In the overwhelming majority of business sectors, email remains the central contact data in the marketing effort. Working with a database polluted by inaccurate or non-existent e-mail addresses means leaving with a serious competitive handicap. In this article, Data Enso explores the importance of email verification, details what's at stake and concludes with the decisive advantages of this practice.
What is email verification?
Email verification is the process of validating and authenticating email addresses, for example on a database, to determine whether they really exist, whether they are active and/or whether they are likely to receive messages.
E-mail addresses collected from lead generation campaigns, mailing list purchases or other sources may be incorrectly entered, obsolete or simply fictitious. By launching email campaigns with problematic e-mail addresses, you run a number of risks that have a direct impact on the ROI of your marketing actions:
- A high hard b ounce rate;
- Deliverability problems, which widen the gap between your campaign's theoretical reach and its actual reach;
- A gradual, sometimes irreversible, deterioration in the reputation of your company's domain name. This deterioration exacerbates deliverability problems, triggering a vicious circle;
- The bad reputation of a domain name can have an impact on the SEO of related websites. Google seems to check for spam signals in emails sent via Gmail.
As you can see, the stakes involved in email verification are decisive, especially when you consider that email is the central contact data in many marketing and communication strategies. Working with erroneous emails means taking the risk of not reaching a potentially interested target, wasting precious sales and marketing resources, and looking like a spammer with potentially irreversible damage.
| The question of disposable or ephemeral emails According to a study by Marketing Week, around 60% of Internet users have already intentionally provided incorrect emails in order to download a white paper, an ebook or, more generally, to benefit from free content. Our experience validates this observation, and we estimate that one out of every two emails given in exchange for content is false or disposable. These emails therefore pollute your database, with all the disadvantages detailed above. |
Why should you systematically check the emails in your database?
#1 Preserve the quality and integrity of your database
Every year, 22.5% of e-mail addresses become invalid... and it's not your fault. This obsolescence is mainly due to contacts changing employers. In fact, the phenomenon has become much more pronounced since the pandemic, with higher turnover in sales and marketing functions.
In the absence of a systematic verification process, your database will accumulate invalid emails over the months, until it has a potential bounce rate higher than that tolerated by email clients.
#2 Preserve the reputation of your domain name
A database polluted with emails that don't exist will cause hard bounces. The reputation of your domain name is impacted, until a critical threshold is crossed, causing you to be blacklisted. The result: your e-mails end up in your contacts' "spam" folder, with a huge loss of earnings and a significant loss of ROI on your marketing actions.
#3 Optimize your emailing solution credits
By systematically checking the validity of the emails in your database, you can be sure that your messages reach the inboxes of your entire mailing list. As a result, you optimize your emailing solution's credits and the costs associated with your campaigns.
#4 Unbiased KPIs for your email campaigns
A database containing non-existent or invalid emails will distort your results and bias your analyses, leading you to make decisions based on erroneous data. For marketers, an email campaign launched on the wrong database will produce abnormally low ratios and make it difficult to release additional budgets.
#5 Creating and activating user accounts
If your customers can create an account on your website, email verification is essential so that they can finalize the creation and activate their account. An incorrect email (e.g. a typing error) means they won't receive their login details, which will lead to frustration and probably put an end to the purchasing process.
#6 Optimize your prospecting effort
E-mail address verification ensures that targeted prospects can be reached by e-mail, and that messages reach the right address. Without this verification, prospecting efforts can be wasted... a major problem when you consider that sales resources are both scarce and expensive.
#7 Building customer loyalty
In many ways, customer loyalty is the shortest route to growth. With a customer database polluted by inaccurate or invalid emails, you won't be able to send product updates, special offers and other important information. This deprives you of up-selling and cross-selling opportunities, with a negative impact on sales performance.
EnsoEmail: a reliable database and high-performance campaigns
Make sure your mail arrives directly in your prospects' and customers' inboxes with EnsoEmail, a solution that optimizes new customer acquisition(integration via API into our online forms) and makes your databases more reliable(file processing). EnsoEmail guarantees a 99% reliability rate:
- Email syntax check ;
- Checking the ;
- SMTP test ;
- Identifying disposable or temporary emails;
- Correction of typos.
Discover the EnsoEmail solution and its various use cases here.