Building a campaign is a hard and time-consuming process for any marketer. You define your targeted audience, find a lead source, gather your email leads, structure your email template and then launch your campaign. Your campaign is successful, you convert your leads to sales, generate revenue… Except, this is not what’s going to happen.
The sole purpose of an email campaign is to reach as many leads as possible. But, the results of such campaign can be random, varying from semi-successful to a plain fail. So you will obviously ask yourself, what is the problem?
The answer is simple. When we extract emails from our lead source, we have no idea about the quality of the emails we are getting. It’s even worse when we harvest emails in bulk. Such carelessness can cost us time and resources we’ve put into building our campaign.
So, referring to the title of this article, what is the One Tool you need?
The Tool
Email verifier is the solution. It validates emails, removing invalid and abandoned ones from the list, as well as reduces the bounce rate. Verifier can either do it in bulk or one email at a time.
To achieve highly valid results email verification services apply numerous methods:
- Syntax check. A verifier performs a thorough email address check for typos like spaces, commas, or semicolons. It makes sure the @ sign and domain name are placed correctly.
- Domain verification. The domain name is checked to make sure it is hosted, registered and fully operational.
- SMTP Authentication. This process involves pinging the email server with an EHLO message. If it responds correctly, it means the email address is fully valid.
Some email verifying services use only syntax check and domain verification, but that doesn’t guarantee 100% validation. Only by using SMTP authentication will you receive a properly verified list of email leads in bulk.
Let’s see what happens when we use a service that uses all three methods at once.
The Experiment
We conducted an experiment to show you how this service can improve your email leads. For this test, we used Snov.io email verifying service, as it offers generous freemiums and is available as a Chrome extension.
For this test, we grabbed a list of 86 emails from random lead sources.
Now let’s see how many of our emails wouldn’t reach its recipient.
Look at that! To make it clear, a number next to the orange indicator is the number of invalid emails, yellow – unknown status, and green – valid email addresses. Basically, without this tool our campaign would have already 38% failed with the fate of the other 30% of emails uncertain.
To finalize our results, let’s take a look at the numbers. And the numbers tell us everything we need to know:
- 31.4% valid emails
- 30.2% emails with unknown status
- 38.4% invalid emails
Isn’t this the definition of catastrophe? Only about 32% of our messages would have reached the recipient and this is just a small-scale test. Imagine the results we would get from analyzing bulk lists with thousands and thousands of emails. So many resources potentially wasted. We haven’t even discussed the reply rate to these messages, but you can probably imagine that too.
Efficiency and Automation
The selling point of these services is automation and speed. Services use real-time verification processes to deliver the most up-to-date results. Email verifiers can validate hundreds of emails within seconds and it’s all done simply by uploading a file and pressing a button.
Lead Enrichment
We’ve conducted this experiment to show you just how much your campaigns depend on this little tool, and you’ve seen the results for yourself.
The only thing we want to add is that email verifier isn’t always just a tool for verifying emails, some services can enrich your leads with new information like first name, last name, company and position. This information is extracted from the service’s database. Depending on how full the service’s database is, you can get you leads enriched with every parameter you need or at least get a bit of data attached to it, which will still significantly improve your chances of converting your leads into sales.
Keep in mind that not every verifier has this feature implemented. It requires an immense database of leads to enrich someone else’s. Platforms that offer multiple services can usually enrich your leads with the data you need.
Conclusion
Hopefully, after our little experiment, you see the impact an email verifier can have on your marketing campaign. We’ve detected a huge amount of invalid emails in our short list, which would translate into far worse results have we been working with bulk lists of emails.
Besides, we can use some email verifying services as data enrichment tools and improve our leads with new info from the service’s database, reducing the email bounce rate.
Is your campaign doomed if you don’t use an email verifier? Well, if you’re satisfied with only having 30% of your emails delivered, then no. Though it’s probably not what a good marketer would want…
