- Summary
- Introduction to email verification and data hygiene
- How reduced data hygiene affects your business ROI?
- The need for email verification and data hygiene in your marketing strategy
- Who should use email verification and data hygiene?
The complete guide on email verification and data hygiene and the best practice for marketers and users to create a clean email list.
We have created this whitepaper based on an analysis of last year's cmercury data consisting of a total of 6 million+ verifications.
- Where to use email verification and data hygiene?
- Improve your deliverability rate using email verification and data hygiene tools
- How do you implement email verification and data hygiene?
- How often should you use email verification and data hygiene tools?
- Conclusion
1. Summary
There are many factors contributing to the success of any business. One of the most sought after aspects is bridging an effective communication with the customer. With the betterment of technology, convincing communication has never been a daunting task for us to date. From the beginning, and even today, one of the best connectivity platforms between a business and a consumer is email. It stands beyond all other communication channels. Therefore, email is an essential platform businesses should never ignore.
Email marketing has become an inevitable tool for business goals and milestones that communications like product promotions, loyalty programs, shipping confirmations etc; would be obsolete without it. Therefore, the collection of real and relevant emails is crucial.
This whitepaper intends to help you understand and guide marketers and users through email verification and data hygiene and follow its best practice for the most promising results. An email verification service is vital to ensure that all the hard work and strategies that depend on email don’t go in vain.
Be it a marketing campaign, prospect, customer engagement, service or product
purchase its success depends on the email deliverability. The goal of email verification is to ensure that the emails get delivered successfully to the recipients’ inboxes and not the spam folder. Such practices prevent you from being marked as spam or getting blacklisted by the servers. It helps you improve your domain, sender and IP reputations which boosts the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
2. Introduction to Email Verification and Data Hygiene
Email is an unavoidable component of your marketing strategy. If you have created compelling content for a promotion or offer, it’s great. But what if you are sending to invalid email lists. This is the situation where email verification and data hygiene come to your rescue. It helps you clean your list and confirm that you are sending to only valid and secure email addresses. Email verification and data hygiene feature is a robust and cloud-based technology that checks whether the:
- email addresses are valid at the domain and recipient side
- email data list is hygienic and warns you of any phishing or spamming email addresses.
According to studies, 65% of companies quoted clean and hygienic lists bring the best deliverability and results. The more the number of delivered emails, the better would be the delivery, open, click-through, and conversion rates of your business.
65% of businesses cited that clean email lists bring the best deliverability rates and conversions.
Even though email marketing seems to be affordable, the continuation of poor email data quality will take a toll on the reputation of your organization. Save your marketing budget by sending your email campaigns only to valid and engaging email addresses and not to those which are more probable to bounce back and give a bad reputation.
Following the best email marketing practices not only increases your capacity to remarket to your customers and prospects but also gives you the chance to upsell and cross-sell in the future. Verification is proven to remove the deliverability issue by sending your campaigns to the right and real recipients and converting them into loyal customers.
In short, email verification and data hygiene offer you the following three key benefits:
- Improve your email campaign deliverability and implementation
- Reduce the risk of unhygienic data
- Enrich the customer loyalty and fulfilment
3. How reduced data hygiene affects your business ROI?
Email is the most effective marketing technique generating an average ROI of 122%!
There can be many instances of how an email list comes with unhygienic data. Some of them include customers who have unsubscribed from your email communications or who may have moved to a new primary email address. Though you can make use of some attributes, you may be unknowingly putting a toll on your business ROI. Reduced data hygiene lead to deliverability issues, and blacklisting by recipients and ISPs which hardly bear any fruit for you. Whereas, clean email data pays off and drives increased response rates and ROI. To ensure this result, you have to track the following metrics:
- Deliverability Rate
- Bounce Rate
- Open Rate
- Click-Through Rate
- Unsubscribe Rate
The idea is simple. The greater the engagement rate the higher will be the ROI. Therefore, execute periodic email verification and data hygiene check to witness a higher conversion and revenue.
4. The need for email verification and data hygiene in your marketing strategy
The toll of poor data hygiene on email quality
Even after two decades of popularity, email remains the top and most popular channel for business communications. You can use emails for products or service promotion, welcome & transactional emails, cross-sell & up-sell, loyalty programs, understand trends in customer wishes and interests and more. However, the issues arise when the sent emails fail to communicate due to poor email data hygiene and quality.
With the implementation of intensified security standards by popular email service providers (ESPs) and internet service providers (ISPs), the recipients can now evade spammy emails and other bad email practices. However, these stringent rules give stricter penalties for businesses that follow bad email practices. For instance, if you send emails to invalid email addresses it can result in a hard bounce or be marked as spam. It harms not only your email marketing efforts but your company reputation as well.
Email deliverability issues adversely affect 78% of companies globally.
The email deliverability problems haunt about 78% of organizations across the globe. Email channels must be used to boost your growth and recognition. If you keep incorrect or invalid email addresses in your database, it is equivalent to collecting water in a bottom holed pot. Your customers hope to receive relevant and timely information in their inboxes. So don’t miss out on opportunities to verify and clean your database before sending.
5. Who should use email verification and data hygiene?
The question of who should use this feature depends on many factors. For instance, if your corporate responsibilities include sending emails to communicate with your audience, customers or partners, you must employ email verification and data hygiene so as never to neglect part of your email strategy. Below are some of the business models that should definitely consider email verification and data hygiene:
- Marketing Professionals, Technology & Operations
- Ecommerce or Retail Professionals
- Web & Database Management
- Customer Service & Account Management
6. Where to use email verification and data hygiene?
You can use email verification and data hygiene in instances where you:
- Gather Email Addresses
- Create Webforms & Landing Pages
- Need to Checkout Page of Ecommerce Websites
- Expect Newsletter Signups from Prospects
- Build CRM and Marketing Databases
- Do Telecalling Marketing Strategy
Email verification and data hygiene perform an 8 stage validation and verification process to pass through several quality checks to confirm whether the correct status codes are returned.
The capability to verify and execute complex databases using the 8 stage verification, makes cmercury VERIFY unique among the global marketers!
cmercury VERIFY performs single, list and bulk email verifications and provides instant and relevant reports. Apart from hygiene results like flagging potential spam complaints, cmercury also flags catch-all mailbox attributes used which are not performed by major ESPs like Gmail and Yahoo. It means any email sent to a mail server will not be accepted if it doesn’t exist. This unique feature of cmercury cracks the challenge for marketers permanently.
7. Improve your deliverability rate using email verification and data hygiene tools
As per extensive research by many tech giants, most businesses prefer email marketing over other channels because they want to create awareness among the right prospects. The cut in the email deliverability rate impedes the performance of marketing strategies. Notably, email marketing experts found the solution to boost your email deliverability rate and give an uplift in your marketing strategy. The same has been addressed by us in this whitepaper.
Email verification and validation is a process that performs a detailed breakdown of emails in the uploaded lists. Mostly, users may accidentally enter invalid, inaccurate or non-existing email addresses that may not even reach the recipients’ inbox. This will certainly increase email bounce rates and returns a negative result to the mail server. Thus, there will be a dip in the reputation level of your email IP address and future emails will be flagged by the ISPs. Fortunately, the capability to verify and identify the full list of email addresses will prevent the probability of a failed delivery.
Email verification and validation include the 8 stage process to obtain a hygienic email list.
1. RFC Syntax Check
RFC Syntax Check verifies and validates whether the email address uses the correct RFC syntax format.
2. Domain Syntax Check
Analyses and validates whether the domain uses the standard syntax and authorises the top-level domain extensions.
3. Domain Validation Check
Domain Validation Check analyses the global DNS servers and confirms whether the domain name exists or not.
4. Mail Server Verification
Mail Server Verification verifies whether the domain identified in the email address has an active mail server to receive emails.
5. Role Email / Broadcast Email Flagging
Role emails and broadcast emails are those where multiple emails have a redirect receipt from a single role address. The email verifier will flag such addresses and decrease the chance of spam complaints and invalid email addresses in future.
6. Disposable Emails Flagging
Disposable emails are created by users who don’t wish to reveal their exact identity due to the fear of receiving spam mails.
7. Mailbox Existence Check
The mailbox check is done to ascertain whether the entered email addresses exist or not. It ensures a high accuracy rate in email addresses of catch-all domains.
8. Spam Reporter Score
A low, medium or high score is given to each email address based on the number of spam reported by the recipient in past. It helps to decide whether to include the recipient in a bulk campaign or not. If the recipient is not an opted member and has a medium or above score, then you can avoid sending your campaigns.
After all the above steps, marketers will acquire a valid, accurate and real email address list that has a nil chance to be marked as spam or bounced.
8. How do you implement email verification and data hygiene?
- Realtime Verifications
Realtime verification is where emails are verified at the point of collection. It may be at the web forms or other points of sales (POS). The best instance of realtime verification is the checkout page of an ecommerce shopping cart. Here, customers enter their email addresses and other information instantly to purchase something. Its implementation process includes the inclusion of the web services code into your system to alert the customer if they enter invalid details. It can be developed with the help of middleware services. Some companies verify the emails only before it is entered into the CRM or database.
- Benefits of Realtime Verifications
The biggest advantage of verifying the email addresses at the point of collection is that it alerts you of the invalid email address immediately. So your chance of sending to an invalid address is almost nil. Most of the invalid email addresses occur due to typo errors either manually or from the system. By using realtime email verifications, you increase the odds of fetching a new opportunity to grow a clean email list.
- Batch Verifications
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30% of emails change every year, so you should clean them at regular intervals.
On the other hand, you can also verify email addresses in batches or bulk. Do you know that about 30% of emails change every year? You need to clean them from your database regularly depending on your business. cmercury uses the batch option for those who want to start with the verification process soon but have some technical restrictions. You can also initiate batch verification files and add realtime verification at the point of data collection, if possible.
9. How often should you use email verification and data hygiene tools?
This is one of the frequently asked questions in batch email verifications. As 30% of email addresses change annually, it is suggested to do database verifications on a monthly or quarterly basis for the best result. It also depends on your business model. A good strategy includes verifying those emails having a high engagement rate less often and verifying emails having a low engagement rate more often. If you want to reengage with old or inactive contacts in your database, that haven’t been emailed for over six months, then we strongly recommend performing batch email verifications before running any marketing campaigns.
10. Conclusion
Email verification is an inevitable process that should be part of every email marketer’s strategy. Its robustness enables you to implement it into web forms, landing pages, ecommerce shopping carts, POS and more. Even if you opt for realtime, or batch verifications, it will certainly increase the deliverability and performance of your email campaigns. Moreover, following the best practices will enhance your business reputation, and customer satisfaction and let more relevant emails reach your recipients’ inboxes.
About cmercury
cmercury is an AI-powered email marketing & omnichannel platform that offers top email delivery & verifications, data cleaning, keyword predictions, SMS marketing, web push notifications, web popups and more. Reputed companies across the globe including Voylla, Clovia, Zivame, Myntra, Reliance, Shopclues, Global delight, Vodafone, Snapdeal, Radisson, Muji, Titan and more, have experienced the best customer retention and given a boost to their email, mobile & web promotions. Currently, we have completed 1 million + omnichannel customer interactions across email, SMS, web push, exit-intent popup & web overlay channels. Notably, we have also delivered 1 billion+ email deployments using the best email deliverability and robust email infrastructure backed with highly secure Tier 1 datacenters.
- cmercury VERIFY, the best email verification & validation tool
cmercury provides single, list and bulk email verification with pertinent reports. Our email verification services guarantee a 99% accuracy rate for Gmail users and 97% for non-Gmail users, flag potential spam complaints and catch all-accept all mailbox policies. The emails you collect from us after verifications are cleaned and valid and can prevent risks like emailing to invalid email addresses that reduce conversion. Further, you can improve deliverability and capture more prospective leads. As a result, you will experience higher open, click, and conversion rates, and enjoy increased business ROI.
- Email verification and data hygiene analysis and results
Here are some of the milestones achieved by cmercury in email verification and data hygiene based on in-depth analysis.