Why Email Verification is a Must for SaaS Companies

Email verification is crucial for SaaS companies to ensure customer engagement and effective communication, especially since invalid email lists can lead to missed opportunities and reduced customer satisfaction. At every stage, email verification can help to not only reduce bounce rates and protect sender reputation but also significantly improve the user experience with your solution. This then enhances customer engagement, customer retention, and business growth.

Read on to learn how and why you should use email verification to improve your SaaS business operations.

What is Email Verification?

Email verification is the process of confirming that an email address is legitimately associated with an inbox and is deliverable. After running your list through an email verification solution, you can remove invalid emails from your list and, in turn, communicate exclusively with individuals who have valid, deliverable email addresses. Basically, it removes the junk from your email list entirely.

The Role of Email in B2B SaaS Operations

As you know, SaaS organizations depend heavily on email, and for good reason. Email serves various purposes: sales outreach, support, marketing campaigns, and upsell/expansion activities. This makes email validation crucial for SaaS businesses. It guarantees that emails reach valid recipients, preventing bounces and spam complaints. But how does it work?

Core Components of Email Verification

An email verification system consists of the following main components:

• Syntax checks are used to verify the format of email addresses.
• Domain verification is used to verify the existence of email domains.
• Mailbox verification is used to confirm the existence of email mailboxes.

Other components include identifying accept-all, role-based, and free emails. With an email verification solution like Emailable, all of this can happen in minutes or even seconds, depending on the size of your list.

The Role of Email Verification in Optimizing B2B SaaS Leads

Not only is email verification super important in the operation of your SaaS company, but it is also a vital step in lead generation as it ensures the emails collected are deliverable. Sending only to deliverable leads will improve deliverability rates (and, in turn, open rates), maintain your sender reputation for future sends, and improve ROI by focusing only on legitimate email addresses.

Using real-time email verification, SaaS companies can receive instant feedback when emails are entered into the system when a user submits a form or signs up. This allows sales and marketing teams to catch invalid emails before they cause a problem when the email campaign is sent.

Another way to seamlessly integrate email verification is through the lead generation platforms or CRM systems your team already uses, allowing for a smoother workflow. Marketing and sales teams can focus on converting these leads by targeting engaged, interested, and legitimate leads. Emailable offers integrations directly with many popular CRM providers, making it easy to add email verification to your workflow.

To implement real-time email verification in your SaaS lead generation, consider best practices such as integrating lead capture forms, regularly cleaning up your list, and monitoring results using analytics.

By implementing real-time email verification, you can ensure your emails reach the right people, protect your reputation, save costs, and improve conversion rates.

The Role of Email Verification in SaaS Onboarding

As you know, the onboarding stage is crucial for SaaS users, as it is the first real interaction between a company and its customers. It sets the tone for the user experience and ensures customers understand how to derive maximum value from the software. It helps users become familiar with the product, understand all the features, and decide if it's worth integrating into their daily workflow. Onboarding can also include setting up an account, receiving personalized tutorials, learning core features, and integrating the software into business operations. It really is make or break for SaaS businesses.

An easy way to make your onboarding flow smoother and more reliable is to integrate email verification. This plays a significant role in ensuring a quality user experience and the success of the SaaS product.

Key Benefits of Email Verification in the Onboarding Stage

• Ensures accurate contact information: Email verification ensures that customer’s email addresses are valid, correctly formatted, and capable of receiving messages. This reduces the risk of communication breakdowns caused by typos or invalid addresses.

• Enhances deliverability: Email verification allows you to detect invalid email addresses before crucial onboarding emails are sent, thereby decreasing bounce rates and enhancing email deliverability.

• Prevents fraudulent or fake accounts: Real-time email verification helps filter out fake email addresses during the sign-up process, ensuring only legitimate users continue with the onboarding process.

• Enhances customer experience: Email validation guarantees the prompt delivery of crucial onboarding messages and the reliability of follow-up communications.

The Role of Email Verification in Customer Success Retention and Reducing Churn

For any SaaS company, customer success and retention are crucial to long-term growth, as retaining existing customers is far more cost-effective than constantly acquiring new ones. Regular email communication with customers is one of the most important factors for retaining customers and ensuring their success.

Ensuring Deliverability and Timely Communication

One of the most critical factors in customer success is timely communication. For example, if a customer’s subscription is about to expire or they need assistance, you must communicate this promptly. However, sending emails to invalid or misspelled addresses will result in their non-receipt, potentially depriving the customer of crucial information.

Email verification ensures that only valid, active email addresses are in your database. By cleaning your email list and removing invalid or inactive addresses, you improve email deliverability, ensuring that important messages always reach the intended recipient. When customers receive timely information about renewals, updates, or special offers, they are more likely to stay engaged and renew their subscriptions, helping to prevent churn.

Enhancing Re-engagement Campaigns and Preventing Churn

Customer churn is one of the biggest challenges for SaaS companies. Once customers stop using your product, winning them back becomes much more challenging. Thankfully, re-engagement campaigns are proven to rekindle interest in your product and prevent churn.

Email verification is a key part of a successful re-engagement campaign. If you’re running a campaign to reach dormant or lapsed customers, sending emails to invalid or outdated addresses will render your efforts ineffective. Re-engagement campaigns often include time-sensitive offers or important updates about new features that can revive a customer’s interest.

By verifying email addresses before initiating a re-engagement campaign, you ensure your emails reach the correct individuals. This enhances the likelihood that recipients will open, read, and respond to your messages. Whether offering an exclusive discount, a product update, or a personalized recommendation, email verification improves the success rate of your re-engagement efforts, making it easier to bring lapsed customers back into the fold.

The Impact of Poor Email Quality on SaaS Business Operations

The reality is that poor email quality can damage a SaaS company, leading to missed chances and lost revenue. By using an email verification solution, these missed chances are no more.

SaaS companies may encounter numerous issues if they neglect to verify their lists regularly. SaaS companies may experience a high volume of bounced emails, encounter spam filters, damage their reputation, and potentially face domain blacklisting. This negatively impacts customer engagement, sales volume, and overall revenue. Email verification for SaaS companies is key to avoiding these problems and running a SaaS business smoothly.

Poor email quality can harm a SaaS business in many ways. For example:

• It can become more challenging to maintain customer interest and generate sales.
• It can negatively impact your brand's perception and credibility.

This can cost you money and opportunities for growth.

When a company sends emails to a large list, the quality of the email list directly impacts the domain's reputation. Here's an example scenario that illustrates this:

Example Scenario:

Imagine a company with 5 million email addresses in its database. However, only 2 million of these email addresses are valid, and the remaining 3 million are invalid or nonexistent.

Now, the company has decided to send out emails to all 5 million addresses, including both valid and invalid ones, without performing email verification. Here's what happens:

1. Invalid Email Addresses: When emails are sent to the 3 million invalid email addresses, the email server will attempt to deliver messages, but since the addresses don't exist, they will bounce back. These bounce-backs signal to the receiving email servers that the emails are undeliverable.
2. Bounce Rate: The bounce rate is the percentage of emails that fail to be delivered. In this scenario, out of the 5 million emails sent, 3 million will likely bounce. This results in a bounce rate of 60%. A bounce rate of 60% is extremely high, well above the industry standard of around 2-5%.
3. Negative Impact on Domain Reputation: Email Service Providers (ESPs) and other email servers track the bounce rates of domains sending emails. A high bounce rate, especially one above 5%, signals to ESPs that the sender might be using low-quality or outdated email lists, which can lead to spamming or poor list hygiene. Consistently high bounce rates can lead to a domain being blacklisted or flagged as spam. This means that future emails from this domain are more likely to be routed directly to spam folders or blocked altogether.
4. Increased Costs: Sending emails to many invalid addresses increases the overall cost of email marketing. Some email service providers charge based on the number of emails sent, and with high bounce rates, the company wastes money on undeliverable messages.
5. Long-Term Consequences:
   • Email deliverability decline: Over time, if the company keeps sending emails to invalid addresses, the domain's reputation will deteriorate, and more emails will end up in spam or junk folders. This greatly reduces the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.
   • Damage to trust and brand reputation: A poor reputation from excessive bouncing can damage the brand's image with customers, especially if legitimate users' emails are also being flagged as spam.

In this example, sending emails to a list with a 60% bounce rate caused by invalid addresses has severely harmed the company's domain reputation.

High-quality email lists and low bounce rates are key to maintaining a positive domain reputation and ensuring the success of email campaigns.

The good news is this is easily avoidable. Simply verify your emails before marketing or sales actions and remove those bad, problem-causing emails from your list. Mail verification solutions like Emailable ensure your email list is accurate and prevent bad email quality from hurting your business.

Conclusion

In summary, email verification aids SaaS companies in ensuring the delivery of emails, leading to improved ROI, better sender reputation, and reduced bounce rates. By regularly verifying, SaaS businesses can grow and stay ahead in the market.

It’s easy to make email verification work for your SaaS business. Choose the right email verification tools that balance security, user experience, and efficiency. That way, your business can thrive for years to come.