If you need a successful cold email outreach campaign, then checking your email validity is crucial.
Having correct and active emails have a huge impact on your open rate as well as your sender reputation. If you do not check whether your emails are valid before you send them out, it can create a several issues for your email deliverability.
In this guide, we will learn five easy ways to check whether your email is valid without sending out a single email.
Why You Need to Validate Email Addresses
You are about to launch your first cold mailing campaign? You have surely managed to collect a nice list of e-mail addresses with the right targeting for your campaign. However, keep in mind that some of them may have typing errors.
Other email addresses may be fake and planted by spammers, so you do not want to keep them on your list. That is why it is important to always check email validity when sending emails or adding new addresses to your list.
Increase deliverability and reduce bounce rate
Once you have ensured all your email addresses are valid, you can reduce your bounce rates, have a list that is free of invalid addresses, and spam traps, and have a high deliverability rate.
E-mail addresses are called "catch-all" when the server is set up in such a way that it cannot check whether the address is valid or not. In this case the only way to check them is to actually send an e-mail. In the Emelia tool, you can detect them through the activity of other users. Emelia detects and cleans emails that have been "bounced" on the platform.
Improve and maintain your reputation as a sender
If you do not check whether your email is valid, you can damage your sender reputation, reduce your open rate, and increase bounce rate.
This means that the inbox service provider will mark your email as spam and throw them in the spam folder or the junk folder. You might also find your domain and IP address on the email blocklist, which can further damage your reputation. Ultimately, your message will no longer reach your intended audience and your marketing dollars will go to waste.
Save money
Some email marketing tools have packages linked to the number of emails sent. For example, you are limited to 5000 emails sent per month. If you have done an email verification of your prospect list, you will use this quota with better results. Sending an email to an invalid email address is a lost credit. With Emelia, you can send an unlimited number of emails per month.
As you can see, it is very important to simply check the email addresses you have collected. An email validation service will help you filter out incorrect and fake emails from your list, which will reduce the risk of high bounce rates or damage to your reputation. Moreover, it will also prevent spammers from getting their hands on your email list.
Ways to Check Whether An Email is Valid
It only takes a short amount of time to find out whether an email is valid or not, which will ensure your message gets delivered to the intended recipient; hence, resulting in high profitability for your business.
Email Syntax and Format Verification
One of the biggest reasons why your emails bounce is that you have been sending them to the wrong email address. These are often small errors or emails that are no longer active, such as when someone leaves the company.
However, it can have grave consequences for your marketing campaign and can harm your sender reputation. The solution is easy, though. All you need to do is to look for typos. Every email address consists of the recipient’s name, which is the first characters of the email address. This is followed by the @ symbol, which is followed by the domain name, which defines the space owned by a specific email provider. The last part of domain name system is the top-level domain, which is placed after the domain name. Common domain names include .com, .org, .gov, .co, etc.
Make sure that all four of these elements are present and in the right sequence in the email. If any part is missing, it is a sure sign that your email is invalid. Also, make sure that the email address does not contain any special characters that are not supported by email addresses.
Use an Email Verification Service
Thanks to the sheer number of email verification tools in the market, now you will no longer have any difficulty in verifying your emails. Most email verification tools follow the same steps to verify an email address from a whale list.
Your first step is to upload your email list or bulk email database in a CSV file or another compatible format suggested by the tool. With the click of a button, the tool will clean up your list and show you the results of each email address in the form of stats which will show factors like high bounce rates, spam traps, etc.
Once you have verified your emails, you can download the clean, accurate, active, and valid emails and use the new list to verify email addresses and send your messages. All it takes is just a couple of minutes.
Here are some tools to check your email list:
Directly in Droptcontact when enriching your contacts
At Emelia, our team has implemented an exclusive "Bounce Reducer" feature to reduce the bounce rate by automatically cleaning your prospect list when loading it into the tool. The tool will detect email addresses that have been bounced on the platform for all Emelia users. This is even more reliable than any verification tool since the way it is verified is 100% reliable. Indeed, an email has really been sent, it's not just a ping on the email address.
Perform an IP Address Lookup
Although it sounds technical, performing an IP address lookup is one of the easiest and most effective ways to find out whether your email is valid.
IP address lookup is used to find out the geolocation of any IP address once every email message you get comes with the IP address of the email server that sent it.
To find out whether an email address is valid, all you need to do is to copy-paste its IP address into an IP address lookup tool like the one provided by What Is My Ip Address. The tool will show you data about the ISP, location, and the organization name associated with the IP address. If the IP address has originated from a country you did not expect, it could be a sign that someone is spoofing you.
Password Recovery
A good old way to find out whether an email address is valid is to enter it into the login field of the email provider.
The three major email service providers i.e., Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, offer a simple email address checker in their login fields. This can help you find out if you have entered the correct email address in the form. If you try to log in with an incorrect email address, the email service provider will inform you of that.
You can use this email checker feature whenever you want to check email addresses from gmail.com, outlook.com, or yahoo.com. In addition, you can go to the password recovery page of these email service providers to get the same results.
However, keep in mind that this method only allows you to check one email at a time. So if you have a whole email list to check, it can be quite inefficient.
Plus, you might get blocked from signing in to your account after multiple unsuccessful attempts.
Look for Disposable Emails
Disposable emails allow users to receive messages at a short-term, temporary email address.
A disposable email address will expire automatically after a short amount of time, and as such, this service is largely misused by spammers who need a large number of email accounts to continue their fraudulent activities.
You can remove disposable emails from your list by disallowing signups from established domains that provide disposable emails. However, the task is not easy.
There are dozens of disposable invalid email addresses and domains, and it can be time-exhaustive and impractical to track every single one of them down.
However, you can use an email address validation API to get rid of all the disposable email addresses from your database automatically.
All you need to do is to make an API request by passing the access key, and submitting your email addresses. The API tool will do the job for you.
All the methods above can help ensure your emails are valid and keep your email list clean, ensuring your reputation remains safe, and your marketing efforts are not wasted. Ensuring that your outbound emails reach the desired recipient is the single most important way to ensure the success of your cold emailing campaign.