Real-Time Email Verification: How It Can Benefit Your Website or App

Email verification is the process through which you determine whether or not an email address is a valid one. Verifying your email lists is an essential step in securing your marketing goals and objectives. Doing so in real-time will fast-track you into having best practices for managing your contacts and marketing efforts.

During this blog entry, we are going to offer insight on this matter, with a special focus on how to implement real-time verification on your website or app, as well as going over some of the natural benefits of email verification. Whether you have a small-scale business or running a large enterprise with huge marketing campaigns you stand to benefit from email verification.

Today we are going to cover the following aspects:

• Email verification benefits for businesses
• Email verification in real-time for your website
• Email verification in real-time for your application

Why is email verification important for your business?

First, let’s start by explaining why email verification is absolutely essential when discussing communication with your customer base. Email addresses become obsolete after a while, lists tend to degrade naturally at a 2% rate per month. This can happen, for example, when people are changing jobs and no longer have access to their inbox; they swap email mailbox providers and stop using the older address, they lose access to their current account and have to start a new one. Furthermore, alongside those regular occurrences, there are also temporary email addresses that you need to worry about, email addresses that become unavailable due to server-side issues, and role-based emails that are not attributed to a single person nor have their inboxes checked.

Due to this degradation of lists, businesses must align their operations with best practices for email sending, which brings us to the topic of today. Email verification allows you to maintain your deliverability and easily handle these bad emails by removing them from your lists. More importantly, it does so preemptively to you sending out any emails. Real-time verification not only comes with the benefit of regular bulk verification but also adds an extra layer of security and efficiency by doing a verification at the moment of capture.

Having a setup to comfortably know that you’re adding only valid email addresses on entry, will give you peace of mind in two very important aspects. You can be confident that your lists will be clean as you add new contacts and you benefit from a slower deterioration rate.

Furthermore, as we will exemplify further down in this post, the benefits expand beyond clean lists and slow deterioration rates; reduced costs, better leads, and simplified workflows are some of the benefits of real-time email verification - but we’ll get to that soon enough.

Email verification benefits

Before we start on how to implement real-time email verification for both websites and apps, let’s do a quick overview of some of the most common benefits of email verification.

This small list is but a drop in the ocean, but it provides ample context as to why you should be interested in this topic. To appreciate real-time verification you must first understand email verification and its inherent benefits.

These benefits can be ones such as:

Lower mailing costs

Almost every ESP will charge you a monthly fee based on the number of contacts in your database. Keeping undeliverable emails will not only hurt your sender score but also, inevitably, lead to higher costs for your marketing or sales operations. Validating your lists will help you optimize costs and protect your ESP account. In a different blog entry we discuss the ROI (Return on Investment) potential of email marketing, this is the highest in the marketing industry, at a staggering 4300% (possibly) - every bit of efficient cost management counts towards achieving these incredible results.

Maintain an up-to-date email database

Removing contacts that are no longer active is the first step in achieving a clean list. With email verification, the workflow for cleaning email lists gets reduced and the workload is removed. You will be able to focus on value-added efforts for your campaigns, without wasting time on constantly segmenting lists to filter out unwanted email addresses. Moreover, verification also gives you added insight into the risk you’re undertaking with your campaign, which comes in handy when you’re in the planning phase of your email marketing campaign.

Improved email deliverability

One of the aspects that your ESP will analyze to decide whether or not you are complying with its policies and industry standards will be the deliverability rate. Sending out newsletters to subscribers that cannot receive emails will negatively impact deliverability. Email verification plays an important role in improving email deliverability, therefore letting you prioritize other valuable marketing efforts.

Reduced soft and hard bounces

Bounces are emails that have not been delivered. We actually have a handy blog post about this (LINK TO SOFT N HARD BOUNCES) Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean that they don’t count towards your overall email metrics. Reducing soft and hard bounces through email verification will not only mean that you will have improved email marketing results or better reputation, but it will also lead to a better standing with your ESP - which as you very well know is a crucial partner for your business’s marketing efforts.

Improved sender reputation and score

Sender reputation is a score assigned by Internet Service Providers to determine when emails should not be delivered. This score is one of the tactics used to combat spam emails. Therefore, a higher score will likely mean that your email campaigns will be delivered successfully. Keep in mind that your sender score is built over time and is much easier to bring down than up, adopting best practices is a surefire way to maintain your score at a respectable level. Email verification is essential if you want to improve or maintain sender reputation and, implicitly, increase the likelihood of reaching your subscribers’ inboxes.

Applying email verification to your website or app

Using a real-time verification solution, such as our Widget, any developer can implement real-time email validation for any website. This tool was built with ease of use and simplicity in mind. The entire setup process takes just a couple of minutes and you’re good to start verifying.

Below we mention some of the most common website and app forms used to capture emails, explain them in order to provide context, and proceed to give an overview of how real-time verification works to the benefit of your business in these scenarios.

Newsletter forms

It comes without saying that the first rule of email marketing is segmentation. Many of our clients are using subscription forms on their websites as a way of generating new contacts. The premise is very simple, you just place a form on your homepage or blog, and users that are interested in receiving updates about the company, discounts, or resources that you publish will be able to subscribe to your newsletter.

One issue that can occur is that users might misspell their email address, they might provide a temporary one or they might just make one up. For businesses, this means having to deal with exhausting cleaning processes. But implementing our Widget inside the form will mean that email addresses will be verified instantly and only the valid one will actually go through to your lists.

Registration forms

Many businesses rely on building a community around their brand as a tactic for generating new customers. It comes in different shapes and sizes, from e-commerce websites to newspapers or magazines, but the idea behind it is the same. Users need to register to unlock certain features or to be able to place an order. Capturing bad emails during registration can help save your time in the future, for both marketing and customer support purposes.

This is where email verification comes in and simplifies the process for website owners. Instead of allowing all email addresses to be used for registering an account, the email addresses can now be verified and confirmed as valid and active.

Gated content forms

Because we have already discussed how email verification impacts various aspects of B2C companies, we want to offer a use case that applies especially to B2B ones. Gated content is a great lead-generation tactic for businesses that are looking at digital growth through inbound marketing. Creating valuable content, either e-books, white papers, on-demand webinars, or how-to guides is just the first step in implementing an efficient lead generation strategy. Putting that content behind a form will encourage users to trade their information in exchange for the asset.

Gated content will also attract users that are not willing to give their real data, which negatively impacts the success of a lead generation campaign. But using real-time verification will ensure that only valid and existing email addresses can be used for downloading a piece of content. Therefore, your email list will not become inundated with temporary email addresses, fictitious ones, or email addresses that no longer exist.

Referral forms

Offering an incentive to current users to recommend your service is already an industry standard. As previously mentioned, Uber, FoodPanda, Revolut, and many more are using a referral system to grow their customer base. Current users will receive some in-app currency for every new client that registers with their unique code or URL.

To properly verify that each email selected by a customer is worth sending out an invitation to, email verification can process them and only allow the valid ones to be used for the referral system. That way, you will not overwhelm your system with undeliverable emails, while also protecting your sender reputation and cutting down on operational costs.

Contact forms

For websites and applications that offer customer support without requiring an account, contact forms can become a source of spam. On the other hand, not providing a valid email address can also mean that any future communication with that user is rendered impossible. Email verification will help you avoid the hassle of trying to figure out the correct contact information for your customers and make sure that you’re efficiently communicating with your client base.

In conclusion

Let’s summarize the above information.

• Email verification is the process of making sure an email address is valid.
• Real-time verification is the process of email verification before it even gets added to your list.

By implementing email verification into your business processes you stand to gain from

• Increased reputation
• Cost reduction
• Bounce reduction
• Clean lists

By implementing real-time email verification on your website or app:

• Only good emails go to your lists
• More efficient communication
• Less customer support load
• Better marketing leads

We hope to have provided you with some clearance about how real-time verification works and how beneficial it can be for your business.