cmercury Bulk Email Verifier – The Inevitable Tool For the Success of Your Email Programs
Email Verification
Every email marketer will agree that email deliverability or inbox placement is the heart of their email programs. But, above all, email verification is essential to email marketing success. cmercury free bulk email verifier helps marketers to maintain their email list hygiene. If your emails do not reach the intended recipient’s inbox, all the efforts around email design, content or product strategy, or audience segmentation turn out to be futile.
Suppose your email campaigns fail to reach the inboxes. In that case, the most significant impact will be on sales and marketing functions with soaked up lead and sales pipelines and ultimately lower revenue.
Email Validation and Email Verification
The email marketers got confused many a time between email validation and email verification. So let’s have a quick run-through for those who are still confused between both. Email validation, as its name goes, validates an email address. A bad email can creep into a mailing list due to typo errors (honest mistakes) or someone intentionally adding an invalid email address. (purposeful misdirects). An email validation tool checks and validates whether an email exists with the said domain (for example – abc@hotmail.com).
On the other hand, email verification goes one step ahead. It verifies if an actual inbox is in use or not. In addition, bulk email verification tools check hard bounces, reduce the risk of getting penalised by spam monitoring agencies and ISPs, and remove temporary, disposable emails and role email addresses.
A competent bulk email address verifier should also check invalid email address formats and authenticate domain extensions. Most Email Services Providers (ESPs) provide bulk email validation and verification as a natural extension and backwards integration to their product suite. Using APIs, email list cleaning remains in silos or can be integrated into the website, which empowers realtime validations.
Email Deliverability & Sender Reputation
Email Sender Reputation is a widely followed yardstick to assess email deliverability. Better the sender reputation, more the inbox placements. There is a higher probability that if your sender reputation is at stake, a major of your promotional emails will get routed to the spam folder.
The two critical factors deciding the sender’s reputation are campaign engagement and customer complaints, which determine the importance of the Domain and IP Addresses used for campaign deployment. The more the recipients click on the “Report Spam” Button provided by the mailbox providers (ISPs like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL), the greater the chances of your domain and IP reputation taking a toll!
Suppose you want the optimum results from your email programs. In that case, the marketer needs to ensure email hygiene and address validation plays a vital role in ensuring your list remains clean. Therefore, you should maintain Email List Hygiene from email data acquisition through the entire customer life cycle stages. Let’s start with the easy-to-manage ongoing email list hygiene management.
Email Deliverability & On-Going List Hygiene Management
Ongoing Email List Hygiene Management primarily involves quarantining inactive customers and removing abandoned mailboxes that keep hard bounces in check. In addition, it helps maintain your email list clean. An up-to-date email list signifies lesser risks of spam trap hits and email bounces that help safeguard your domain and IP addresses against blacklisting and ISPs labelling you as an illegitimate sender.
Regular email list hygiene monitoring keeps a check on hard bounced emails as well as soft bounces or temporary failures. The reasons could be the recipient’s mailbox exceeding the quota, mail server timeouts etc. The other essential aspects to consider are the shelf-life of your email-based and the last date you reached out to them. If your answer is a double- or triple-digit value, ensure you have deployed the right tools for ongoing bulk email validation.
Now let’s look at the daunting challenge for many email marketers. How cmercury verify, a bulk email verification tool, maintains your email list clean when you have email data acquired over multiple online and offline sources.
Email Deliverability & Email Acquisition Practices
Often, marketers are saddled between aggressively building their email list from as many sources as possible or strictly adhering to the quality first against quantity advocacy. We at cmercury support the school, which advocates aggressive email list building, but with a caveat; to ensure you have proper tools and processes to ensure email data hygiene is foolproofed in the acquisition phase. Let’s quickly review how invalids and non-existing emails get added to your email list.
Firstly, the customer fills out a form or signs up for a newsletter. Often, invalids creep in mainly due to omission and typo errors.
Then you need to follow a single opt-in approach against the recommended verified and confirmed opt-in approaches.
If you don’t have a bulk email validation tool that can keep a check on ‘nasty emails’ getting added to your email list.
You are sure that specific email verification processes are not effectively working with the one you have and are proved by the ongoing high rates of hard bounces you suffer on your promotional campaigns targeted across freshly acquired subscribers.
Your bet heavily on offline events, conferences and humans manually key-in the emails directly to your campaign list.
A systemic analysis of your campaign data shows a gradual performance drop, additional hard and soft bounces, increasing customer spam complaints, and domain and IP reputation dropping from “high to medium to low to bad”, as reported by tools like Google Postmaster.
If any of the above resonates with a challenge, you are facing in your email marketing. In that case, you should immediately consider deploying a bulk email verifier irrespective of the acquisition source.
cmercury-verify Validation protocols
cmercury VERIFY follows an 8-point-based bulk email verification and validation protocol, making it a best-in-class email hygiene building tool for email marketers globally. So, let’s have a review of these protocols followed by cmercury-verify.
1. RFC Syntax Check
Do you know any email address follows a specific syntax or set of rules initially standardised by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the 1980s? The local part, the symbol @, and a domain name are made up of an email address—for example, sreedharan@marketing.com. RFC Syntax Checks ensure that the email address is in the correct RFC format.
2. Domain Syntax Check
The domain also follows a universally accepted standard syntax. The right-most label conveys the top-level domain (.biz or .com or .org). The hierarchy of domains descends from the right to the left label in the name. Each label to the left specifies a subdivision or subdomain of the domain to the right. For instance, (johndoe@example.com). Domain syntax checks whether the domain syntax is correct or not and also qualifies the top-level domain extensions.
3. Domain Check
A domain-level check validates whether the domain name exists or not by checking the global DNS servers.
4. Mail Server Check
The mail server check validates that the domain specified in the email address has a mail server to receive emails.
5. Mailbox Check
In addition, cmercury-verify, the bulk email checker, inspects if a live mailbox exists for each email contact scanned through.
6. Role Email Address Check
A powerful built-in feature of cmercury-verify, it flags if an email address is a role address (marketing@example.com). Role email addresses typically define a responsibility rather than a person. Therefore, there is a greater unlikeliness for a role email to consent to receive marketing emails.
Broadcast addresses are known as the subcategory of role addresses. Any emails sent to these addresses go to many people attached to the broadcast list and increase the risk of spam complaints and invalids impacting your email deliverability.
7. Disposable Address Check
Disposable email is a service that allows a registered user to receive an email at a temporary address that expires after a certain period elapses. The customers who do not want to use their email addresses for spamming are using this protocol.
Many online discussion forums, blogs and websites ask visitors to register before they can post comments, view premium content or download white papers. A disposable email account will allow the visitor to sign up and verify his registration without exposing his primary email account to spam.
8. Spam Reporter Score Check
cmercury-verify maintains a global repository of email users who flagged a proportionately higher volume of email campaigns as spam across multiple email clients and programs. Based on this propensity, users are ranked and assigned a score. Marketers get an intimation of those users who breach the preset threshold value. Accordingly, they could fine-tune their campaign audience.
Conclusion
To sum up, email validation is an inevitable part of your email campaigns. Unfortunately, many email marketers pay less attention to email hygiene management. The direct implications like higher spending, diminishing returns from your emails and indirect implications like eroding sender reputation, dropping inbox placements etc., turn out to be more damaging than you anticipate.
As experienced email marketers, we must ensure that email database hygiene checks from acquisition to the later stages of the email marketing life cycle remains a top priority. You can always try cmercury VERIFY as a trusted brand for bulk email verification. Here is a free guide to sending bulk email campaigns using cmercury.