promotional and informative content.
- personalize your communication as much as you can. Not only with tokens like your subscribers’ name, but try to determine their preferences and buying history and behavior.
- entice your audience with a sweet deal every once in a while. Whether you offer free shipping on a holiday or a discount, they’ll remember you for your generosity and repay you with their loyalty.
Try Deliverbility to help you list to be clean at very low cost.