As marketing specialists, your goal during an email campaign is for all messages sent to reach their recipients without any obstacles. To achieve this, it is imperative to verify addresses and, if possible, to do so before sending, to avoid bounce problems and spam traps. In this article, we will discuss verifying emails before sending and the methods to perform this verification.
A Look Back at Email Verification
Email verification is an essential step for the success of a sending campaign. It involves ensuring that the addresses you have indeed lead to a real user, that the inbox account is active, and that it allows incoming messages, so your emails will not be lost. The elements subject to this email verification include syntax, IP address, domain name, DNS, and the SMTP mail server.
The Importance of Verifying Email Addresses Before Sending
Email verification is essential for ensuring the deliverability of your messages, which leads to better open and engagement rates. This process allows for several benefits:
- Avoiding bounces;
- Achieving and maintaining a good deliverability rate;
- Keeping clean and up-to-date mailing lists;
- Protecting your sender reputation;
- Preventing being placed on a blacklist;
- Saving time and money with emails that reach their intended recipients.
How Often Should You Verify an Email?
The frequency of verification depends on the size of your list. The larger the list, the more often you should verify. However, there is no need to do it excessively. Find the right balance. For example, a small list may only need to be verified every three months, while a particularly long list should be checked about every month. Keep in mind that some moments are more suitable than others for verification, such as when you add new addresses to your list or if you notice that the results of your latest campaign have declined (bounce rate higher than 2% and/or low open rate).
Methods to Verify an Email Without Sending It
1) Use an Automatic Email Verification Tool
This method is the most popular and effective, especially for mass mailings. There are many online tools offering comprehensive email verification. Among them, Captain Verify is a notable example. These tools are particularly convenient for marketing experts as they can thoroughly examine email lists of any size, identifying and removing non-functioning addresses. The advantage of such a tool? Accurate, fast, and secure cleanup with little to no effort required.
2) Manual Email Verification
We only recommend this method for very small lists, as it is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. To assist you, you can use our Email checker, which is a free email verifier.
3) Email Server Ping
This relatively simple technique involves connecting to the email server you want to reach by sending a “ping” using the SMTP protocol, with the aim of verifying that the address in question can receive messages and respond to them. This can work for small mailing lists, but not really for large ones, as the workload would then be far too significant. In this case, it’s better to leave the task to verification tools.
4) Searching the Address on Google
This method can only be useful for a few addresses, and obviously not for mass mailings. Moreover, it will not allow you to know precisely whether the address is valid or not, just to verify that it exists and is indeed associated with the person in question.
To verify emails without sending them, make sure to choose the right method, one that corresponds to your list and your needs.
