Email becomes a crucial channel of contact for fostering development and brand recognition. If you have a list of email addresses, your sales team can get a steady flow of leads. But those leads have to be right, or else you’ll have a lot of trouble.
We’ll discuss email verification in this piece, including what it is, why it’s important, and best practices. So, your outbound sales process will keep running smoothly, leading to more money coming in.
What does email confirmation mean?
Email verification is a simple idea that is also called email validation. It’s discovering if an email address is real, fake, or no longer in use. This can lower the rates of both hard and soft bounces.
What makes email confirmation crucial for outbound sales?
There are several justifications for email list verification; however, the following are the most crucial ones:
Marketing campaigns
To get relevant open, click-through, and conversion rates, you must accurately determine the number of users on your list.
Sender credibility
Bounced emails ultimately make it more difficult for prospects to get your communications.
Optimize time
The time available to your outbound sales team is limited. Make sure that they are using it to talk to real prospects.
We now understand the need for an email verification for your sales efforts.
Grammar and spelling
Verifying email syntax is the first stage in the verification process. The syntax of an email refers to the creation order.
For example, a service that checks email addresses will do so across the major email service providers. If a Yahoo email address starts with a number, it signifies phony.
The next thing we do is the format. There are a lot of complicated rules about what can and can’t be in email address usernames. This needs to run quickly through thousands of formulas, which can’t be done by hand in a reasonable amount of time.
The server’s confirmation
After the format and syntax, the server will be checked by a good verification service. It checks the DNS records for emails’ domain names. For example, the domain of [email protected] is xyz.com. The service will ensure that the domain is set up to get emails.
Having a full inbox is another thing that can cause a message to bounce. Even though it doesn’t happen as often as it used to because most providers now offer free large storage options, it still does. Email verification should check to see if inboxes are full and, if they are, get rid of the spam.
This is a very important part. Even if your email bounces because the person you sent it to has a full inbox on their valid domain name, it will hurt your reputation as a sender.
Inbox validation
For mailbox validation, an SMTP mailbox server is contacted to see if the mailbox exists. If it does exist, it can get emails.
The email address will get an EHLO message and wait for a reply. When it gets a reply, it knows that the email address is real and marks it as “active.”
This step can take a few seconds or a few minutes, depending on how big your mailing list is and whether or not the people on it have complicated anti-spam systems that slow down the process.
Double checks
It’s great to have a confirmed email address that is active and ready to receive emails. But the last thing you want is for the same prospect to get more than one copy of the same email from your outbound sales reps.
First, it’s annoying; if it keeps happening, it can be a problem. Even though a single duplicate email might not turn away potential customers, you could end up in the spam filter if you send out duplicate emails every day or every week. Plus, it doesn’t look very professional.
This makes it clear that you need to check your database for entries that have already been made.
Account checks
As their name implies, role accounts are addresses that a business employs for a certain position or department. These include billing@, admin@, and support@.
People are on your list of prospects. Even though they work in the same department, it still comes down to one or more people. Sending outbound emails to role accounts is thus a bad idea.
The email address may change hands fast or even have many users, even if it turns out that your decision-maker mostly uses one of these role accounts. This can make people confused or even cause them to delete emails. So, when verifying, check against role accounts and only market to users with certain names.
You can check without sending a reply email.
Most of the time, the end-user has to send a reply to prove that their email address is real. However, this may happen without a manual user response when employing the EHLO procedure that was previously indicated.
To avoid more downtime when verifying live addresses, try to use a verification service that can do this independently.
Opt-in repeatedly
Double opt-in is another way to confirm an email address when you can’t do it automatically. This should be a part of your outbound sales and marketing procedure anyway because it makes it easier for people to get your messages.
A user gives you their email address and agrees to get emails from you. This is called a “single opt-in.” For example, you could ask them for their email address in exchange for a free PDF they can download or to sign up for your newsletter.
