Email verification benefits go beyond just improving your email deliverability. Validation protects your sender reputation, reduces email bounce to nearly zero, and maximizes your marketing ROI.
By cleaning your list, you ensure that your emails reach real, active recipients.
An unverified list can lead to poor engagement and potential blacklisting. Email verification solves these issues by ensuring only valid addresses remain, helping you get the most out of every campaign.
In this post, we’ll explore the key benefits of email verification and why it’s a must for successful email marketing. Let’s get started!
What is email verification
Email verification is a process that checks whether an email address is valid. Also known as email validation, email checking, or email testing, it separate out addresses that are unsafe to deliver.
An advanced email checker can also tell you whether the email address is high quality. That will enable you to decide if you should send an email to that address.
The biggest advantage of email verification is that you can spot and prevent an issue before it reaches the email service provider. Otherwise, the email ecosystem would suspect you of spamming people.
Email verification benefits
Here is a short video on email verification benefits, based on the details in this post:
Prefer reading a shorter version? Here’s our Slideshare presentation.
If you thought email verification helps you to only reduce email bounces, think again. Here are the various benefits of email verification, updated for 2022:
1. Ascertains accuracy of your data
High-quality data is key to success in digital marketing. The results of validating a mailing list will tell you about the quality of your data. If the quality is high, you know you’re on the right track.
If, on the other hand, you see a large number of undeliverable or incorrect addresses, you know there’s a need to improve things.
2. Reduces email bounces
Email bounce rate refers to the percentage of emails whose address was not found and were returned to the sender. The general rule is keep your bounce rate below 2%; anything above 3% is considered critical.
A bounce rate that’s higher than makes you look like a spammer. Your email service provider begins suspecting you. As part of punishment, some of your valid emails might be delivered to the spam folder of your recipients.
By cleaning your email list, you don’t just reduce email bounces to nearly zero. You also improve your compliance and follow best practices.
3. Saves money
Storing your emails addresses and sending out emails both cost you money.
Email list cleaning tells you which all emails aren’t safe to send. With that report, you can know which address to cull from the list. Your mailing list will shrink for sure, but that also means savings. To those who’re wondering why email verification is important, the answer is that because you’re sending emails to fewer people, the costs associated with storing and sending out emails go down.
4. Shows accurate campaign insights
Sending emails to invalid addresses makes it hard to trust your analytics. But once your mailing list is cleaned, you’ll have valid, deliverable email addresses. This means all recipient actions—like opens, clicks, and conversions—are accurate for analysis.
For example, if a particular email has a low click-through rate (CTR), you can be sure that it’s due to the content or offer, not undeliverable or inactive addresses. Email verification ensures that every response is genuine, giving you reliable data to refine your email marketing strategy.
5. Improves customer engagement
When email validation removes invalid, inactive, or disposable email addresses, you’re left with a list of real, engaged recipients. This provides you with a more accurate understanding of your subscribers’ preferences and interests.
For example, if you notice a particular offer generates more clicks, you can be confident that it’s resonating with your audience. By tailoring future emails based on these genuine responses, you can create content that aligns with their needs and increases engagement. The more relevant your emails are to your audience, the more likely they are to engage with them, making email verification a key tool for boosting engagement.
6. Increases campaign ROI
Imagine sending fewer but perfectly targeted emails that not only reach your ideal audience but also engage them effectively. By cleaning and verifying your email list, you ensure that each email lands in the inbox of an active, interested recipient, minimizing waste and maximizing impact.
This precision in targeting reduces expenses related to non-existent or inactive subscribers, leading to more efficient use of your marketing resources. With costs lowered and revenue likely to increase, every dollar you invest delivers a higher return, ultimately maximizing your campaign’s ROI.
7. Saves efforts in fixing bounces
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to launch an email campaign without the hassle of managing bounces?
By using a clean, verified email list, you prevent common deliverability issues that can harm your email marketing efforts.
Without email verification, undeliverable emails trigger bounces as soon as you send your campaign. If left unchecked, these bounces can damage your sender reputation.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may start pushing your emails into recipients’ spam folders—affecting not just inactive users but also your most engaged subscribers. And once your emails end up in the spam folder, it’s game over—most recipients won’t check it, and you risk dropping off their radar entirely.
If you’re managing these issues manually, you’ll need to set up complex systems to handle bounces or rely on your Email Service Provider (ESP) to move bounced addresses to a suppression list. Should the number of bounces exceed limits set by the ESP, you could face warnings or even risk being banned.
Email verification eliminates these risks by removing undeliverable addresses before your campaign starts. This proactive approach drastically reduces hard bounces, safeguards your sender reputation, and ensures your emails land in inboxes—not spam folders. While avoiding bounce management may seem like a small detail, it plays a crucial role in maintaining the success of your overall marketing strategy.
8. Prevents deliverability issues
When you ignore deliverability issues caused by undeliverable emails, ISPs begin to see you as a potential spammer. To protect their users, they push more of your emails into spam folders.
The result? Even your most engaged recipients may stop seeing your emails—not because they don’t want to, but because your messages are landing in their spam folders, and who checks those? Eventually, you drop off their radar, and your email marketing efforts lose effectiveness.
To avoid this, start validating your email list to catch invalid addresses, typos, and spam traps.
Regular email verification improves deliverability by reducing bounces and maintaining a good sender reputation. Paired with relevant, high-quality content, you’ll ensure that your emails land in the inbox, where they belong.
9. Protects Sender Reputation
You’ve been sending out emails for some time and as a result you’ve created a kind of reputation among ISPs, ESPs and so on.
This reputation is commonly known as sender reputation. It’s a score or a number that represents the quality of the sender’s IP address.
It is built on many factors, like how often recipients flag your email as spam or what proportion of your outgoing email bounces back.
Using a cleaned email list ensures you aren’t sending out emails to any address that will reject your email, causing bounces. If you’ve ever wondered why verify email addresses, the answer is this: it helps protect your sender reputation.
10. Provides a reliable database to your sales teams
The effectiveness of engagement your sales teams can nurture relies heavily on the accuracy of your email list. Without a verified list, your sales team may be sending messages to invalid addresses, leading to inaccurate metrics and wasted efforts.
A verified email list eliminates this problem by ensuring that all provided addresses are valid and active. This means that your sales team can work with accurate data, resulting in more effective and efficient outreach. Consequently, the insights gained will be reliable, helping your sales efforts to be more targeted and successful.
11. Saves you from punishments and fines
When you use the services of an ESP, you are their customer, so they should be taking good care of you, right? Sure. But they also expect you to maintain security and act responsibly. That means they won’t tolerate your campaigns returning a large number of bounces and complaints.
But what happens if you can’t minimize bounces and complaints? Depending on the scale and frequency of the issues, your ESP could start by warning you.
If the problem persists, they may refuse to deliver your emails or even blacklist your account entirely. This happens because high rates of hard bounces harm not just your reputation but also the ESP’s deliverability for other clients. In severe cases, you could even face financial penalties for damages.
One of the key advantages of email verification is that it ensures you maintain list hygiene, reducing hard bounces to near zero and improving the security of your email marketing. It also helps authenticate your email lists, boosting trust with both your ESP and recipients.
12. Helps you evaluate email collection methods
If you’re like most other marketers, you collect email addresses from multiple sources. People may have signed up for a free e-book, a free email course, a free trial of your product, … Or you might be using email marketing for events you have lined up. And for each sign up, you want to validate the email address.
One of the best outcomes of email verification is that it tells you how reliable your email collection methods are. You might, for instance, find email addresses collected for a free webinar are high quality as compared to, say, signups for a newsletter.
This insight gives you a wonderful opportunity to improve and fine-tune your email collection methods.
13. Lowers spam complaints
One of the benefits of email verification is that it reduces spam complaints. This could be particularly true for role-addresses (addresses like sales@, support@ etc). If you send out emails without email verification, some of your emails could reach role-addresses on your list.
Role-addresses are often shared by multiple people on the same team. You have no idea which individual, out of the team, subscribed to your mailing list. However, the rest of the people on the team wouldn’t know someone used the address to sign up for your e-newsletter. As a result, one of them is going to report you as a spammer.
Bodies like Spamhaus maintain blocklists of potential spammers. If you’ve ever checked how to get your IP removed from Spamhaus blocklist, you probably know it’s neither swift nor easy. Which is exactly why you want to be maintain a clean list and thus ensure you never get into the blocklist in the first place.
14. Keeps your email list updated
Annually, an estimated 22% to 30% of email addresses die and turn invalid.
Put differently, about 1 in every 3 email addresses on your subscription list will cease to exist every year. You can very well imagine the price of storing and emailing to addresses that are no longer valid. Email verification ensures your list is updated and all emails on your mailing list are safe and deliverable.
That gives you the confidence that all efforts of targeting these recipients are in the right direction and that you aren’t wasting a single penny on addresses that expired months ago.
15. Safeguards against other legal issues
The following example (names changed) shows you GDPR and CCPA aren’t the only legal challenges.
Ms Sarah Nice (email sarahn729 [at] somefreemail [dot] com) made a purchase from the ecommerce store CarelessOnline Inc last week. By mistake, she keyed in a non-existent email sarahn927 [at] somefreemail [dot] com as her address. CarelessOnline Inc began sending emails with Ms Nice’s name, address, and purchase details to this email id. Naturally these emails bounced, but CarelessOnline Inc didn’t notice.
Soon, Ms Janice Fraud created the address sarahn927 [at] somefreemail [dot] com. Now Ms Fraud begins to receive emails that were meant to reach Ms Nice – all complete with name, address, purchase details and all that.
The less unfortunate thing that could happen is that Ms Fraud reports these emails as spam. That’d hurt CarelessOnline Inc’s sender reputation. The bigger risk is that Ms Fraud will misuse this information in a way that hurts Ms Nice. And when Ms Nice notices the damages, she’ll likely drag CarelessOnline Inc to court.
Had CarelessOnline Inc verified the email address immediately upon registration, things would have been different. They would have stopped sending further emails, protecting Ms Nice and stopping CarelessOnline Inc from getting into an avoidable legal mess.
Infographic on email verification benefits
Below is an infographic on the benefits of email verification:
Conclusion
From cost saving to better analytics, from a major reduction in email bounces to fewer complaints, email verification benefits are multiple and meaningful. Successful marketers know this and always make sure they use cleaned lists.
At QuickEmailVerification, 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.
