Cleaning Your Email List: Why Email Verification is the First Step
If you assume email marketing as a train, then email addresses are the tracks that will lead your emails to the right stations. Before starting the journey, a good driver will ensure that the tracks are clean and lead to the right place. So putting extra effort into email list cleaning before an email campaign is important. Successful landing of emails to the inboxes of your audience requires a clean email list. Email verification maintains email list hygiene and helps achieve increased subscriber engagement and reduced unsubscribe rates. Let us look at email list cleaning closely to understand why it is the first step of any email campaign.
What is Email List Cleaning
The 3 major parts of email verification are – real-time email verification, existing email list cleaning, and automated cleaning of email IDs. Among these, email list cleaning is a major part of email verification.
There are several types of invalid emails, like temporary emails, emails with typo mistakes, old and obsolete emails, and unsubscribed emails. Temporary emails have a life of one day or one week, after which they will become invalid email IDs. On the other hand, very old email IDs are mostly obsolete, so it is important to verify whether they are still in use. Email verification service providers check the whole list and then remove these invalid emails to provide a clean email list.
Why Email List Verification is The First Step
We all acknowledge that a proper address is needed to deliver a physical letter to the right person. In an email campaign, the first goal is to deliver emails to the inbox and not bounce back. Just like physical letters, emails also need the right email addresses. The email verification process removes invalid emails from the list to ensure the optimum deliverability of your emails to the targeted audience. It not only minimizes the bounce rate but also increases the subscriber engagement. An email marketing expert knows the significance of email list cleaning, so they make it the first step of email marketing. The benefits of the email list cleaning process are mentioned here.
Benefits Of Email List Cleaning
Improved Deliverability
A list containing invalid emails will increase the bounce rate. On the other hand, using a clean email list for your email campaign will ensure most emails end up in the inboxes. A clean email list will reduce email bounce and increase deliverability.
Sender Reputation Protection
The email list hygiene ensures a lesser bounce rate, which helps maintain the sender’s reputation. A higher bounce rate alerts the Internet Service Provider about the sender and is often marked as a spammer by ISPs. Email list cleaning can help you to avoid being flagged as a spammer.
Cost Effective
The price you pay for any email campaign depends upon the number of emails sent irrespective of the deliverability. So you pay for the emails that bounce back or get into the spam folder. To avoid this extra cost and enhance effective communication, you should opt for email verification before planning a campaign.
Better Engagement
The ultimate object of any email campaign is to gain subscriber engagement. With better email deliverability, the chances of opening an email and taking action on it also increase. It also increases the number of subscribers and eventually leads to better subscriber engagement.
Optimized ROI
The above-mentioned points explain that a clean email list will help your emails reach the inboxes of targeted audiences. Better deliverability leads to better engagement of audiences and better engagement ensures optimum return on investment.
Reduced Unsubscribe Rate
The email list cleaning process includes identifying the unsubscribe requests and eliminating those opt-out emails from the list. This is how marketers make sure they send the emails only to those who have opted in. This action ensures that your campaign doesn’t disturb non-interested people and reduces the unsubscribe rate.
More Accurate Analysis
The email campaign analytics may be distorted if the email IDs in your email list are invalid or inactive. By obtaining reliable data through email verification, you may get proper analytics on the campaign results.
Drawbacks Of Email Verification
email verification has no specific drawbacks as such. However, choosing the wrong email verification service provider may incur some disturbance in achieving your campaign goal.
Initial Cost
You may need to spend some extra penny but this will covered up once you achieve better ROI.
Third-Party Dependency
The email verification service provider is a third party for sure but they are professional and expert. The businesses that use professional help to grow, get more success than the ones that don’t use experts’ help.
Conclusion
Email list cleaning is necessary for maintaining email list hygiene. Email marketing experts say that email list cleaning is the first step of any email campaign that will save time and money. If you can eliminate invalid emails from your list before you start shooting emails, you will achieve better subscriber engagement and ROI in the long term.
FAQ
A: The email lists generally contain a large number of data. If we do it manually it will take too long to clean and there will not be any assurance of accuracy. On the other hand, the email verification service providers are professional and equipped with automation to perform the task very quickly and accurately. It will save the productive time of your manpower.
A: Email Verification helps curate an email list consisting of valid email addresses. By verifying your email list it ensures maximum deliverability. It also helps reduce bounce rates, protect your sender’s reputation, and increase the chances of your emails reaching engaged and active subscribers.
A: There are no such rules for the email list cleaning. However, cleaning at regular intervals is always good for your email list hygiene. If you do not find any suitable automated cleaning plan, then at least clean the email list before the email campaign.
A: Return on investment of any campaign calculated by checking a few metrics like email deliverability, email open rate, email click-through rate, and conversion rates. A clean email list ensures all the email IDs in the list are active and capable of receiving your email. It also means the email deliverability rates will be high. Delivered email has a chance to open and click through it. This helps increase the conversion rate and that means better ROI. The opposite may happen if you do not clean your email list before the campaign.
A: The initial cost of using verification services, the time needed to check huge lists, and the possibility of removing members who may still be interested but haven’t participated recently are some potential drawbacks. There can also be a reliance on outside services for the verification procedure.