You’ve finally grown your email list big enough.
But you keep hearing that you need email verification. Or was it email validation?
Why do you need them anyway?
Yearly, 22.5% of email addresses become invalid.
That’s why you need to verify email addresses to keep that list clean, improve deliverability, and decrease your bounce rate.
Okay but aren’t email verification and validation the same thing?
True, email verification and validation appear to be two peas in a pot, but there is more to it.
As an email marketer, you’re constantly confused between verification and validation.
The difference between email verification and validation can be misleading, and often confusing.
For the sake of all email marketers, we wrote this article.
In this article, we get to the bottom of any misconception about Email Validation and Email Verification.
Here is our article to set the record straight about what those two words mean.
What is email validation?
Email validation‘s process catches typos by mistakes or purposeful misdirects.
The email validation process makes a quick check that the email record exists with the domain, such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, and more.
In email marketing, the email validation process is vital to help you uproot the email addresses with typos in your email lists.
What is email verification?
Email verification’s process is much more complex than email validation.
Email verification verifies the email address and the recipient who will receive the email.
The email verification process confirms whether or not the inbox account is active and valid.
Once the verification process is done, you can know which emails are reaching the correct recipient and which are not and will only give you hard bounces.
How does email verification work?
The email verification process’s steps are:
- Syntax check: emails must have a beginning, an ‘@’, and a dot. domain.
- Domain check: (DNS records) to make sure the domain is real and that a mail server exists and is set up correctly.
- Catch-all check
- MX record checks: check mail servers if they’re hacked or used for fraudulent activity.
- Email address ping
E-mail verification vs. validation: What are the differences?
Email verification checks an email address if it’s valid and active, throughout the whole process.
A valid email address can receive messages from other senders.
The email verification process goes through many steps for either email verifier or bulk.
The email verification process’s steps are:
- Syntax check
- Domain check
- Catch-all check
- MX record checks
- Email address ping
Email validation is the final result of the email verification process.
The results of email verification are either “valid,” “invalid,” or “unverifiable.”
The results are often marked by green, yellow, and red colors.
Sometimes, Email validation also means checking any additional information that comes with the lead’s email or checking the source of that lead.
Why you shouldn’t skip email verification?
If you’re still ignoring email verification during email marketing, you are headed to catastrophic campaign issues that will take weeks to resolve.
This is why email verification matters.
It helps keep your email lists fresh
Email addresses become valid for many external reasons.
Like corporate email addresses deactivate when people change companies.
That’s when email verification comes in handy.
If you don’t verify email lists regularly, your bounce rate will reach a critical threshold and your sender reputation will tank.
Email verification weeds out the bad email addresses and only leave the valid and active ones.
It maintains a high sender reputation
Your sender reputation depends on many things.
The two main things that your sender reputation depends on are the bounce rate and deliverability.
That’s how email verification helps you to maintain a good sender reputation.
It means you will only send email to legitimate email addresses, your email will be opened, which will increase your deliverability and reinforces your reputation.
Email verification is what will help you to maintain a high sender reputation and avoid blacklists.
It reduces hard bounces
Email verification protects you from sending emails to invalid email addresses which in many cases, the recipient doesn’t exist.
This act is also known as hard bounces.
High bounce rates are usually indicative of spammers.
High bounce rates only make ESPs treat you badly.
When your bounce rate grows, your sender reputation falls.
Once your hard bounce rate crosses a critical threshold, ESPs blacklist your account.
It improves email deliverability
Email verification filters out invalid email addresses.
Email verification helps you keep only recipients who will receive your emails, so your emails will land in the inbox.
Email verification also influences that your email deliverability remains high.
Email verification helps save on email sending and, once again, protects your email sender reputation.
Benefits of using email verification services
No matter if your goal is to generate leads for a bootstrap startup, or your goal is to build your email list for your email marketing campaign, email verification services have several benefits, here are some of them:
- Prevent hard bounces when you send emails to invalid and undeliverable email addresses.
- Helps you avoid being labeled a spammer (when your unwanted emails are sent to valid recipients) from ISPs.
- Saves your time and money from sending emails to “dead” addresses.
- Clears false results from an email marketing campaign; thinking the campaign isn’t working, when, in reality, it’s the email addresses that are faulty.
- Help you not waste your money on useless email address lists that are inactive or falsified.
- Makes sure that only the interested leads receive requested materials in their inbox in a timely and professional manner.
To have reliable and accurate email marketing strategies, it’s best to choose an email verification service that provides both validation and verification.
While each validation and verification are valuable independently, validation and verification go hand in hand to help keep your email campaign as functional as possible.
If you’re looking for a great email validation service, you can try Email Inspector for free today. Get your first 100 email addresses checked by a professional and discover how many fake accounts you have on your list!
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