L’email marketing today represents one of the communication and promotion tools most used by Italian companies. The advantage of e-mail marketing is twofold: on the one hand there is the low cost (unlike, for example, sending paper mail) and on the other hand there is the immediacy of the communication itself. But doing email marketing is not a trivial thing to do. There are many aspects to consider if you want to get satisfactory results from an email campaign. The main steps to follow to start doing this type of work are essentially the following:
- Creation of a mailing list (without a list of email addresses it is impossible to talk about email marketing)
- Verify email addresses
- Creation and sending of the message via specific email marketing programs
In this article we want to focus on the second point, that is verify email addresses.
Why is it worth checking email addresses?
Yours mailing lists it may be full of errors, fake and temporary email accounts that could affect yours deliverability that is, on the outcome of sending your email campaigns. If you don’t want to risk your emails being seen as SPAM or rejected due to poor data quality, it is best to consider this verification phase as a crucial phase for your work.
Maybe you don’t know that everyone who sends an email has a “score” or rather a “sender score” (sender score) which represents important information about the “deliverability“. This score (linked to your IP or domain name) helps ISP (internet service provider) to determine whether you are “worthy” of accessing their inbox or whether you should be filtered into the folder spam. The higher your score the better you are REPUTATION. If your score is low you have a bad reputation and your emails will end up in SPAM.
Email verification improves that score (sender score) for the following reasons:
1. Eliminate hard bounces (email bounces)
A high bounce rate, i.e. a high percentage of non-existent emails in the list, is one of the main reasons why your sender score may be low. These “bounces” occur primarily because the email address does not exist more. Maybe they are email addresses that never existed or maybe they are accounts that once existed and were then discontinued.
It’s good practice.”clean email list” on a quarterly basis to identify old email addresses and remove them before the next campaign. It is also recommended to validate each newly acquired email address to avoid typos and fictitious accounts.
2. Reduces Spam reports
In an ideal world, the spam complaint rate should be less than 0.1%, meaning for every 5,000 email messages sent you should have fewer than five spam reports. To achieve this result you need to send quality content to interested users, but even then some spam complaints could arrive. Most of those spam reports come from those temporary email accounts, made by users precisely to avoid receiving too many emails. An email verification software (like the one we indicate below) that can identify and remove such temporary addresses will therefore also help you reduce spam reports.
3. Avoid Blacklists
If you end up in “blacklist” your messages will not be accepted by many servers. Some blacklists are more powerful than others, and some blacklists automatically delete you after a certain period of time.
Practicing good email cleanliness and acquiring data from the right sources is key to minimizing the risk of ending up on the blacklist. Please note that it is advisable to monitor your email IPs daily to identify if they are being “banned” so you can try to resolve the issue before sending the new newsletter.
Best Software to Verify Email Addresses
Now that you know how important it is verify email addresses Let’s try to understand which program to use to do this job. There are dozens of email verification programs online but below we want to highlight one that stands out for its ease of use and affordable price. We’re talking about the program Globo Email Verifier.
This software is extremely simple because the only thing you will have to do is import the list of email addresses and click on VERIFY. There are no parameters to set or addresses to manually assign valid or invalid. It also carries out a complete verification of email addresses, in fact it carries out 5 separate checks simultaneously:
- Removes any duplicate emails from the list
- Detect and delete email addresses with incorrect syntax
- Remove temporary email addresses or spam traps
- Verify the existence of the email address domain
- Perform SMTP verification of your email account
At the end of these 5 checks the program says whether an address is VALID or INVALID.
Here’s how it works Globo Email Verifier. First download and install the program on your Windows PC:
Install and launch the program. You will see this main screen:
If you want the interface in Italian, click on SETTINGS and select Italian as the language. In any case, even if you leave the program in English, you will have no difficulty using it.
The first thing to do is click on IMPORT EMAILS and select the list with your email addresses. You can select CSV, EXCEL or TXT files. If by chance the list contains duplicates the program will automatically remove them and warn you.
After importing the list, a message will appear on which you will have to click OK to proceed:
After clicking OK, all the addresses to be verified will appear in the program:
At this point click on the button at the top VERIFY (or on the “Start” arrow) and the program will start carrying out all 5 checks mentioned above. For each address it will then appear whether it is valid or invalid. Under the “log” column, the technical details of the verification carried out will appear:
The software can verify approximately 1000 email addresses every 10-15 minutes, so you can also upload lists of tens of thousands of email addresses and the software will verify all the addresses in a few hours.
Once the verification is complete, click on the menu at the top FILTERS if you want to view only valid or invalid emails. Finally access the section EXPORT and from here you can export and save, for example, only valid emails in a new file (Excel or CSV)
That’s it, check done. Now you will certainly have a bigger list in your hands CLEAN and ready to use for your newsletters or email campaigns.
NB: Globo Email Verifier is available in a free demo version which allows you to verify a maximum of 100 addresses at a time. If you don’t want this limit you can purchase the FULL license without limitations only €19 + VAT from this link. Similar programs on the market have much higher costs (even more than 50 euros)
How to Verify Email Addresses “Manually”
Without using software it is also possible to try to clean your mailing list manually. Obviously the manual process could take a long time if there are many email addresses to verify. However, here are the main checks that can be performed to determine the validity of an email address.
- Format check: Check if the email address has a valid format. An email address should contain a username followed by an @ and then the domain. For example, “[email protected]“. Make sure the email address you are verifying has this basic structure.
- Sending a verification email: You can send a verification email to the address you want to verify. The email may contain a link or special code that the recipient must click or enter to confirm the email address. If the user receives and confirms the verification email, the email address is likely valid.
- Domain Verification: Check whether the email address domain actually exists. You can do this by looking up the IP address associated with the domain and seeing if it is active and matches the email address. There are several online tools that can help you with this check.
- Typographical error detection: If you’re trying to verify a large list of email addresses, you can use email address validation tools or libraries that check for common typographical errors. These tools can find email addresses with typos, missing characters, or invalid characters.
- Checking account existence: You can verify whether the email address actually exists by sending a test email or by searching for information on the account associated with that address. For example, you can search for the name of the user associated with that email address online or contact the person directly to confirm the validity of the address.
