Verify and Clean Your Email Lists: The Right Method

Today, in the marketing and communication sector, your customers’ email list is an indispensable tool. However, to run an effective email campaign, it is necessary to regularly verify and clean your email lists to precisely target your customers. Discover why these checks are important and learn the method to ensure their effectiveness.

Why Is It Essential to Verify and Clean Your Email List?

A high-quality email list is crucial for achieving a high email delivery rate.

Poor-Performing Email Lists and Low Delivery Rates

With outdated emails or addresses belonging to users who are not interested in your company, you significantly reduce your message delivery rate and increase bounces. Bounces represent the number of emails that do not reach users’ inboxes.

Both factors negatively impact your email campaigns since messages are never read by recipients. These are wasted emails that skew your results.

It is important to understand that invalid email addresses will significantly impact your deliverability.

Why Is a Good Delivery Rate Important?

The delivery rate represents the percentage of emails that are successfully delivered to an inbox. A high percentage has several advantages:

• More accurate statistics
• Cost savings
• Increased campaign conversion

A good deliverability rate ensures more precise statistics because, conversely, poor deliverability affects your KPIs: click-through rate, open rate, etc.

Moreover, a high delivery rate saves money because your company isn’t wasting resources sending emails to addresses that don’t exist or users who are indifferent.

To obtain an effective mailing list that drives conversion and campaign success, it is crucial to understand the difference between email validation and verification—two distinct phases in the process.

Two Steps to Clean Your Email List

The first step is to validate the emails, followed by the verification phase.

Validation Phase

To verify and clean your database, your company must remove invalid emails, correct mistyped addresses, and eliminate duplicates.

Validation consists of checking the syntax of each email address. The domain name must exist, so you need to ensure that there is an MX record linking the domain to a mail server. For example, correcting an address like “outtlook.com” to “outlook.com”.

Your data list is likely quite large, so you won’t do this manually. Automated tools can efficiently verify your list. These tools typically ask you to upload an Excel file containing your data to detect invalid emails.

Cleaning based on statistics is also necessary. Some emails are never opened or received. For this reason, use your analytics tool to select a period of at least 6 months. Export your data as CSV and filter contacts that have never opened an email during that period.

Verification Phase

Verification involves testing the email addresses by sending emails. This step is crucial to identify invalid addresses. After the validation phase, companies perform practical tests.

Sending real emails may prompt some users to mark you as spam. Using verification tools is a more relevant method. These tools rely on algorithms and databases to ensure precise verification.

Best Practices for Effectively Cleaning Your Email List

To benefit from the aforementioned advantages, here are some practices to adopt within your company to maintain a coherent email list:

Use Double Opt-In for New Subscribers

When a user shows interest in your company by signing up for your newsletter, send them a double opt-in email with a confirmation link. This ensures that only valid and interested addresses are added to your list.

Simplify the Unsubscribe Process

Make the unsubscribe process easy by including a clearly visible link in every email. This encourages uninterested subscribers to unsubscribe rather than mark your emails as spam, which is beneficial in the long term.

Bounce Management

Utilize the tools provided by your emailing provider to identify invalid emails after each campaign.

Even if your routing system normally protects you from sending to these invalid addresses in future campaigns, analyzing these returns, updating your CRM, or even directly contacting your client via another channel helps ensure you can reach them in the future.

Regular, In-Depth Cleaning

Perform regular cleaning of your data. Although there is no strict rule, cleaning every three months is recommended, especially if you have a large email list. The more frequently you verify your list, the more up-to-date and coherent it will be, thus ensuring the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Email verification tools can automatically identify and remove outdated or incorrect addresses, simplifying the cleaning process and ensuring your list remains accurate and current.

By following these best practices and using the available digital tools, you can achieve optimal cleaning of your contacts, thereby ensuring the success of your email campaigns. A clean and well-managed email list is the key to an effective and cost-efficient email marketing strategy, offering improved deliverability, increased engagement, and a higher return on investment.