Email Marketing

How Email Validation Helps You Overcome Marketing Challenges?

There’s no singular formula to email marketing success. There are simply too many factors in each product or business that require nuances and unique attention to detail.

Not only that, but each subscriber is different in the way they like to receive emails and what content they want to see inside.

But you’ve buckled down and have honed your email marketing blade on the way through your customer’s defenses and hopefully plunged into their wallets.

But inevitably, you sometimes seem to dull your blade and tarnish it across the hard walls of a spam filter or a bounce. This is detrimental to your campaign and to your sender reputation.

It’s something that never should have happened in the first place if you used the proper whetstone: email validation.

Ok—enough with the forging analogies. Let’s talk about how email validation keeps you on the way to email marketing success and lands you (safely) in your subscriber’s inboxes.

How a Clean Email List Reduces Bounce Rates

If your email list has been a sourdough-starter (no more bread metaphors, we promise) that’s been growing and growing over the years—that’s wonderful.

But if you haven’t kept up with the maintenance, some of those emails might have become invalid.

Sometimes this results in those emails bouncing—either a soft bounce or a hard bounce.

What Is a Hard Bounce?

Hard bounces are a permanent bounce or error. This means that the email cannot be received by that address for whatever reason.

Hard bounces can come in many forms, but typically they are the result of user errors such as:

  • The email address simply doesn’t exist
  • The address has been deactivated (typically when an employee leaves a company)
  • The email address has a typo which makes it invalid (e.g., typing @yhaoo.com instead of @yahoo.com)

Other reasons an email can hard bounce are that the domain name no longer or never existed, or the recipient has blocked all further emails from you.

What Is a Soft Bounce?

Soft bounces are temporary bounces that typically can be successfully sent at a later date.

bounce rate

Emails could be soft-bounced because:

  • The recipient’s mailbox is full
  • The email account was suspended temporarily
  • The recipient’s email server is down due to an unexpected error
  • For whatever reason, you’ve been blocked by the recipient’s email server due to too many of your emails being marked as spam
  • Your domain is on a blacklist
  • Your message is too large

Some soft bounces don’t need immediate attention because they sometimes resolve themselves on their own.

However, they should be closely monitored. If after three bounces the issue doesn’t resolve, further steps should be taken, and the address should be treated as a hard bounce.

How does Email Validation Help?

By corrected spelling and syntax errors, email validation helps to eliminate these bounces. For instance, if there was more than one “@” symbol (for one reason or another), an email validation service will catch and fix it. Fixing these errors helps you to reduce your bounce rates and have a more successful email marketing campaign.

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Why Spam Traps Fall Victim to Email Validation

There are a few ways that you could have acquired a spam trap, but first—let’s tell you a little about what it is.

What Is a Spam Trap?

Ok, don’t panic. The term “Spam Trap” doesn’t have to be as bad as it sounds. It’s not something that will randomly—or maliciously—appear and ruin your email marketing forever.

Spam traps are used by inbox providers—like Gmail, Yahoo, etc.—to catch spammers or senders with poor sending practices.

A spam trap is an email that doesn’t belong to a real person but is instead used by Email Service Providers (ESPs) to catch senders with poor email practices. They look like real email addresses but are on email lists companies can buy (don’t do that).

However, sometimes legitimate senders, like you, can end up on the spam trap radar if you don’t practice proper email hygiene.

Spam traps are useful to the consumer, but they need to be weeded out from an email marketer’s perspective.

How does Email Validation Help?

Email validation databases typically have a log of known spam trap addresses. By identifying these traps before you send your campaign, you’re far less likely to encounter one.

However, while email validation does help with finding existing spam traps, it’s always best practice to avoid purchasing emails from third-party lists or otherwise.

How Email Validation Helps You Have a Better Sender Reputation?

Email service providers (ESPs), like Gmail for instance, and email filtering systems (EFS), like SenderScore for instance, get together and try and prevent the everpresent email spam circulating everyone’s inboxes.

Sender Reputation

They track this through different factors:

  • The number of emails sent from your IP address
  • The number of spam complaints from recipients
  • If emails simply read “spammy.”
  • If you’re not keeping up with your email hygiene

If enough of these factors add up, the reputation of your IP address will be put to the question, and if there’s enough cause to justify blacklisting, the ESPs and EFSs can do so.

This means your emails will either be rejected or not be delivered at all.

The bad news (note: there’s not really good news) is that the spamming doesn’t have to be done by you if you’re on a shared server (multiple businesses on the same IP).

For more about sender reputation, please read our article here.

How does Email Validation Help?

Fixing all the bounces and following anti-spam measures listed above improves your sender reputation. Cleaning your list is the best way to improve your sender reputation, and email validation is the largest part of cleaning your list—so it’s a win-win.

As you can see, maintaining email hygiene through an email validation service is the best way to improve your email marketing metrics.

Email Oversight’s email validation service is the best one out there, so give us a calland let us show you how we can increase your email marketing numbers!

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