Checking emails is an important step in ensuring that the addresses on a list are correct and able to receive messages. This practice reduces the risk of bounces, avoids spamtraps, and helps maximize the efficiency of email marketing campaigns.
However, it’s not enough just to collect all your emails in a list, upload them to any platform and wait for the magic to happen. More than that, getting maximum performance from email verification requires preparation and the adoption of strategies by companies, from email capture, segmentation, sending campaigns and maintenance.
The success of email marketing depends on variables that affect, positively or negatively, the sender’s reputation, overcoming blockages, your ability to deliver emails to the inbox (deliverability), the chances of getting engagement and conversions.
Therefore, in order to achieve results, good practices must be applied to all activities related to email marketing, including email verification.
Table of contents
Why good practices in email verification are they necessary?
Because, as with any activity, adopting the best market practices helps to achieve more effective and consistent results. That’s why it’s important to know and apply the best practices for email verification in order to get the most out of its benefits, such as reducing Cost Per Lead (CPL) and improving reputation and deliverability.
Adopting good verification practices is indispensable because it brings benefits such as:
- Reduction of hard bounces: removing invalid e-mail addresses from e-mail marketing mailing lists reduces hard bounce rates at e-mail providers.
- Protection against spamtraps: preventing the registration of spamtrap e-mails or simply removing them from existing e-mail lists is a vital feature for e-mail marketing activity and its reputation.
- Protection against temporary emails: this category of emails, which can sometimes be useful to your users, represent a threat and a danger to email marketing campaigns. Therefore, the functionality that allows you to identify and prevent or remove these emails is invaluable.
- Improved deliverability: one of the main benefits is improved deliverability, which is the ability to deliver more email messages in the inbox (which we call inbox placement) and fewer emails directed to the spam folder.
- Reduced cost per lead: real-time email verification at data collection points prevents new registrations from being lost and wasted due to simple typing errors that make emails invalid, as well as preventing the registration of temporary emails, optimizing every penny of investment in lead generation.
Taking care of your mailing list before verification
Email verification solves most of your problems with email lists: it removes invalid emails, spamtraps, temporary emails, duplicate emails, among others that can damage your campaigns.
However, you should bear in mind that email verification aims to resolve these problems after they have already occurred In other words, your business opportunities depend on a good performance in the email collection process.
Think about it: you’ve generated 100 leads without any prior treatment during collection. When you check the emails, you discover that 35 of them need to be removed because they are invalid and temporary. Despite having a ready-made list and protecting your reputation, you will only have 65 leads to pursue relationships and sales. However, if there is already a real concern for quality when collecting emails, you can basically have all the leads that are valid for a relationship, without any waste.
That’s why you need to be careful with your mailing list before checking it.
What to consider for top quality listings
- Collect emails ethically: first of all, remember that you need to comply with data protection and privacy laws. Therefore, ensure that visitors register by giving their free and unambiguous consent. Furthermore, don’t collect emails indiscriminately on the Internet or buy email lists, as these are not only poor quality records but also violate the law.
- Consider promoting segmentation during collection: when collecting e-mails, registration forms or onboarding pages, consider the possibility of obtaining information that can serve as segmentation elements later on.
- Avoid duplicate emails: Duplicate emails can cause problems, such as spam complaints from recipients who receive multiple identical messages, as well as being blocked by anti-spam filters. Make sure that duplicate registrations don’t happen, but that they work as nutrition for existing registrations.
- Carry out regular checks: Once verified, e-mail addresses are not free from becoming hard bounces or spamtraps. This can happen because addresses can be abandoned or deactivated. So consider carrying out regular checks, separated into segments that require more care, such as corporate emails and inactive / seasonal lists.
- Consider pre-check segmentations: you don’t need to check all your emails from all your lists at once. Consider making segments of the lists you are going to use and then checking small clusters at a time, for each campaign you run.
Choose a professional email verification tool
The choice of an email verification tool must take into account various factors (not just price) that are decisive for the quality of the actions that will be carried out with the validated lists.
Among the criteria you should pay attention to are:
- Precision: Many platforms promise to be very fast at checking emails, but the most important factor is accuracy. The quality of the analysis and the maximum use of email lists is what will really have a positive impact on your email marketing actions.
- Security and privacy: gather information on the platform’s compliance with data protection and privacy laws. See if the platform is based in a country that also has regulations and laws of this nature.
- Cost-effectiveness: The pricing of the platform is important, but it must be in line with the benefits it brings. Remember that extremely cheap platforms can be indicative of poor quality services. And poorly verified listings have a negative financial impact.
- Real-time verification APIs: verifying e-mail lists is very important for e-mail marketing strategies, but remember that the quality of e-mail collection is just as important, if not more so. Therefore, check whether the tool you are going to use has APIs for verifying emails in real time for your registration forms.
Different treatments for different sectors
Different sectors need to handle different types of data, either because the collection methodologies are different, because the customer profiles are different and the types of actions are also different.
For example, the gym and wellness segment: many registration processes are still manual. This practice must be abandoned and replaced by more intelligent methods.
Other retail segments, which operate both offline and in e-commerce, have registers made at terminals by salespeople. Here, many mistakes are made or even various fields are neglected so that the salesperson “spends less time”. Methods need to be optimized, customers given more freedom to register themselves in exchange for promotional incentives, etc.
Other segments with more B2B-oriented services deal with many more corporate email addresses, which have a shorter lifecycle due to high turnover rates. Email lists in this segment will therefore require more frequent maintenance and rechecks.
By the way, if you’d like to find out more about the challenges of email list quality in your market segment, download the SafetyMails Email List Quality Survey.
List maintenance after the check
As we’ve said before, a good practice for verifying emails is to maintain the lists after the verification procedure. Email contact lists are alive and constantly changing, with new records as well as records that need to be removed.
So there are at least 3 recommended precautions that you need to have:
- Continuous monitoring: try to monitor your mailing lists on an ongoing basis, carrying out new checks to identify emails that have been deactivated, especially corporate ones.
- Removing duplicate emails: Duplicate emails are a problem, you know. So make sure there are no duplicate emails on your lists.
- Removing unengaging emails: unengaging emails should be removed from your contact lists, because they mean that the recipients are no longer interested in your content (and can damage your reputation) or that these accounts have been abandoned and could become recycled spamtraps in the future, damaging your reputation and leading to blacklists.
Conclusion
Email verification is a practice that goes beyond just deleting invalid or temporary emails from a list. To get the best results, you need to adopt good practices throughout the process – from collecting and segmenting emails to continuously monitoring lists.
By applying these strategies effectively, companies can significantly improve their deliverability, protect the reputation of their domains and optimize costs per lead. In other words, a careful and continuous approach to email verification is the key to maximizing the effectiveness of email marketing.
FAQ
Because email addresses can become invalid or deactivated over time. This can happen due to changes in providers, account abandonment, etc. Periodic checks ensure that the list is always up to date and free of contacts that could damage the campaign’s deliverability or reputation.
Emails that show no engagement can be a sign that the recipient has lost interest in the content. Keeping these emails on the list not only reduces the open rate, but also puts the sender’s reputation at risk, since inactive accounts can be turned into spamtraps. Removing these contacts keeps the list healthy and focused on recipients who are really interested.
Buying email lists is a risky and often illegal practice, as it can violate data protection laws such as the LGPD and GDPR. In addition, these lists are generally of poor quality, with many invalid or temporary emails, which can dramatically increase hard bounce rates and damage the reputation of the sending domain.
Pre-check segmentation allows you to divide your list into specific groups, checking only the contacts that will be used in future campaigns. This saves time and resources, as you don’t have to check the entire database at once. In addition, this practice ensures that each segment receives a personalized approach, optimizing the relevance of the campaign.
When choosing a verification tool, it is important to evaluate criteria such as accuracy, security, compliance with data protection laws and cost-effectiveness. Tools that offer real-time verification APIs are also extremely useful, as they allow you to validate email addresses at the time of collection, preventing invalid emails from entering the list.