The importance of email verification in your digital customer journey

Email validation can reduce bounce rates by 90%, while just a 1% increase in unverified email addresses in your database can cause your email deliverability to drop by 10% - a staggering impact when you consider the comparatively small percentage of bad data fed into your system.

It’s reported that only 10% of email addresses collected are accurate. When you verify email addresses, the positives are endless: your email marketing is more effective, fraud prevention is improved, and the ability to protect your sender reputation increases.

In this blog, we’ll be diving deeper into why email verification is a valuable tool for enhancing any digital customer journey.

Help to eliminate hard bounces

Hard bounces happen when an email address is no longer in existence - or was never a real address. It is not uncommon for some customers to enter fictitious email addresses into form-fills to stop a company from spamming them with deals, or to try to take advantage of a promotional offer only available to new customers.

Marketing Week states that 60% of consumers intentionally provide incorrect information when submitting their personal details online, and a further 10% of emails addresses entered into checkouts, sign up forms and internal systems are invalid.

By using email verification software, you can prevent costly errors like these from ever happening. Domains are checked at point of entry, and if they’re unverified or listed as invalid, they won’t be admitted into your database. Using double opt-in, you can go one step further than just email verification and ask your customers to verify their email via their inbox.

Although this isn’t required for data compliance laws, it is best practice, and helps to further eliminate hard bounces from email inboxes.

Reduce spam complaints

Best practice dictates that for every 5, 000 emails sent out, you should receive less than five spam complaints.

If users are entering incorrect or false email addresses to take advantage of a new customer offer or signing up partners or family members without their permission, it can result in spam complaints that put the reputation of your organization at jeopardy. As we’ve already mentioned, using double opt-in practices would help to mitigate this - but what about keeping your legitimate email list happy?

Finding out a customer’s preference is important when signing them up for correspondence, loyalty programs, etc. - you do not want to unintentionally fill their inbox with adverts that have nothing to do with them or their interests. Similarly, instances of repeat comms to the same customers can drive them away from your sign-up lists rather than hammering your message home.

Make sure you have a marketing strategy outlined and a user flow for email correspondence - and make sure there’s always an opt-out link at the end of every email to increase their confidence in the validity and propriety of your business.

Prevent blacklisting

Blacklisting stops your emails from reaching desired recipients and is a surefire way to decimate any email database, as any emails from blacklisted IP addresses will show as spam and be prevented entry to inboxes.

The way to stop this from happening is to make sure you’re only sending out emails to verified addresses, else you’ll be marked as spam and eventually blacklisted. You should clean your email address lists regularly using a batch email validation tool to identify old or incorrect email addresses and remove them before your next campaign.

With real-time email address verification, you can validate each newly acquired email address, preventing typos and fake accounts from creating additional unwanted hard bounces.

Your business can also benefit from regularly reviewing and removing unengaged subscribers from your mailing lists. Uninterested users become outdated customer profiles - if a user hasn’t opened your emails in the past three months, you should remove them from your list to reduce the risk of spam complaints and hard bounces, which can eventually lead to blacklisting.

Simplify the Process with Loqate’s Email Validation

Check and verify email addresses in real time to prevent bogus email registration, and maintain a clean, accurate email database of customers.

Loqate’s email validation tool helps remove the need to use CAPTCHA, a preventative measure that can be frustrating for customers. By verifying email addresses in real time via our API, you can ensure you are only collecting real email addresses from real customers.

Aside from ensuring your database is accurate, it also reduces CRM costs for unnecessary contacts while improving email marketing performance. Loqate’s API integrates seamlessly into your contact forms, offering 24/7 validation whenever a customer enters their email address.