Imagine spending hours, days, or even weeks crafting the perfect email campaign, only to have many emails bounce back, never reaching your audience.
You did everything right—created compelling marketing messages, used engaging visuals, and wrote enticing subject lines.
But you failed to do one thing: verify your subscribers’ email addresses.
Now, your email deliverability is low, your sender reputation is ruined, and your precious resources have gone to waste.
Ensuring that your email list contains valid, active addresses can make a difference, turning your hard work into real engagement.
In this article, we’ll explore email verification and why you need an email verification tool like Breadcrumbs to maintain a quality email list.
What is email verification, and why is it important?
Email verification is the process of making sure an email address is valid and deliverable before sending emails to it.
Sending an email to a non-valid and authentic address can increase the risk of the email bouncing back.
Email verification is important because it:
- Improves email deliverability so that emails reach valid recipients, which reduces bounce rate.
- Ensures compliance with privacy regulations, including obtaining FCC one-to-one consent where necessary, to avoid legal complications and protect user privacy.
- Helps maintain a good sender reputation with email service providers (ESPs) or internet service providers (ISPs).
- Boosts engagement and open rates because you’re sending emails to the right address, so they’re more likely to engage with your content.
- Protects against spam traps (email addresses used to identify spammers).
- Reduces risk of blacklisting (ESPs can blacklist IP addresses that constantly send emails to invalid or non-existent addresses.)
- Enhances list quality (Verifying emails helps you remove non-existent, fake, temporary, or improperly formatted email addresses from your list).
- This leads to better campaign performance (Enhanced deliverability and engagement means a higher ROI for your email marketing efforts).
The risks of not verifying emails
Not verifying emails can be risky. Without verification, your mailing list might contain invalid, incorrect, or fake email addresses, which can hurt your sender’s reputation, increase bounce rates, and reduce engagement.
Bounced emails
When an email bounces, the ESP or ISP sends the email right back to your server. This means it didn’t reach the recipient’s inbox.
Sometimes, an email will bounce when you send a message to an unverified address. But in other cases, even if you verify an email, there’s still a possibility of it bouncing.
Different factors cause email bounces, such as technical issues, the recipient’s inbox being full, or the recipient’s server blocking your email.
Damaged sender reputation
ESPs consider a range of factors when assessing sender reputation, such as:
- Bounce rates: High bounce rates often mean a large portion of your email list contains invalid addresses. This could signal poor list management.
- Spam complaints: If you get a lot of spam complaints from recipients, it might show ESPs that your emails are low-quality or irrelevant.
- Email volume: Sudden spikes or irregularities you send can raise suspicions of spammy behavior.
- Authentication mechanisms: Email authentication methods can help you verify your identity as a legitimate sender.
- Content quality: Delivering relevant, engaging, and valuable content reduces the likelihood of recipients marking your emails as spam.
Email verification is another factor ESPs consider when it comes to sender reputation.
So, if you don’t verify emails before sending a campaign, you could damage your reputation.
A bad sender reputation can cause your emails to end up in spam folders. This is happening more often than in the past. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, the average percentage of spam rates increased with almost all popular ISPs.
And if your emails don’t end up in spam, ESPs could block your emails entirely.
This reduces the chances of your emails reaching your target audience, and as a result, lower engagement and conversion rates.
To improve your sender reputation:
- Implement authentication measures, such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and avoid sending too many emails in a short period.
- Monitor engagement metrics, such as open and click-through rates (CTRs).
- Maintain proper email list hygiene.
- Verify single emails or entire email lists with Breadcrumbs
Wasted resources
Email marketing campaigns require a ton of resources, like time, money, and effort.
It takes time and effort to craft email content, design the emails, and set up automated workflows to send emails. And it takes money to get the software, tools, and personnel you need to work on email campaigns.
By using free email marketing tools (including our free email verifier), you can minimize costs while still benefiting from powerful features to manage campaigns effectively.
When you send emails to addresses you haven’t verified, you reduce the chances of them reaching your target audience, which means precious resources down the drain.
This could significantly affect your return on investment (ROI).
Reduced engagement and conversions
If your emails don’t receive enough engagement or conversions, it can negatively affect their deliverability and sender score.
This is because recipients aren’t interacting with your content, which signals to ESPs that your emails aren’t valuable or relevant. Think of it like a social media algorithm. Social media platforms suggest content to users based on engagement, such as likes, comments, and shares.
So, if no one is engaging with your emails, there’s a strong chance ESPs will slowly filter out your emails to the Promotions or Junk folder so that they aren’t directly visible to your intended audience.
A verified email list can mitigate this issue by ensuring more emails land in the primary inbox and recipients consistently open them.
Inaccurate data
Email addresses that don’t exist or contain misspelled characters are inaccurate data.
Using this inaccurate data in your email campaigns can have many negative consequences, such as bounces, damaged sender reputation, and lower deliverability.
This is why it’s so important to use a free email verification tool like Breadcrumbs that accurately identifies invalid email addresses, including those with syntax errors/typos and spam traps.
What is a bounced email?
A bounced email occurs when an ESP can’t deliver an email to the recipient’s inbox and returns the email to you. This can happen for many reasons. Regardless of the cause, they can negatively impact your sender reputation, deliverability, and overall marketing success.
Understanding the different types of bounces—soft and hard bounces—and their implications will be valuable for your email marketing campaigns.
Soft bounces
A soft bounce happens when an ESP can’t deliver your email due to a temporary issue that might be resolved. Unlike hard bounces, which are permanent failures, soft bounces indicate that your email “bounced” due to temporary failures.
Common causes of soft bounces include a full mailbox, temporary server issues, or message size limits.
Soft bounces don’t have the same immediate impact on your sender reputation as hard bounces. However, constant soft bounces can eventually affect your deliverability if you don’t address them.
Hard bounces
Hard bounces are permanent delivery failures. Issues like invalid or non-existent email addresses can cause hard bounces.
Hard bounces directly and negatively impact your sender reputation because they signal to email service providers that you may be using outdated or incorrect contact information.
How to respond to bounced emails
Addressing email bounces is crucial for maintaining an effective email marketing strategy. Knowing how to handle bounced emails will ensure a clean email list and that your campaigns reach your intended audience.
Verify email
The first step in managing bounced emails is verifying email addresses to ensure they’re valid and deliverable.
Email validation tools like Breadcrumbs can verify emails in seconds and help you maintain list hygiene by adding only valid email addresses.
Breadcrumbs checks emails against a vast database to confirm they’re real and active, flagging invalid addresses.
Check mailbox status
If an email bounces, check the status of the recipient’s mailbox to determine the reason for the delivery failure and decide on the next steps. This process involves:
- Verifying mailbox errors: When an email bounces, you should receive a bounce message or Non-Delivery Report (NDR) from your ESP. Read it carefully to see why the email bounced.
- Freemail checks: Verify whether the recipient’s address is from a free email provider like Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook. Even though freemail addresses are generally reliable, issues with these providers can sometimes lead to temporary bounces.
- Email verification checks: Confirm that email syntax is correct, the domain exists, and the mail server can accept incoming emails.
- Mailbox screenings: Check if an email is active and can receive emails. Query the mail server to see if it’s functioning correctly.
Adjust email content or send time
Tailoring your email content to subscribers’ interests and preferences will help you ensure the highest levels of engagement possible. In fact, 71% of consumers would switch brands if they’re unsatisfied with targeting.
Use A/B testing to determine which elements of your emails contribute to the highest engagements and conversions. This involves testing things like your subject lines, visuals, and calls to action (CTAs).
Send time matters, too. Research shows that emails sent during weekdays and mornings (between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. CST) have the highest open rates.
More specifically, Tuesdays are the best days to send emails, resulting in slightly more opens than other weekdays.
However, every subscriber base is different, so it’s important to adjust send times based on subscriber habits and time zones.
How to verify emails
To verify emails, you first want to do a syntax check. This involves verifying the email address’s format to ensure it follows standard email conventions (e.g., name@domain.com) to identify obvious errors.
You’ll also want to:
- Verify the email address’s domain to ensure it exists and is configured to receive emails.
- Do an SMTP (Sender Mail Transfer Protocol) check to see if the specific email address is valid. During this process, you simulate emailing to see if the server responds positively.
- Make sure the email address isn’t associated with known spammers or listed on any blacklists.
- Do a role account check by identifying and filtering out role-based email addresses (e.g., info@domain.com) that are less likely to engage with your emails.
- Detect and remove disposable or temporary email addresses that people use for short-term purposes.
But what if you’re sending emails to hundreds or thousands of subscribers? These steps can take hours or even days. Breadcrumbs can verify emails in seconds. That means you’ll get quick, accurate results that help maintain a clean, deliverable email list.
Why you should use Breadcrumbs’ free email verification tool
Breadcrumbs’ free email verification tool is the perfect choice to verify emails and maintain a stellar sender reputation.
You can verify a single email or upload your contact lists by connecting your Breadcrumbs account to HubSpot. You can upload up to 10,000 contacts.
Final thoughts on verifying email
Don’t waste your resources on sending messages to unverified emails. For every email marketing campaign, always maintain a clean email list.
To keep your open rates and conversions high, handle bounces promptly, send emails at optimal times, and tailor your content to your audience’s interests.
Try Breadcrumbs’ free email verification tool to save time on the tedious process of verifying emails.
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