Email marketing has transformed how we do business and it has been recognised as the technology that has had the greatest impact on how we work over the past ten years. Email marketing also is vastly more effective at acquiring new customers than social media – almost 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.
However, on the average contact list around 60% of emails are inactive. This means that less than half of your contacts are probably receiving your communication and have a chance of opening it.
Email also has over 3 times the number of user accounts compared to Facebook and Twitter combined – around 2.9 billion. Here is a link to an awesome infographic on email marketing statistics.
What I find amazing though is how many forms and checkouts don’t use real-time validation to improve data quality at source. This is a false economy as ‘Donald.Duck@outlook.com’ is unlikely to become a valuable long-term prospect.
1. Improve how you gather, manage and clean your email addresses:
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Review your sign-up and email capture forms to ensure that if possible you have real-time validation integrated into the process and consider asking new customers to confirm their email address via a welcome email. This will almost certainly reduce the number of sign-ups you get but you have to question the intent of those visitors who try to register with bogus or inactive email addresses.
It is better to start a relationship with a customer on even terms rather than allow people to take advantage of a poorly implemented customer contact form. Otherwise you may also be opening yourself up to potential fraudulent activity that could cost you more than the price of a validation solution.
You should also consider regularly removing customers you have not opened emails and dormant customers of over 3 to 6 months to further improve your contact database. For more seasonal businesses you might want to extend this to a longer period if you have evidence to support this. You can view 13 email cleansing and verification solutions in a separate post.
2. Segment and prioritise your customers to improve targeting and response rates:
Source: Freeimages.comTry to consolidate all the data you collect from customers into a database so that you can begin to use it for email marketing. This will allow you to improve the quality of your contact database and segment your customers according to value and needs so that you can begin to target customers with more relevant and timely communications. This should allow you to improve open-rates significantly. Providers like Segment.com can assist you with this process.
3. Set up transactional & event-based emails:
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Customers are most engaged when they complete a transaction on your site and so this is an ideal time to contact them with an email. Setting up transactional emails to confirm a customer initiated activity provides a great opportunity to deepen the relationship by including relevant content, such as cross-sell or up-sell messages and/or promotional offers.
Source: Airbnb.com
For customers who register with you or meet other criteria (e.g. abandon basket) it is important to set up automated email cycles to deliver relevant and timely messages to provide revenue generating opportunities. You can use solutions such as GetResponse to create automated transactional and event driven email campaigns.
GetResponse allows you to establish event-based email cycles triggered by actions such as opens and clicks, change in contact preferences, birthday or other important dates, contact sign-up or another email cycle. This means you can set up email cycles that are adjusted for your audience profile and ensure they are received at the optimal moment in your customer’s journey.
4. Mobile optimisation is Critical:
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According to statistics from the US Consumer Device Preference report almost three quarters (66%) of emails in the US are opened on smartphones and tablets. This means email marketing is especially good at reaching mobile customers and so content needs to be fully optimised for small screens. Most users who view an email on mobile will delete it if the email doesn’t look good on their mobile device.
Don’t assume your customers have perfect eyesight and check your emails on a real phone rather than an emulator. From a consumer’s perspective email marketing has the advantage over SMS texting as sometimes texting can result in a charge to the recipient.
Before embarking on email campaigns it is a good idea to consider all of these strategies as otherwise there is a danger your email campaigns will fail to deliver their expected return on investment. Although it is one of the most effective methods of digital marketing unless you do the necessary preparation work you could be throwing your money down the drain.
An email address checker is essential because email marketing can be one of the most effective ways of acquiring new customers and reactivating existing customers. However, research suggests that on the average contact list around 60% of emails are inactive as email address checker software is not regularly used. So less than half of your contacts may be receiving your communication and have a chance of opening it. This can seriously damage the effectiveness of email campaigns by reducing your conversion rate.
For this reason email address checker software is important to consider when planning your email marketing strategy. It may be a false economy if you don’t invest in real-time solutions to check and verify email addresses when you first capture them.
You should also regularly conduct data cleansing of your lists to maintain the quality of existing customer contact details. Email address checker solutions will normally validate the format of emails, remove duplicates, remove role emails (e.g. sales@), compare against a bounce file, compare against a complainers file and remove disposable emails.
Our recommended email checker solution is Snov.io because it includes a new Chrome extension Email Verifier tool. If compared by price, Snovio extension is cheaper than competitors, whilst maintaining the same level of service and quality.
Here is our full list of the top email address checker solutions:
A web-based email address checker solution that allows you to either drag and drop your list into a window on the site or import it from your email service provider. The site automatically confirms the total number of records and the cost of validation. Brite-Forms is a real-time , secure form protection and validation solution that eliminates mistakes at the point of data entry and helps prevent form spamming. Integration simply requires a snippet of JavaScript to be added to your webpage.
An essential tool for anyone looking for prospective clients and talents. This email finder tool offers a chrome extension that allows users to find email addresses of potential leads directly from LinkedIn. With a 97% success rate, this tool provides triple-verified information that is essential for recruitment and salespeople looking to connect with new prospects. ContactOut offers the most accurate and up-to-date data in the industry, making it the perfect tool for your lead generation needs. ContactOut is a valuable lead generation tool that can help you reach your target market.
A comprehensive suite of email checker software and data management tools including validation, cleansing and data supply solutions. This includes software for email verification, plus phone, address, bank and identity validation. Data8’s software is a comprehensive email checker, with flexible licencing options and easy to integrate APIs for websites, CRM systems and shopping cart platforms.
A purely browser-based email address checker to validate and enhance you data. Aimed at SMEs the service just requires you to upload your contact data file and select the service you require. Neopost estimate that in the UK customer data changes by between 7% to 21% every year and so needs to be regularly cleaned and updated.
A full email address checker and validation service. Offers advanced list cleaning using a 12 stage email verification process to protect your sending reputation by scanning for typos, spam-traps, complainers, disposable emails and more.
Provides a comprehensive range of email address checker and data validation and cleansing solutions. They allow you to capture accurate data via real-time email addresses verification software and also validate email addresses already held in your business databases.
Offers email address checker services and real-time validation as subscribers sign up on your website. They have a single API for integrating with your application and a bulk API for organisations wanting to resell email validation services. UK-based 24/7 customer support team available to answer your queries.
Hunter’s Email Verifier is a reliable tool that helps ensure the validity and deliverability of email addresses. With this tool, users can easily verify email addresses in bulk and identify any incorrect or outdated addresses before sending out cold email campaigns.
The Email Verifier uses advanced algorithms and techniques to detect syntax errors, domain issues, and other potential problems that could affect email deliverability. Additionally, Hunter’s Email Verifier is constantly updated with the latest data, ensuring accurate results every time. By using this tool, businesses can improve their email marketing campaigns’ success rates and avoid wasting time and resources on incorrect email addresses.
Instant and accurate email address checker software and list cleaning Email Verification Plus Hygiene reduces the chances of an email not being delivered and improves email marketing performance. The service will check if the email address is valid or will it bounce and is there any risk to sender reputation in sending an email to the address.
Offers email address checker software, list cleaning and integration of email verification into your application process. Kickbox verifies email addresses using a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol to check it is a known email address. By checking with the would-be recipient’s email server via SMTP, they establish whether a user for a given email address actually exists.
A browser-based solution that requires you to upload your list as either a text file or CSV format to verify and clean up your email list. The solution connects to the mail server to check whether the mailbox exits to reduce bounce rate and costs.
Provides a comprehensive and global range of data capture and validation solutions including email, postal addresses, landlines and mobile numbers. It is easy to install and compatible with Salesforce, SAP applications and Microsoft CRM.
Provides a full range of web-based data capture, cleansing and management solutions with a global reach. They claim to remove 95% of bad emails in your list and help you avoid blacklists and spam folders. They also correct general formatting and syntax errors to turn undeliverable addresses into deliverable ones.
Melissa Data offers a Free trial for their Global Email Cloud Service which provides real-time email mailbox verification, corrects common typographical errors, and standardizes email addresses as they are entered – which eliminates the need for the ‘Confirm email’ field in sign-up forms and checkout.
A budget-Friendly Bulk Email Verification solution. MyEmailVerifier offers an extremely quick, progressed and exact email confirmation administration.
MyEmailVerifier is a main mass email Verifier administration with over 96% deliverability ensure. MyEmailVerifier’s email cleaning procedure wipes out practically 100% of spam, garbage, and invalid email addresses. Their main goal is to support your leads, ensure that your messages are conveyed in the inbox and help you center around producing new business.
MyEmailVerifier’s email address approval administration gives ongoing check API to organizations who depend intensely on email advertising. MyEmailVerifier helps transformations by improving email deliverability to the inbox.
Their easy to understand interface is having any kind of effect with regards to cleaning an email list. Basically, MyEmailVerifier is an email approval device that suits organizations of each size with regards to maintainability and reasonable valuing.
MyEmailVerifier is here to make that conceivable, our approval framework browses and confirms messages at different levels: Email Address Syntax Verifier, Domain/MX Record Checker, Catch-All Detector, Role Account Detector, Improved Yahoo Emails Validation, Free Domain Checker, Greylist Domain Detection, High Performance Real-time API, and Detailed SMTP Response check to ensure the Email is legitimate and live. You can approve your Email list.
Attempt MyEmailVerifier free with 100 email credits on Sign-up. No charge card is required.
Delivers a full range of data capture and cleansing services, including email validation, address, mobile and payment validation. The service verifies the domain and that the mailbox really exists and can receive incoming mail. It also checks the validity of business and personal email addresses, even for free web-mail services such as Hotmail and Gmail. Batch cleanse offers to process your existing address list to remove bogus and mistyped email addresses.
This is a comprehensive email address checker and data validation solution that checks email addresses against a number of different validation criteria including RFC syntax and deep level SMTP testing of user inbox existence. It offers bulk email verification by uploading text csv files and real-time email address verification by integrating the REST API into your application or website.
A free service is available for up to 100 email addresses per day. Pricing plans start at $4 and work on a pay as you go basis, with no timeline or expiry.
Offers a multi-step email address verification and validation system. This includes a syntax check, domain validity, check against database of bounced emails and finally a multiple SMTP-check. This helps to protect sender reputation and increases email delivery rates.
Snovio Email Verifier allows you to verify email address or validate email addresses in bulk as you browse. The tool removes invalid email addresses and reduces bounce rates, so you improve your email marketing conversion rate. It also allows you to verify a list of email addresses in the extension box and you can copy and paste results or get a CSV list from the app.
This is a full service data cleansing company with services including: address verification, email verification, data de-duplication, field standardization and normalization and other custom data cleansing needs. We also offer marketing analytical services including segmentation, lead scoring, building marketing dashboards and other ad-hoc analysis.
Syntax engine identifies invalid email formats, email correction software corrects misspellings and typos, spam trap suppressions, proprietary domain database reviews status of every email domain, mailbox check predicts if emails will bounce, diagnostic codes categorize reasons why emails are bad, and email delivery metrics monitor how old an email is and when it was last opened.
A free email address checker that verifies individual email addresses. Alternatively you can subscribe to their bulk-email address checker at Bulk mail verifier. This is a cloud-based email address checker that removes dead emails, invalid syntax and fake email addresses from your subscriber or email lists.
Real-time email address checker and data verification platform. This includes checking at the server to ensure the username is registered at the domain and using their suppression list. Their suppression list has millions of email addresses that are classified as temporary, high risk or complainers. The service can verify all the major consumer email providers including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and Hotmail. Xverify also offer address verification for the USA and Canada.
100 free verifications available for new customers. Volume discounts apply depending upon total verifications per month.
Conclusion:
Email marketing is an important driver of sales and engagement with visitors and prospects. However, unless you spend time and money on real-time email address verification software and regularly clean your data the effectiveness of your campaigns will suffer. Don’t let this happen as despite the availability of large contact lists quality is still more important than quantity.
Email address checkers are not a luxury, they are essential for any organisation that is serious about email marketing.
