Using Email Verification Service

Everybody wants to send quality content that will be interacted with. After all, you don’t spend all that time and energy just for your emails to be left unopened and unnoticed by recipients. However, getting your email delivered is not as simple as you would think. It requires a good subject line and great content, but most importantly, a contact list that is active and engaged. Email Verification Services comes to save the day!

Table of Contents

• Why should you verify contacts?
  • No more hard bounces
  • Reduced spam complaints
  • Avoiding being blacklisted
• What is Email Verification Service?
• Email Verification Services - it works for all our customers
• See for yourself

Why should you verify contacts?

Before you start sending emails you need a valid contact list right? It seems easy. Allow people to subscribe to your content and ideally, all of those contacts should open and engage with your messages. It’s something every digital marketer is familiar with. 

However, you might notice that with time, some of your emails are not getting the traffic they deserve or don’t get delivered at all. There seem to be more and more errors, bounces, or even increased spam complaints. That can seriously damage your sender’s reputation and marketing efforts. With a lower sender’s score comes consequences. When it drops too low, your emails are more likely to land in the spam folder. Never to be opened by your contacts, and likely forgotten until the inbox automation system will delete them. This bad reputation is directly tied to your domain, which means that whatever email you will send using your domain - your sender score will follow. Fixing it is hard and it’s much better to start with a clean list. It will minimize the possibility of getting sent to email purgatory.

There are a couple of benefits of verifying contacts apart from the obvious one. Keeping your lists neat and in order. Let’s take a closer look at them.

No more hard bounces

This is one of the primary reasons why your sender’s reputation can drop. Hard bounces are most commonly tied to an email address that does not exist. There are a couple of reasons as to why. The email could be fake from the start, typed in randomly just to obtain a certain piece of gated content. It could be a throwaway email from temporary inbox services - a tool that creates a “fake” email address and inbox for a certain period of time and then gets deleted automatically. Finally, it could be an email that existed but was deleted by it’s user over time. 

No matter the origin of the contact, these are the ones that can potentially hurt your reputation. It’s a good idea to clear out dead emails on a quarterly basis to keep your list organized. Furthermore, once you sort out all the old emails you can regularly check all new incoming contacts to make sure you won’t get any hard bounces.

Reduced spam complaints

Nobody wants to get spam complaints and services are ruthless when it comes to the percentage of allowed complaints on your domain. Ideally, your rate shouldn’t be higher than 0.1% which means that per 1,000 emails you should have no more than 1 spam complaint. Seems a little unrealistic, but it is doable as long as you keep your content relevant and engaging and keep your lists sorted. 

By verifying emails, you get a chance to see if a contact is considered risky due to it’s poor reputation or high frequency of marking emails as spam.

Avoiding being blacklisted

Blacklist is a huge subject that we frequently mention, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we’re talking about it with email verification. If you get blacklisted, your emails will no longer be accepted by servers and never reach the inbox. There are various blacklists that either automatically delists you after a certain amount of time or keep you listed until you reach out to them. It also comes with a long and damaging process of getting back on track and getting delisted.

Practicing good email list hygiene by verifying all your contacts and obtaining addresses from reputable sources is a great start, but you should also consider checking your IPs on a daily basis to make sure you weren’t added to a blacklist. And that goes for anybody who sends emails, no matter their sender score.

What is Email Verification Service?

What does email verification mean? Simply put, the EVS tool allows you to check any email that you have in order to make sure your lists are of quality. An efficient email checker can significantly improve the accuracy of your email list, reducing bounce rates and protecting your sender reputation. It eliminates misspelled or inactive emails and contacts that have a high potential for spam complaints. Everything to ensure your high sender’s reputation. If you want to get some technical information on how it works, it is actually a simple process that involves a series of steps. Let’s go through them so you can better understand how it works. 

The email is automatically checked in our vast database and verified on this basis. If the contact is listed, that’s great. We assign a specific score based on opens, clicks and reached messages. Our algorithm checks all the data and gives out a result based on the processed information.

If the contact is not in our database, we verify it based on the domain. We check the provider and assign status based on that. Finally, we spellcheck the email to make sure that it is a valid address. If there is a typo, it will get a dedicated status and spelling suggestion based on our intelligent algorithm.

Here are a couple of statuses on our Email Verification Service that will allow you to understand how to interpret a certain email address and then act accordingly.

Valid - Deliverable, legitimate email address

Invalid - Non-deliverable inbox that for some reason cannot be reached

Risky - Valid email address that has some risk factor to it (like a domain with low reputation or known naming patterns that were used by abusers)

Unknown - We were not able to categorize it as any of the above

Email Verification Services - it works for all our customers

The good news is that our Email Verification Service is available for everybody registered with Elastic Email.

Our Email Verification System has two options - single and bulk verification. Single verification can be used when you have a Free plan of either the Email Marketing or Email API product. It allows you to verify a single email at a time within our dashboard. The bulk verification allows you to upload a .csv file with a list of email addresses that you want to validate.

For Starter and Pro plans plans, you can upload a list of any size as long as it meets the limit of your contacts within your Email Marketing plan or your email sending limit of your Email API plan. To give an example, let’s say you have Email Marketing Starter plan with a contact limit of 2,000 - our baseline. It means that you can upload a maximum of 2,000 contacts in the Email Verification Service tool to be verified. Now, you don’t need to do it all at once. Your list can hold 3 contacts or it can hold 300. The choice and the way that you verify emails is completely up to you. Just keep in mind that the number of contacts will be deducted from your total limit and will be reset at the end of your subscription period. The same rule applies to the Email API plan, but in this case, you can verify as many addresses as you need up to your email sending limit.

See for yourself

As of now, our Email Verification Service is officially up and running for everybody who is interested in verifying their contacts. You can log in to your dashboard and find out how it works for yourself, or if you want to test the waters first, head on to our dedicated page to read more about this service, find out the exact pricing, and check your first email address.

Anna Wybieralska