Email marketing remains one of the most effective marketing channels, with an average return of investment (ROI) of between 38:1 to 44:1. It has been helping organizations improve their customer acquisition and retention.

Several surveys show that emails drive purchases, and that around 17.75% of email clickthroughs convert to sales, a figure that has been gradually increasing over the years. However, email marketing comes with limitations and pitfalls, too.

Email marketers must thus understand that, to succeed, campaigns need to reach their intended targets, which is made possible by maintaining a clean email list.

Email Validation and Maintaining a Clean Email List: Why Are They Necessary?

Email validation and list hygiene are critical factors that digital marketers need to keep in mind because they can make or break campaigns.

The cleaning of an email list involves removing inactive, or “cold”, email subscribers. Doing so ensures a good relationship with your Internet service provider (ISP) and email service provider (ESP). It also allows you to enjoy a high deliverability rate.

Having a clean email list assures you that your messages only get sent to those who want to read them, preventing you from being marked as a spammer. If recipients frequently mark your emails as spam, your reputation as a sender suffers, which can result in financial and customer losses.

Aside from tracking spam complaints, most ESPs now use sophisticated measures to calculate opens, clicks, inactivity, and unsubscribes. As such, email marketers need to monitor their clients’ behaviors closely. They need to understand that even the most engaged subscribers may lose interest over time. And so, instead of being assets, they end up as more of a liability.

How can email addresses become a liability? Some users sign up to receive newsletters using email addresses from organizations that they are no longer associated with. Others use alternative email addresses that they hardly use. Still, others fail to change their addresses when their email service providers cease to operate. These addresses can be considered “spam traps.”

The Dangers That Spam Traps Pose

Spam traps refer to active but abandoned email addresses. They are primarily used to detect email senders who illegitimately add email addresses to their lists without user consent so that email marketers who do not adhere to best practices can be exposed.

And as your ESP gets notified about the use of such traps, that may:

• Result in hard bounces, and you would be requested to remove affected email addresses from your list, or your messages may be marked as spam.
• Blacklist your domain, disallowing you from sending messages to practically any email address.

These scenarios could harm your deliverability, open and clickthrough rates, as well as reputation. Email marketers should be wary of this because even 1% of poor emails can decrease their deliverability rates by as much as 10%. Poor email list management can lead to lost revenue, additional marketing expenses, unsatisfactory customer experience, inefficient sales funnels, and ruined sender reputation. These are avoidable with the help of Email Verification API.

Clean an Email List with Email Verification Software

Email Verification API can help you maintain a clean email list by:

• Checking for invalid email address formats: An email verification tool lets you quickly identify if each email address on your list conforms to Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards with the help of its syntactic email validation engine.
• Pointing out misspellings: Email Verification API can check addresses for typos. It also checks if each address follows known fake email address patterns. This feature prevents you from sending messages to nonexistent inboxes that my dampen your deliverability.
• Verifying a mail server’s or a mailbox’s existence: An email validation tool also checks if an email address is active, and so can receive messages using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) from any sender.

Email marketers can use Email Verification API to validate email addresses in real time. Integrating it into your existing email address gathering app to check every address’s validity before it gets added to your database is an excellent way to maintain your list hygiene.

Email Verification API can help improve your marketing campaigns. It is a must-have for doing regular email list cleanups to avoid potential damage to your reputation. An email marketing campaign, after all, cannot succeed if your messages do not reach their intended audiences. Needless to say, if your domain gets blacklisted by either your ISP or ESP, no matter how good your email is, it definitely won’t get sent to anyone.