But in today’s complex email environment, that simple procedure can overlook the greater problem of problematic addresses that put the integrity of your email database in jeopardy.
That’s why you need email address verification – to verify invalid and risky email addresses so you can remove them easily and keep your list running in peak condition.Īt its most basic, email address verification is an automated process that uses rules and data to review your entire email address list and identify addresses that are either safe for sending, valid but risky or unknown, or invalid.Ī basic validation system just looks up the mailbox (or MX) record of an email address and determines if the email address exists or not. However they got there, bad email addresses have to come off your list if you want to recoup your acquisition costs, drive conversions and sales, connect with your customers and avoid deliverability issues. So that’s why you must get a handle on what’s happening in your database and remove problem email addresses ASAP.Įmail verification identifies invalid and risky email addresses
doesn’t mandate permission as CASL and the GDPR does, but it outlaws practices like not honoring unsubscribe requests and scraping email addresses.Ĭhances are you’re paying the price today for poor decisions made years before you. New laws like Canada’s Anti-Spam Law and the General Data Protection Act in the European Union make these practices illegal. Or, they added all of the email addresses from people who emailed the company on other businesses, even if they didn’t ask to get marketing messages. Marketers who are under this quantity-over-quality pressure are more likely to find themselves resorting to sketchy practices, like buying lists of millions of email addresses that were scraped off web pages, collected from co-registration sites or sold to aggregators by unscrupulous list managers. It’s partly a hangover from the old days when email marketers were judged by the size of their databases – the more email addresses, the better.
The older your email database is, the more likely it’s full of dead weight. How do email lists grow stale, and how can email verification help? Campaigns with a lot of invalid email addresses get directed into the spam folder by many major ISPs. Another problem: Those addresses depress your performance metrics so you don’t know for sure how well your email program is doing.Īnd perhaps the most important aspect, sending to a stale list can damage your inbox placement. That’s why they don’t drive any value for your email program.Ī database that’s choked with useless email addresses wastes money, time and effort. Or, the person used someone else's address.Īll of these email addresses have one thing in common: They don’t have real people behind them, meaning people who signed up for your emails and really want to receive your messages.
Many of these are tied to a job or role, like " " or " ," instead of a person.
They just don't belong to the people who entered them, or they don't belong to a person at all. They don't belong to the people who gave them to you.