How Does an Email Verifier Solution Works?

Is email dead? According to McKinsey Consulting, there was indeed a significant 20% decline in email usage between 2008 and 2012 which was caused by the growth of popularity of social networks, instant messaging and mobile messaging apps. And while this has caused marketers across industries to shift their budgets to other mediums and channels, including social media and display, email has again started to grow and account for a far greater share of acquired customers than social media. This share is nearly 40 times larger than that of Facebook and Twitter combined.

And according to the same research, email remains a critical part of the marketer´s toolkit with 91% of all customers still reporting to use email on a daily basis. What is more, email conversion rates to purchase are estimated to be at least three times larger than those of social media and have average order values estimated to be 17 percent higher via email than social media.

In this blog, we explain in detail what email verifier solutions are, how they work and what are their benefits.

What Is an Email Verifier Solution?

Everything important in business needs to be adequately maintained for effective long-term operations. This includes relationships with customers, employees, and partners as well as IT systems and equipment. The same rings true for email recipient data that requires a tune-up every now and then-mostly to ensure that there is a "real" individual at the other end of the address.

You won't be able to gain the benefits of a solid mailing list such as higher opening rates, better customer retention, phishing prevention, and superior ROI if you fail to care for it regularly. Actually, quite the opposite is likely to happen should your lists contain loads of fake and inactive email addresses capable of hurting your deliverability statistics and ruining your reputation with email service providers.

This is where email verification as a service can come in handy. Let us explain. Email verification is the process wherein an email address is validated to check if it is still active without having to send it a message. Many users find this practice highly useful because it helps in reducing both the soft and hard bounce rates from e-mail campaigns while protecting their outgoing mail server's reputation.

Email verification is the process wherein an email address is validated to check if it is still active without having to send it a message. Many users find this practice highly useful because it helps in reducing both the soft and hard bounce rates from e-mail campaigns while protecting their outgoing mail server's reputation.

An email verification service can be used to perform such validation in bulk to save time and manual efforts with API integration, enabling to analyze entire mailing lists automatedly so that fake signups and invalid details are prevented.

An email verification API can guarantee that your emails are being delivered to active inboxes to avoid being penalized. E-mail campaigns take a lot of effort to accomplish, which is why it's essential to make sure that your messages are reaching their intended recipients. By sending communications to verified audiences, you can greatly improve your inbox deliverability score, which is crucial to become a trusted sender.

In-form email verification allows website owners to highlight typographical errors to users during the signup stage. This can significantly lower the amount of wrong information being submitted by letting recipients know that there is something wrong with their details. Doing so not only makes the overall registration process better, but it also secures accurate user data for your mailing lists.

After you have verified your email data, you can start getting rid of accounts that aren't relevant to your goals. Even if you end up with a smaller mailing list, you'll still have better engagement rates overall. Constantly delivering emails to the proper addresses can improve the open and click-through statistics for your campaigns. What's more, you can use email verification to banish email addresses and providers abusing your freemium plans that way protecting your revenues and avoiding spending server resources on non-converting end users.

Why Email Verification Is Important?

There are many different reasons why marketers and other business professionals should use email verification tools to verify their email address lists before using them in their campaigns. Some reasons are technical and others are related to human factors.

On the list below, we list some of the most common reasons why email list verification is important for contacts:

1. Contact Has Changed Their Email Provider or Service

The reason why we are starting the list with this reason is because it is the most common one. Here is an example which you can probably relate to: a person on your contact list has been using a specific email service provider, usually a local provider, and then switched onto using Microsoft Outlook, or vice versa. One other common situation is when a person on your contact lists makes a switch from one popular inbox provider to another. Here, although the email address is still the same, the message sent to it will never be read nor delivered.

2. Contact Has Changed Their Email ID

This reason is also one that is very common. It occurs when a person on your contact list continues using their current email service provider but switches onto using a different account with a different email address. In practice, this looks like a person has been using a unverified@finder.io and then one day starts using verified@finder.io.

3. Contact Has a New Position at Their Company

A lot of companies, especially those bigger ones, have an internal practice that employees have email addresses that are depended on their position. In other words, those employees that work on entry position may have different email addresses than those that are mid-level and C-level. As a consequence, all persons that switch from one position to another will have their email changed and their old email address will not work anymore. For instance, if you are emailing a person who had a managerial role but, in the meantime, switched to a C-level position, you will not be able to reach him with your e-mail campaign without having their new email address.

4. Contact Has a New Position at a Different Company

Times when a person worked at the same position or company their entire life have long passed. One of the most frequent reasons why email messages end up undelivered, especially when talking about B2B emails, is that most employees switch companies every couple of years. When an employee leaves a company, their email address often becomes unavailable or is redirected to another employee that you probably don´t want to reach or that employee does not want to hear from you at all.

5. Contact´s Company Is Out of Business

Same as with employees, companies change. They change names, they become acquired by another company or they simply disappear because they failed in finding their product-market fit or customers failed to find the value in their offering. When any of these reasons happen, it results in their old domain being unreachable. Usually, this is most often because the company is out of business and these email addresses should be filtered out.

6. Contact´S Email Provider Is Out of Business or Down

Same as with any other company, email providers can also go out of business. Additionally, they can experience technical difficulties that render their services temporarily unavailable. Last month, Google´s Gmail went down leaving many users unable to use their emails. What´s more, the outage resulted in many emails bouncing back and other error messages. Rishi Iyengar from CNN Business reported that “some of the affected users were able to access Gmail, but were seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior.”

How Does an Email Verifier Solution Works?

Although email verifiers are tools that have been on the market for some time and most marketers have heard, if not used, them in their e-mail marketing campaigns, many of them do not actually know the actual technical aspects about them and how they actually do what they do.

The actual process of validating an email address consists of three steps:

1. Checking the Syntax

This is the first step of email validation and is the same for all email verification tools, online and offline ones. The reason why syntax check is important is because it ensures that the email address is spelled correctly and that it does not contain any characters (such as spaces and commas) and that it contains all the necessary characters (@s, dots and domain names), as well as to ensure that they are in the right place.

2. Checking the Domain

The second step of an email verification process is the actual verification of the domain name. The process of checking the domain is performed to ensure that the domain listed in the email address exists in the first place. Domain check also ensures that the domain is registered and is working properly on the hosting domain.

3. Email Pinging

The third, last, and the most complicated step of the email verification process is email ping. Email ping is a technical procedure where the email verification tools pings the actual email address that is being verified using an EHLO message which is an Extended Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (ESMTP). It is a command sent by the tool to identify itself when connecting to another email server to start the process of sending an email message. The receiving server response will confirm that the email address which is being verified actually exists on the server and that it is active.

Some email verification tools provide their users with all or just some of the verification steps mentioned above. Finder.io uses state of the art verification methods and protocols in order to ensure its users the highest possible validation rate.

Conclusion

Email deliverability and their open rates are two important factors of every email marketing campaign. Both of these metrics have a significant impact on the overall email marketing performance. Verification of email addresses is an important step in improving both email deliverability and building a great reputation with your customers which eventually boosts your overall marketing performance.

From cost saving to better analytics, from a major reduction in email bounces to fewer complaints, email verifier solutions benefits are multiple and meaningful. Successful marketers know this and always make sure they use cleaned lists. At Finder.io, we provide our customers with a detailed breakdown of the results of email verification. This helps them separate out safe to send email addresses from undeliverable, risky or unknown addresses. As a result, they are able to run campaigns that bring better results.

Finder.io is an easy to use email verifier solution specifically designed for email marketers and e-mail marketing companies to clean their e-mail list. Finder.io will help you best to reduce bounce rate, avoid getting blacklisted or labeled as 'spammer' by identifying bad, undeliverable, stale or fraudulent emails from your email database.

Finder.io is an email checker and validation solution that helps businesses search and verify email addresses in real-time. It enables employees to connect with targeted audiences, create verified email list and handle sales prospecting operations on a unified platform.

Professionals can use the application to generate leads and find prospects by searching first/last and business domain names. Finder.io allows organizations to import or export email list in bulk, follow-up with prospects and gain insights into audience activities through custom reports.

Here at Finder.io, we help you protect your sender reputation by verifying your email marketing lists. The better your reputation is, the higher your deliverability will be. And the higher your deliverability is, the higher your revenue generating potential will be. We filter out all invalid and risky email addresses from your email marketing lists and maximize your email marketing potential. Clean your lists with Finder.io.