As long as you are conducting business online, email campaigns will be to your company as fuel is to a vehicle – compulsory. Consequently, it is paramount to ensure that the emailing system employed by your enterprise is as flawless as possible. The process of ascertaining that the email addresses your company is working with are not only legitimate but also valuable, begins at the moment prospects start keying in their email addresses in your email sign-up form. Every email address that is useless or that leads to a dead-end is an opportunity that your enterprise could have ceased and converted to revenue. Hence, it is vital for a business to establish an effective and efficient system to guarantee that it only works with authentic email addresses so as to gain the most from them. A solid email validation framework is the key to making this a reality.
Email validation is a process that confirms that the email addresses prospects provide in email sign-up forms are authentic. A good system for validating email addresses will only allow real email addresses to be captured in your database. Often, it is a two-step process: firstly, real-time validation – this will check what the prospect is feeding the sign-up form to ascertain that it actually is an email address. Finally, the prospect will be requested to confirm that the email address belongs to them, by going into their inbox and clicking on a link – in an email sent from your company – that will redirect them to a page with further instructions regarding how to complete the sign-up process. A little more work, but it’s considerably beneficial to your company, and below are a few pointers why.
1. A Good Reputation
Have you been online lately, visiting this and that website? If you have, you must have been bombarded with alerts or pop-ups requesting for your email address for various reasons. To make it worse, there are websites that don’t even give you room to at least browse a little and see what they have to offer; the moment the page loads, “BAMM!!!” you are bombarded with an alert that takes over your entire screen, and takes away your ability to browse until you either provide your email address or reject the offer. In other words, people have to deal with thousands of email marketing schemes every day; therefore, you want your company to be among those they consider worth their time, and not those they view as a nuisance.
Validating email addresses is a vital process that will help protect the reputation of your enterprise. The reputation of your company, in this respect, is determined by the degree of spam complaints, subscriber level engagement, and hard bounce rates. Your company is probably one of those that will kindly request prospects to provide their email addresses for one business-related reason or another. You want to ensure that the addresses provided are legitimate so that whenever you send out emails, your ESP (Email Service Providers) and alternative email related services will not red-flag your emails. This will ensure that your prospects, as well as the email service providers, trust your emails and whatever they were meant to accomplish will be done successfully.
2. Save Money
As indicated earlier, every email address that is a dead-end is revenue lost. ESPs will cost you, and you want to ensure that every penny spent on your email campaigns is worth it. Email addresses that are a dead-end occupy slots that other valuable email addresses could be occupying. Moreover, you will be paying for sending out emails to nobody. You’ll be wasting time and your money. Validating email addresses will help to prevent this. By confirming the authenticity of email addresses on the go, you will ensure that you are only dealing with leads that actually have a fruitful end, and not painful, money and time wasting dead-ends. Furthermore, if you allow your email system to accept invalid email addresses, they will accumulate with time and you’ll be forced to spend extra money to get rid of them. This is because your ESP will not take it lightly when it is discovered that there is a considerable amount of dead-end emails coming from your company.
3. A Diminished Bounce Rate
A suitable point to follow the preceding one; validating email addresses significantly reduces the number of emails that end up nowhere. A bounce rate of as little as 3% is considerably high, so this is something you want to keep a keen eye on. If you don’t know yet, ESPs take note of and don’t think kindly of companies whose emails are categorized as spam or have a tendency of targeting ghost recipients. If your company is red flagged as one of these enterprises, there is a good chance it’ll be placed among those companies that cannot be trusted, and by default, any email originating from your company will immediately be placed as spam at the recipient’s end. This is a disappointing fact, particularly when you have just acquired new promising prospects. You’ll find email validation significantly effective and beneficial if you wish to prevent this expensive and disheartening outcome.
4. Credible Campaign Statistics
5. Enhanced Productivity
If there was only one benefit of validating email addresses to a business, it would be ‘Enhanced Productivity’. Let’s start here, the main purpose of your email campaign is to acquire as many prospects as possible and eventually turn them into long-term clients; hence, more revenue for your business. Therefore, when you acquire valid email addresses and in turn send emails to these addresses with a call to action, and everything goes well, you’ll end up being more productive. You’ll be sending emails to prospects who exist, and who know your business exists. This significantly improves your chances of acquiring long-term clients. You’ll increase your conversion rates, and optimize your revenue opportunities. You’ll be dealing with credible campaign statistics. You’ll save money since you’ll only pay for what you have actually used, and your company will acquire a good reputation. Ultimately, your email campaign will be a success since it’ll be accomplishing precisely what it was intended for,
