If you’re operating a business, email is one of the most important tools you’ll need to help your company grow. Email stands as a significant part of how businesses communicate with clients, potential customers, and suppliers. As such, while other communication channels like social media continuously come up with new features that marketers can use, email should remain a crucial part of your strategy.

Email marketing can help you reach your target market and acquire new customers. It’s a simple, effective, and cost-efficient way to grow a huge customer base. In fact, according to the Radicati Group, the number of email users is expected to grow by 4.1 million in 2021. One of the advantages of implementing an email campaign is that it is highly measurable. Therefore, giving you a clear picture of how your email campaign is performing.

This is where email verification comes in. Imagine sending out emails without knowing if the person you sent it to has read or received them. Email verification or also known as email validation works by identifying if the address is active or inactive. This article will give you the lowdown on email verification for e-commerce and how it can help boost your business.

How Email Verification Can Push Your E-Commerce Business to the Top

If you want to understand how email verification works and how you can grow your e-commerce business with it, this article will help you level up as an online marketer. Email marketing remains one of the most powerful tools you can leverage to promote your business. It makes your customers aware of your product or service and encourages them to purchase from you. One of the perks of email marketing is unlike other forms of marketing tools, it’s an inexpensive way to market your business.

According to Loqate, in the U.S., approximately 70% of email users check their inboxes at least once a day. Mckinsey and Company state that email is still the best way to reach your customers and is 40 times more effective compared to social media. Thus, the health of your contact list is crucial to the success of your email marketing campaigns.  

Valid vs. Invalid Email          

Soucre: Verifalia What is Email Verification and Why Do you Need It?

Building an email database is necessary to grow your online engagement. You’ll need an email verification tool to keep track of your campaigns. It confirms which addresses on your contact list are accurate and active. At the same time, it also helps you narrow down your customer database to ensure that you are reaching those that truly matter.

Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, spam traps exist to expose illegitimate senders who add email addresses to their lists without user permission. Though these traps are designed to protect the privacy of users, it can also expose marketers who neglect implementing tedious email permission and list management practices.  

As well, email verification significantly improves the way you reach and deliver your messages to your customers. You’ll be able to allocate more of your time and energy to create targeted email campaigns. After sorting through your contact list, your customers will become more relevant with a higher chance of buying from you.

What Email Verification Can Do for You

An email verification uses JavaScript, algorithms, and artificial intelligence to identify the status of each email address. You’ll be able to identify if the email address is still active but with no activity for some time. This will allow you to sort through your list and remove invalid addresses to maintain good email list hygiene. It also helps remove low-quality emails with low engagement or users who tag your email as spam. This way you can focus on maintaining and growing your database while reaching the right market.  

Using email verification for e-commerce will allow you to do the following:

• Determine invalid emails
• Correct misspelled addresses
• Monitor the status of each email whether active or not
• Confirm if your email has been delivered
• Prevent your messages from being tagged as a SPAM mail
• Keeps bounce rates low
• Identify an email return as a soft or hard bounce
• Check syntax regularity
• Provides real-time verification

Three-Step Verification Process

Once you’ve accumulated a huge mailing list, you may notice that some addresses may not be active after some time. An email verification goes through a three-step process:

1. Syntax check – A syntax check identifies if the email address has the correct format, scans it for missing symbols, and invalid email addresses that may result in a hard bounce. An email syntax pertains to the correct positioning of an email address. Some of the indications that an email address is fake are if it contains special characters or if it is missing the mandatory “@” symbol.

2. Domain check – The next step is to validate the domain by checking the DNS to confirm if the domain is valid and if the mail exchange server can receive emails. Unregistered domains will tag the email as invalid.

3. Mailbox check – The final step is to verify the mailbox through the SMTP server to confirm if it is valid and can receive messages. During the process, the verification system will ping the email address and wait for the email server to respond.  

Verifying an Email

How Verifying Email Address Can Help Grow Your E-Commerce Business

With the rise of social media, email may seem to have taken a backseat. However, it’s still an integral part of any business, especially when it comes to creating an efficient marketing campaign. As a marketer, it’s important to understand the value of generating a list of valid email addresses and how to maximize it to move your business forward.

Email verification can help widen your market, generate new leads, attract new customers, and convert them to sales. Additionally, you can also use Red Stag Fulfillment to help you effectively build and grow your e-commerce site through its fulfillment and shipping processes.

The Benefits of Email Verification

There are plenty of reasons how verifying email addresses can help you grow your e-commerce business. Here are some of the ways your company can benefit from this service.

• Saves you money - One of the biggest benefits of email verification for e-commerce is that it saves you money. Sending emails costs money. By verifying your contact list, you’re sending your message to fewer people. Therefore, lowering your marketing expenses and increasing your savings. Every message sent to an invalid email equals money, time, and effort wasted.

• Improved ROI – Every time your emails are sent to verified emails, your return of investment (ROI) goes up. It improves your deliverability rate and helps you save time and effort in maintaining your mailing lists. With an accurate contact list, your email marketing campaign should reflect a higher ROI.

• Higher conversion rates – Bad leads are time, effort, and money wasters. A verified address will lead to better leads and higher conversion rates. When email marketing is done correctly, you’ll be able to convert emails into sales and increase your profit.

• Protects your reputation and avoids spam traps – With a high bounce rate, internet service providers (ISP) may end up blocking your emails or redirect them to spam folders. Email verification can protect your email from bounces. At the same time, you can avoid recipients who flag your messages as spam.

Spam traps, as alluded to earlier, pertain to addresses that aren’t owned by a real person. You should avoid this or else you may get blacklisted and end up with a poor sender reputation.  

• Provides an accurate database – A verified mailing list can provide you and your sales team with accurate information. With the right metrics, you’ll be able to analyze your campaigns properly. At the same time, your sales team will be able to work more efficiently with the right information.

• Increases customer engagement – After verifying your email list, you’ll be able to remove customers that aren’t relevant to your objective. This prevents you from using your resources on non-converting users. Instead, you’ll be able to concentrate on creating a more personalized approach and engage your customers better.  

How Long Does it Take to Verify an Email Address?

Verifying an email can be done in an instant without even sending an email. After completing the three-step process, you’ll be able to identify which addresses result in hard bounces, fake, and invalid. The process can be done by uploading the emails by batch to an email verification service or through an API.

With batch uploading, you’ll have to export your list to your ESP, download then upload it to the email verification service then wait for the results. Afterward, you’ll need to clean out your list.

Email Verification Tools

There are many great tools out there to help you verify your emails. Our personal favorite is our friends over at ContactOut. For a fair price, you get a search engine for contact information but with better data. ContactOut finds emails and phone numbers from public pages on the Internet and matches them to the right people.

Takeaway

An effective email marketing campaign propels your business to the top as it drives more traffic, engagement, and ultimately, increases your sales. If you’re not getting the results you want, you may want to take a further look into your contact list. If your list consists mostly of invalid email addresses or spam traps, your marketing campaign can take a huge blow. So, how do avoid this completely? The answer is through email verification.

Email verification is one of the best marketing practices and can benefit your e-commerce business by making sure your messages successfully reach your target customers. It can help you avoid fake accounts, spam traps, and maintain a good sender reputation. This way, you can maximize the benefits of email marketing and help grow your e-commerce business. Using this tool can help you save time, energy, and money so that you can direct your focus on building a bullet-proof marketing campaign.

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