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Depending on your business model, customer data may be your company's most valuable asset. Customer data, especially customer email addresses, does not have an indefinite shelf life.
Poor data quality leads to a low percentage of emails delivered and opened, which means you get worse results from your email campaigns. Continuing to send emails to inactive accounts will also be costly. Worse, all those rejected emails will damage your sender reputation.
Checking your contacts regularly - especially before major email campaigns - can help you avoid all of these problems.
Secure and trustworthy service - so that the data you provide cannot be stolen or used for your own purposes.
Security - review your terms of use to learn about security policies and data storage. Make sure that all client services, including uploading and reporting, are always done over HTTPS / SSL connections.
Experience and speed - The email verification process is complex, and it takes time to develop the algorithms, databases, and server reputation that are necessary for successful campaigns. The best services manage a large network of servers scattered around the world to communicate with email servers in preferred ways. Over time, they learn and continually update their systems and technical processes.
Capabilities - No two solutions are the same, and your email validation service is no exception. A quality provider should provide multiple plan options and different levels of speed and accuracy, depending on the specific needs of your business. Moreover, each company should be able to decide whether or not a particular validation result can be considered valid for its business.
No extraneous emails from the validator are critical: A legitimate email verification service will never send an email to the contacts you provide them. Don't trust any provider that sends emails as part of the validation process. Keeping your email data clean and accurate is key to any successful digital marketing strategy.
What is email verification?
When it comes to digital marketing, email verification or validation refers to the process of confirming the activity of an email address without sending an email.
Most importantly, this practice helps reduce both return email rates during mailings and protect your email reputation
You can use services to mass verify your entire mailing list of contacts or to verify incoming email addresses in real time using API integration to prevent spoofed or temporary addresses and ensure that invalid data never makes its way into your system.
Real-time verification and validation procedures (filling out a form and getting a link to validate your email address) help you build a list of active contacts. But you still need to check your data periodically to delete emails that become invalid over time.
Why do I need verification?
Depending on your business model, customer data may be your company's most valuable asset. Customer data, especially customer email addresses, does not have an indefinite shelf life.
Poor data quality leads to a low percentage of emails delivered and opened, which means you get worse results from your email campaigns. Continuing to send emails to inactive accounts will also be costly. Worse, all those rejected emails will damage your sender reputation.
Regular contact validation - especially before major email campaigns - can help you avoid all of these problems.
How does email address validation work?
Verifying email addresses is a three-step process of checking syntax and formatting, checking the server/domain, and checking the direct email inbox, each of which takes a fraction of a second.
Step 1: Checking email syntax and formatting.
The best email verification services instantly check your email list against standardized email formatting requirements, as well as formatting requirements for some major email services.
Formatting rules are incredibly complex, and manually checking a large list of contacts for a mailing is logistically impossible.
But the verification solution engine detects errors within seconds in both the local and domain parts of the email address: invalid characters, missing @ symbols, and an infinite number of other problems.
Step 2: Domain validation
After checking the format of each address, the service checks the DNS records for the domain name to make sure it's valid and active, and checks the mail exchanger (MX) to make sure it can receive mail.
If everything passes the check with syntax, formatting, domain and server, then the service moves on to check the individual mailbox.
Step 3: Verify the mailbox
The last and decisive step in the process is to verify that a particular mailbox exists.
The service uses the SMTP protocol to communicate with the mail server and verify that the address in question is capable of receiving messages. The email verification service does all of this without sending a single message.
In most cases, the entire verification process takes less than 1 second. In other cases, it may take a little longer, largely depending on the response time of the mail server being tested. Older mail servers, busy servers, and complex anti-spam systems can affect response times.
Risk Assessment Tools
Many screening services offer additional tools to troubleshoot incorrect data or identify potentially problematic emails, such as
Repetitive email addresses
Role-based accounts
Mail forwarding addresses (Catch-All)
temporary email addresses
spam traps
However, not all solution providers offer all of these services, and some provide other services not listed here. You should carefully check the services you are considering to make sure you can get the verification services you need for convenience in the future.
Reviewing Results
Each email verification solution has a slightly different approach to displaying the results of verification tasks, but the basics are the same - you can download the full report or view your results in a dedicated cabinet on the solution's website.
With API integration, the results are automatically returned to your system, so it can accept or reject the email being tested.
Many solutions offer limited information in their results, such as simply indicating whether an email is valid or invalid. Some services offer more detailed results with the main reason for incorrect or risky responses.
Another additional feature provided by several email verifiers is the ability to set when a result is considered successful or not. In fact, not all results are as simple as correct or invalid; deciding how to deal with certain types of responses depends on your goals as a company. With more information about the specific problem affecting your data, you can assess the risk associated with each response type and determine whether to delete those results, keep them, or perhaps recheck them.
Real-time validation
Real-time email address validation is the process of checking individual email addresses as they are entered into your system.
Real-time validation is done by integrating the email validation API with whatever system you use to collect customer data - a form on your website, your customer relationship manager (CRM), or any other digital data collection point. That way, the data coming into your system will be clean and reliable.
No more fake email addresses clogging up your mailing list contacts!
API email verification is easier and more cost-effective than you think, and will save you time and money in the long run.
Cleaning up your mailing list contacts
Clearing your mailing list contacts or bulk checking is the process of sending your mailing list or database contents for simultaneous checking, which removes unwanted, inactive or fake email addresses from your lists. Lists can be uploaded manually to clean up or transmitted through API integration, as needed or at regular scheduled intervals. When the verification process is complete, you can usually upload all results in common file formats such as .csv, .xls, or .xslx.
Validation services can easily handle lists of tens to tens of millions of addresses, so it's a very flexible solution, suitable for a large firm as well as a small digital marketing venture or a new blog.
There are various email verifiers, many of which are good, reputable services.
However, each has their own algorithms, servers, programs, and extras, so they are definitely not all created with equal terms of use. Before settling on one, you should do an in-depth analysis of the solutions' functionality and features.
Here are a few things to consider when choosing a service:
1. Power of Attorney
This is a service you are going to trust with one of your company's most valuable assets; don't put your data at risk of loss, theft or sale.
Check their website to make sure they publish their physical address, phone number and support email address. Contact them to ask a few questions, make sure they answer and are informed.
2. Security: Protect your data.
Research their terms of use to learn about their security and data retention policies. Make sure that all client services, including uploading and reporting, are always done over HTTPS / SSL connections.
Ask where your data will be stored and how it will be protected - not all countries take data security laws equally seriously. In general, do your due diligence - don't put your data at risk to save a few dollars on an unreliable and cheap service.
3. experience and speed
The email verification process is complex, and it takes time to develop the algorithms, databases, and server reputation that are necessary for successful campaigns.
The best services manage a large network of servers scattered around the world to communicate with email servers in preferred ways. Over time, they learn and continually update their systems and technical processes.
4. Capabilities of
No two solutions are the same, and your email validation service is no exception. A quality provider should provide multiple plan options and different levels of speed and accuracy, depending on the specific needs of your business. Moreover, each company should be able to decide whether or not a particular validation result can be considered valid for its business.
5. No letters. Never.
This is critical: A legitimate email verification service will never send an email to the contacts you give them. Don't trust any provider that sends emails as part of the verification process.
