With an increase in digital marketing globally, especially over the last 15 months, strategies such as email and content marketing have become all the more pertinent among businesses. Although these strategies are being employed by businesses, they are not being used to the fullest of their potential.
Secure email validation is a vital part of ensuring the good reach of your email marketing campaigns and attracting more business. Some of its benefits include:
- Low bounce back rates,
- Blacklisting prevention, and,
- An engaged clientele
Steps of Email Validation
With that being established, it is still unknown to many people how this process exactly works. This piece will explore just that in the following steps-
1. Overall Check
In the very first step, before the ESP’s (Email Service Providers) and ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) start verifying the emails, there is an overall check of the email list. This is comparable to a proofreading session after you have written an assignment.
2. Identifying Spam Traps
Spam traps are email ID’s that are not actively used but monitored. Sending emails to these addresses can significantly increase the sender’s chances of being blacklisted by the ESP’s and ISP’s. Through validation, it is made sure that these email IDs are removed from the mailing list to avoid any hindrance in the email marketing strategies that the business set out to carry forward.
3. Syntax and Formatting
In this step of the process, the emails IDs are checked for any syntactical or formatting errors. Not looking into these errors can lead to a higher bounce back. For instance, if a customer accidentally wrote “sarah221@@gmail.com”, the email verification process will rectify this very clear mistake and use the correct ID instead.
4. Domain Verification
The email validation service uses the Domain Name System (DNS) to check the validity of the domains mentioned in each email address. And furthermore, it determines if the email ID is delivered to or not. Domains include and are not limited to Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. A simple example of the same would be if someone put down “john56@tpa.yb”, then the verification service will identify an invalid domain and eliminate it from the mailing list.
5. Mailbox Validation
This is the final step of the process wherein verification services use Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to check is the inbox linked to the address is active. The verification service sends a demo mail to the respective ID and tests it has been delivered. Taking forward the example from the previous step, the verification service will send an SMTP to “john56@tpa.yb”.If it is observed that the email has not successfully been delivered, and then the email address is eliminated from the list.
The bottom line
Inferring from the abovementioned points, it is evident that the email verification process is a well-rounded procedure that aims at eliminating every possible email ID that is invalid. It monumentally changes the way in which a business’s email marketing strategy plays out and aids in garnering more business to the establishment.