How to implement email verification in your online business

To implement email verification processes in an online business, it is necessary to list email data collection points, existing email lists, choose a professional email verification tool, determine regular cleaning processes and monitor the performance of email marketing campaigns.

This move is necessary because email marketing, despite being the digital marketing medium with the highest ROI on the market, requires a lot of care if it is to reach its full potential, especially when it comes to looking after email contact lists.

For example, invalid emails can have a significant negative impact. This is because, with invalid email addresses, the bounce rate increases, affecting the deliverability of email marketing and compromising the sender’s reputation, which can lead to blocking and blacklisting, making it difficult for messages to reach valid recipients.

This problem not only reduces the effectiveness of campaigns, but also increases costs, as there is unnecessary spending on sending to contacts that don’t generate any return.

Email verification helps companies significantly reduce hard bounces by allowing messages to reach real leads, improving deliverability and protecting the sender’s reputation.

Starting from the beginning: what is email verification and what are its benefits?

In short, email verification is the process of validating that an email address has the correct format and syntax and is real and can receive messages. This helps to improve campaign performance, avoid spamtraps and reduce bounce rates.

And how does email verification work?

Email verification is a multi-step process, divided into two types of treatment: the validation and verification of the e-mail itself.

Email validation is the first and most superficial part of the analysis, with a focus on analyzing and validating email address structures, such as their format and syntax. Here, elements such as the structure of the e-mail address will be validated, preventing typing problems and common mistakes.

The email verification stage is more in-depth and involves more steps in the algorithm’s analysis, seeking to go beyond structural analysis, identifying the existence of the email account, the email’s deliverability and categorizing that email in a more refined report.

If you want to know more about how email verification works, we recommend reading this text on our blog. But if you want to understand more about difference between email validation and verification, we recommend reading this other text.

What are the benefits of email verification?

Companies that invest in email verification, whether at the time of data collection in registration forms, or by cleaning or maintaining email lists, achieve significant improvements in terms of the reputation and efficiency of email marketing campaigns.

• Lead generation: during email collection, real-time verification allows for better quality in lead capture, preventing invalid registrations that waste investments in generating business opportunities.
• Fewer bouces and blockages: with mailing lists free of invalid and temporary emails, there is a significant reduction in the bounce rates of email campaigns. As a result, email providers’ anti-spam filters will block fewer emails and increase the reputation of sending IPs and domains.
• Greater deliverability and engagement: With this improved reputation, more emails are delivered to the inbox, optimizing the display of messages and, as a result, increasing the email campaign engagement.

Step-by-step implementation of email verification

Before you begin, follow the steps below for a well-executed implementation of email verification in your business.

Step 1: needs assessment

The first step is to carry out a survey of the company’s needs.

An example of this is map all email collection points, such as landing pages, account creation pages, apps, registration totems, service terminals, among others.

Another example is knowing which email list(s) and their origins: Is there just one mailing list that gathers all the records? Are there lists inherited from business units or partners?

Step 2: choice of tool and verification methods

You then need to establish validation methods and choose a professional email verification tool.

Among the email validation methods that can be mentioned are form field validation, data criticism and double opt-in email registration.

And when choosing an email verification tool, some of the necessary qualities are:

• Reliability and precision: is the tool able to tell you precisely which emails are valid, invalid, spamtraps, temporary and with deliverability problems? Is it able to classify all emails or does it deliver numerous records as “unknown”?
• Available features: the tool needs to have functionalities that make it easy to use, intuitive, informative and capable of integrating with email marketing and CRM platforms, as well as an API for checking emails in real time.
• Privacy and Data Protection: does the company offering the email verification solution have documentation and compliance with Data Protection and Privacy laws?

Step 3: regular verification process

At this stage it is important to determine how each process will be carried out.

Real-time e-mail verification for registration forms

As all the data collection points have already been mapped, it’s time to establish the implementation of a real-time email verification API.

This implementation can be done in various ways:

• Standard code: a ready-made code, copy&paste model, for website registration forms.
• Customizable code: customizable query keys, perfect for advanced users.
• Integrations: ready-made codes for landing pages in e-mail marketing and CRM services.

In doing so, the records entered are validated and verified in real time. When they are invalid, an alert is displayed so that the visitor has time, while still on the registration page, to correct the e-mail address entered.

This optimizes the quality of lead generation and helps reduce the cost per lead.

Email list verification

Once you know what the mailing lists are, it’s time to establish a checking routine, which you can take into account:

• List verification before each email campaign.
• Checking new lists, inherited from business units or other departments.
• Checking specific seasonal lists.
• Routine checks on older lists to revalidate records.

Step 4: monitoring and optimization

The final step is to monitor the results of the verification actions.

Monitor, for example, the bounce rates of email campaigns. You can also monitor the verification reports in real time, so you know what correction rates have been necessary.

With this information it is possible to make adjustments to strategies, such as identifying forms that have verification errors or identifying departments that are delivering very problematic mailing lists.

Good Practices in Email Verification

To adopt good practices in email verification, you need to plan the steps of your efforts properly, from the collection of emails to the recurring sanitization of existing lists, always seeking to guarantee the maximum use of email addresses and the reduction of the negative impacts of bounces and spamtraps.

Among the good practices we can recommend are:

• Don’t buy email lists
• Validate and verify e-mails in registration forms
• Establish a regular routine for checking email lists

Don’t buy email lists

Not buying email lists is considered a good practice for email verification, because it starts from three essential principles: budget, marketing and legality.

When you buy email lists, you don’t know the origin of the data or its quality. You could be buying a list full of invalid email addresses and, worse, spamtraps. Technically this is solved by the email verification tool, but think about it for a moment: you’ve invested in buying a list and you need to invest in a verification tool. Once you’ve removed all the problematic records, is the end product worth the investment or was it just a waste?

What’s more, in marketing terms, you expect your lists to be built on legitimate actions that reflect the contacts’ real interest in what you have to offer, whether it’s a product or a service. Common sense must prevail. Sending indiscriminate e-mail messages is a spamming practice subject to punishment by e-mail providers.

In terms of legality, around 80% of countries already have (or are in the process of producing) privacy and data protection legislation (UNCTAD, 2021). This means that obtaining personal data (and email is considered personal data) illegitimately, such as buying lists, is subject to penalties ranging from fines to publicizing cases of non-compliance with the law.

Validation and verification of e-mails in registration forms

Marketing and legality need to be closely linked to quality. For this reason, a highly recommended best practice is to email verification in real time directly on the registration forms.

In addition to being aligned with privacy and data protection, this practice allows lead generation actions to maximize results in terms of quality, so that marketing campaigns can count on duly verified records that can be successfully delivered.

This check also protects companies against other types of email addresses, such as those of temporary email services.

Regular checking of email lists

Once an email address has been verified, this does not mean that it is a permanent, unchanging state. On the contrary, an email can cease to exist and become invalid (bounce) in a matter of a short time.

This behavior is most clearly seen when we talk about corporate email accounts, which have high turnover rates.

For reasons such as these, it is important to establish that mailing lists need to go through new verification cycles at regular periods of time.

You can set shorter or longer periods based on different email segments or profiles: shorter for professional emails and longer for personal emails, for example. Or even shorter periods for “older” personal email providers and longer ones for “newer” or more “popular” ones.

The important thing is to keep the quality of your contact lists high at all times.

Conclusion

By implementing email verification, companies can reduce email marketing operating costs, improve delivery rates and protect the reputation of their sending domains, avoiding problems such as inclusion on block lists and deliveries to the spam folder.

In addition, email verification optimizes the quality of the leads captured and increases the engagement rate. When carried out permanently and integrated with data collection points, verification helps to maximize the return on investment in email marketing.

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