The Right Ways to Verify an Email Address

In sales outreach, a well-crafted and targeted email can make all the difference in capturing a lead’s attention and ultimately converting them into a paying customer.

Effective communication is the key to driving business growth. One such communication channel that has stood the test of time is email.

However, verification is crucial to ensure your email reaches the right recipient. In this article, we’ll explore the importance of email verification in sales outreach and discuss some common challenges faced without it.

The Importance of Email Verification in Sales Outreach

As a sales professional, you understand the significance of reaching out to the right people at the right time.

Email verification plays a vital role in achieving this goal. Here’s why:

• Improved deliverability: When you verify email addresses, it helps you filter out invalid and non-existent ones, ensuring your messages reach their intended recipients.

• Enhanced sender reputation: ISPs and email service providers track your sender’s reputation, and a high bounce rate due to undeliverable emails can negatively impact it. Email verification helps maintain a good sender reputation by reducing bounce rates.

• Higher engagement rates: When your emails land in the correct inboxes, they’re more likely to be opened, read, and acted upon, resulting in higher engagement rates and better conversion opportunities.

Common Challenges Faced Without Email Verification

Without email verification, your sales outreach efforts may face several obstacles, including:

• Increased bounce rate: Sending emails to invalid addresses will result in a high bounce rate, harming your sender’s reputation and negatively impacting your email deliverability.

• Wasted resources: Crafting a compelling email takes time and effort. Sending them to invalid or non-existent addresses saves valuable resources on leads that never convert.

• Lower engagement: Emails that don’t reach their intended recipients won’t generate any engagement or responses, hindering your sales outreach efforts and decreasing your chances of conversion.

• Damaged brand reputation: Consistently sending emails to non-existent or uninterested recipients can lead to spam complaints and damage your brand’s standing in the eyes of potential customers.

Advantages of Email Verification

A successful email marketing campaign relies on reaching the right audience with engaging and relevant content. One critical element that can significantly improve the success of your campaigns is email verification.

Minimize Email Bounces

• Why bounces: Email bounces occur when an email is undeliverable due to invalid or non-existent email addresses. Typos, outdated information, or false email addresses can cause these.

• Consequences of high bounce rates: High bounce rates negatively impact your sender’s reputation and can lead to lower email deliverability. This, in turn, reduces the chances of your emails reaching their intended recipients and generating engagement.

• Email verification advantage: By verifying email addresses before sending your campaigns, you can minimize email bounces and ensure your messages reach the right inboxes.

Enhance Sender Reputation & Deliverability

• How sender reputation affects email deliverability: Sender reputation is a score assigned by ISPs and email service providers based on factors such as bounce rates, spam complaints, and engagement metrics. A good sender reputation is essential for high email deliverability.

• Techniques for improving sender reputation: Email verification is crucial in improving your sender reputation by reducing bounce rates and ensuring you send emails to valid and engaged recipients.

• Email verification advantage: Enhancing your sender’s reputation through email verification increases the likelihood of your emails reaching their intended recipients and generating positive engagement.

Boost Email Campaign Results

• Metrics to measure success: Key performance indicators (KPIs) for email campaigns include open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and overall ROI.

• How email verification improves campaign performance: By ensuring that your emails reach valid and engaged recipients, email verification can positively impact your KPIs and ultimately improve the results of your email campaigns.

• Email verification advantage: Boosted email campaign results translate into higher engagement, increased conversions, and a better ROI for your marketing efforts.

Maintain Fresh Email Lists

• The impact of outdated email lists: Outdated email lists can lead to high bounce rates, poor engagement, and wasted resources on ineffective campaigns.

• Strategies for regular list maintenance: Regularly updating your email list through email verification helps maintain a clean and up-to-date inventory, ensuring optimal deliverability and engagement.

• Email verification advantage: Fresh email lists can significantly improve the success of your campaigns by reaching genuinely interested recipients who are more likely to engage with your content.

Reduce Spam Complaints

• Importance of avoiding spam flags: Consistently being flagged as spam can lead to poor sender reputation, decreased deliverability, and potential blocklisting by email service providers.

• Best practices to reduce spam complaints: Verify email address, use double opt-in processes, and send relevant content to engaged recipients are some best practices to reduce the chances of your emails being flagged as spam.

• Email verification advantage: Reducing spam complaints through email verification helps maintain a healthy sender reputation, ensures high deliverability, and promotes positive engagement with your campaigns.

Techniques for Email Verification

For a successful email marketing campaign, ensuring your messages reach valid and engaged recipients is crucial. One way to achieve this is to verify the email addresses before sending out your campaigns. In this article, we’ll discuss various techniques for email verification, including:

• Verify email syntax
• Ping the Email Server
• Test with a Secondary Email Account
• Perform DNS Lookup
• Conduct IP Address Lookup
• Utilize Email Verification Tools

1. Verify Email Syntax

Email syntax verification is the first step in identifying invalid email addresses. Here’s how to do it:

Standard email syntax rules:

A standard email address follows the format of [email protected], with three mandatory parts: a unique identifier (XYZ), an “@” symbol, and a domain name (abc.com).

The unique identifier can contain up to 64 characters, including uppercase and lowercase English letters (A-Z, a-z), digits (0-9), and special characters such as ! # $ % & ‘ * + - / = ? ^ _ ` {. The domain name typically matches the business domain or an email service provider’s domain.

Tools for syntax checking:

Several tools can help you check the syntax of email addresses, including online email validators and software solutions that integrate with your email marketing platform. Mailmeteor provides a free email checker solution for example.

These tools can automatically flag email addresses with syntax errors, allowing you to correct them before sending your campaign.

Steps for email syntax verification:

Here’s how you can verify the syntax of an email:

1. Collect the email addresses you wish to verify.
2. Utilize an email verification tool or software solution that includes syntax checking.
3. Run the email addresses through the chosen tool, which will flag any addresses with syntax errors.
4. Review the flagged email addresses and correct any errors manually or contact the recipient to confirm their correct email address.
5. Re-run the corrected email addresses through the email verification tool to ensure all syntax errors have been resolved.
6. Once all email addresses have passed the syntax check, proceed with your marketing campaign.

2. Ping the Email Server

Pinging the email server is another technique to verify email addresses without sending emails. It involves establishing a connection with the email server and checking the validity of the email address in question.

What is email server pinging?:

Email server pinging involves using a tool to communicate with the email server and validate an email address. This process does not send emails but checks if the server will accept the email address for delivery.

How to ping an email server:

1. Choose a tool for pinging the email server, such as PuTTY for Telnet on Windows or iTerm on Mac.
2. If using Windows, enable Telnet. For Mac users, no additional setup is required.
3. Open the command prompt (Windows) or terminal (Mac) and type the nslookup command: nslookup –type=mx domain.com
4. Multiple MX records associated with the domain will appear. Choose the one with the lowest preference number.
5. Connect to the Telnet server using the command: Telnet {mail server address} 25
6. Initiate a handshake with the server by typing: HELO.
7. Provide your identity using a random email address: mail from: {random email address}
8. Add the email address you want to verify: rcpt to {email address to verify}

The server will respond with either an “OK” or an error message. If the response is “OK,” the email address is valid.

While this method is accurate and provides reliable results, it can be time-consuming and negatively affect your system. Therefore, using this technique sparingly or considering using email verification tools or services to perform this check more efficiently and safely is recommended.

3. Test with a Secondary Email Account

Using a secondary email account to test the deliverability of your email campaigns can help verify email addresses without risking your primary email account’s reputation.

The benefits of sending test emails:

Testing with a secondary email account allows you to identify any issues with email deliverability or bounce rates before sending your campaign from your primary account. This practice can help maintain your primary account’s sender reputation, avoid spam flags, and ensure high deliverability rates.

How to set up a secondary email account:

1. Choose an email service provider (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook) and create a new email account. This will be your “dummy” account used for testing purposes.
2. Use this secondary account to send test emails to the recipients on your email list.
3. Monitor the results, such as bounce rates and responses, to identify issues or invalid email addresses.
4. Manually clean up any bounced or non-existent email addresses from your primary email list based on the results from your test emails.
5. Once you’ve verified the email addresses, send your email campaign from your primary account.

4. Perform DNS Lookup

Conducting a DNS lookup can help verify the authenticity of a domain and provide valuable information about any potential blacklists or associated spam-related data.

Understanding DNS records:

DNS (Domain Name System) records map domain names to IP addresses, enabling devices to access websites using human-readable domain names instead of numeric IP addresses. DNS records also contain information about mail servers (MX records), domain aliases (CNAME records), and other essential details.

Steps for conducting a DNS lookup:

1. Open a DNS checking tool in your web browser, such as MXToolbox DNS Check.
2. Enter the recipient’s domain name in the provided text box and click “DNS check.”
3. The tool will display a list of hostnames and details of the domain’s associated DNS records.
4. If no details are displayed for the provided domain, likely, the domain is not valid or currently unavailable.

While a DNS lookup can provide valuable information about the recipient’s domain, it does not guarantee 100% email deliverability. Combining this technique with other email verification methods is essential to ensure the highest accuracy and deliverability for your email marketing campaigns.

5. Conduct IP Address Lookup

Performing an IP address lookup can help verify the authenticity of a recipient’s email account and provide additional information about the associated IP address.

The role of IP addresses in email verification:

IP addresses play a crucial role in email verification, as they can help determine the legitimacy of a sender or recipient’s email server. By checking the IP address associated with an email address, you can gain insights into its reputation, location, and potential for spam or malicious activity.

Tools for IP address lookups:

Several online tools are available for conducting IP address lookups, such as MXToolbox and WhatIsMyIPAddress. These tools can provide detailed information about an IP address, helping you make informed decisions about the email addresses in your marketing campaigns.

Steps for conducting an IP address lookup:

1. Find the IP address associated with the recipient’s email address.
2. Open MXToolbox in your browser.
3. Enter the recipient’s email address in the text box and click “MX Lookup.”
4. A list of IP addresses associated with the email address will appear. Choose one of them for further analysis.
5. Conduct the IP address lookup using a tool like WhatIsMyIPAddress:
6. Enter the chosen IP address in the search field.
7. Click “Lookup IP” to retrieve information about the IP address, including its location, reputation, and associated domain.

6. Utilize Email Verification Tools

Email verification tools can streamline the process of validating email addresses, saving time and effort while maintaining high-quality email lists.

Features to look for in email verification tools:

When selecting an email verification tool, consider elements such as ease of use, integration with your email marketing platform, support for bulk email verification, real-time validation, accuracy, and cost.

Top email verification tools on the market:

Several are available to suit different needs and budgets. Some popular options include:

1. ZeroBounce: Offers email validation, spam trap detection, and email scoring to help maintain a clean email list and improve deliverability.
2. NeverBounce: Provides real-time email verification and list cleaning services to ensure high email deliverability rates.
3. Hunter.io: Focuses on finding and verifying professional email addresses, making it an excellent tool for B2B email marketing campaigns.
4. BriteVerify: Offers real-time email verification and list cleaning services to help maintain a clean email list and reduce bounce rates.

Utilizing email verification, tools can streamline the email validation process and devote more time to creating effective cold email campaigns or sequences. Remember to choose an agency that aligns with your specific needs and integrates seamlessly with your email marketing platform for the best results.

The significance of real-time email verification:

Incorporating real-time email verification into your cold email campaigns can help maintain a high-quality email list, improve deliverability, and increase the overall success of your campaigns.

That’s why Mailmeteor has introduced the BounceShield, a real-time email verification service that ensures you’re constantly sending emails to valid recipients, reducing bounce rates and protecting your sender’s reputation.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):