How to use email validation to improve your deliverability

Introduction

Email is a critical part of any company's marketing strategy. However, email deliverability is often a challenge for marketers. Poorly managed lists can lead to spam complaints and hard bounces, damaging your reputation and leading to lower open rates and click-throughs. In this post, we will look at how you can use email validation to improve the quality of your lists and ensure that your emails reach their intended audiences.

Bad email addresses are the biggest threat to your deliverability and reputation

The biggest threat to your deliverability and reputation is bad email addresses.

Email addresses are the most important part of your email marketing strategy because they get opened, clicked, shared, and replied to. They're also one of the most overlooked aspects of email campaigns by marketers and brands alike. The quality of your list matters more than you think!

Bad email addresses can cause a lot of problems for you:

• Poor deliverability rates will cause you to lose customers who don't receive their emails or see them in their spam folder instead of their inbox
• A bad reputation will cause people on other lists (like Gmail) not to trust your brand since it's perceived as spam by other ISPs (internet service providers)

There are three types of bad email events

There are three kinds of bad email events:

• Unwanted bulk email (UBE)
• Abuse complaints
• Hard bounces

UBE (unwanted bulk email) is a major threat to your ability to deliver email to inboxes

Unwanted Bulk Email (UBE) is a major threat to your ability to deliver email to inboxes. UBE can be sent in bulk and is often used for spam. It's also often sent to lists of people who have not asked to be contacted, making it even more likely that their emails will end up in the spam folder than emails sent from regular addresses.

Abuse complaints are another major threat to your reputation

One of the most damaging things you can do to your reputation is to get complaints sent in by recipients. These are also known as abuse complaints, and they're a major threat to both your reputation and deliverability. When someone sends an email complaint about you to their ISP, it will likely get blocked from reaching that ISP's users—and that means all of the emails you send could also be blocked. If this happens often enough, ISPs may even entirely block all incoming messages from your domain or IP address.

The good news is that abuse complaints aren't hard for you to prevent; there are simple steps you can take to avoid them altogether.

Hard bounces can damage your reputation

Hard bounces are a sign that the email address is not valid. If an email address isn't valid, your bounce rate will likely rise, eventually pushing you into the spam trap category of senders. And if enough time passes without any remedial action, your reputation with ISPs will decline, making it increasingly difficult for your emails to reach subscribers as they're blocked and never delivered.

Fix and remove bad email addresses from your list

The first thing you need to do is remove bad email addresses from your list. You can do this by using a validation service and/or suppression service.

• An email validation service will check for bad email addresses and prevent them from reaching your inboxes, which means that if an email address is found in the validation report, it should be removed from your list immediately.
• A suppression service gives you the option to add specific email addresses that should never receive an update or message from you again (e.g., unsubscribes). If someone opts out of receiving emails from you through a suppression list, their information will no longer be included in future mailing cycles or signups for updates about new products or services offered by your business. This helps reduce unnecessary hard bounces and improves deliverability rates overall because fewer emails are being sent out with invalid addresses already flagged as spammy rather than risk being flagged again later down the line!

Conclusion

If you’re serious about sending emails and making a profit from your mailing campaigns, then bad email addresses must be removed from your list. The key is to start with the basics: validate your list and remove bad email addresses from it. You can do this by following our step-by-step guide above or using an automated solution like SmartInsights that will do all of this for you in one click. Once done, you can rest assured that your emails won’t get caught up in any spam filters and will reach inboxes instead!