Why is Email Verification important for a B2B business?
In one of our previous blogs, we saw how Data Enrichment enhances data quality, increases sales efficiency. It also boosts revenue of a business by eliminating redundant, unreliable data and by increasing chances of conversions. Customer data can consist of various aspects related to the customer like demographics, geography, industry, technology etc. Furthermore, data can also contain details of prospects like their emails, contact information and/or details of their professional history/experience.
But even post data enrichment, around 5-10% of email addresses are invalid on an average in an enriched data list, according to online statistics. Invalid email addresses are one the major causes of increased bounce rate of any B2B business. Therefore, before you strategize and launch your email marketing campaigns, it is crucial that the extracted email addresses are thoroughly checked, verified and validated.
In this blog, we will see how a simple email verification / email validation process helps you get the most out of your email campaigns.
(Visit https://zebrista.com/ to know more about Zebrista, a Sales acceleration software.)
Benefits of Email Verification
Whenever a recipient email address is non-existent or invalid, the email is returned back to the sender or it is said that the email has bounced. An increasing email bounce rate is not a healthy sign for any business/sender as it hinders their standing and position in the market which is known as sender’s reputation. A growing email bounce rate also poses the threat of the business getting blacklisted once it crosses a certain percentage. Sure, it is not primarily the sender’s fault, but businesses can take care of this issue by a simple way of email verification.
Email verification helps in discarding invalid and non-existent email addresses, thereby minimizing the email bounce rate. It verifies the validity, authenticity and activeness of the email address. An email verification tool reduces chances of email bounce, increases email deliverability and also enhances sender reputation. Email verification/validation is one of the many features offered by Zebrista.
- Refreshed and updated email list
People quit jobs, change companies and therefore their email addresses become invalid as their accounts are deactivated. If businesses fail to refresh their recipient email lists regularly, it is bound to increase their bounce rate which will affect them negatively.
It is advisable to refresh and update prospect email lists every 2 months. By using an email verifier, businesses can clean their mailing list, eliminate inactive email accounts and also update their lists by adding new accounts. Email verification tools help in always maintaining a refreshed and updated email list, thus ensuring that all the recipients are genuine, real and active and that the emails sent to these recipients reach their Inbox and not end up in spam.
- Increased Click-through rate
An email Click-through rate (CTR) is calculated as the percentage of recipients who clicked on one or more links in the sender’s email. Anything above 3% is considered to be a good email CTR. For obvious reasons, a sender’s email CTR will improve only when the email recipients in their email list are real and active ones because fake and inactive emails will only add to the bounce rate.
Email Verification tools eliminate unwanted and deactivated emails; and help in maintaining a list of only genuine emails that increase the CTR of email campaigns.
Along with a minimized bounce rate and a good click through rate, another aspect that needs to be taken into consideration is a low spam rate. All these three rates go hand-in-hand as they all are interlinked with each other. Gmail and other major email providers have set the industry acceptable standard spam complaint rate as anything less than 0.1% or 1 complaint for every 1,000 emails sent. A higher spam rate is anything that crosses this threshold.
Email verification aids in lowering the spam rate of email marketing campaigns by flagging email accounts that are inactive and fake. Additionally, email verification tools are capable of recognizing email accounts that often tag emails that they receive as spam. Businesses can rely on email verifiers to eliminate such accounts and ensure that they themselves do not get tagged as spam.
- Detection of fraudulent accounts
The web is full of fake, temporary and malicious email accounts. While some can be created by fraudsters for a minimum period of time to cheat, others can be catch-all mail servers that are configured to accept all emails sent to the domain irrespective of the existence of the email address and its associated mailbox. Sending emails to any of the above email accounts is risky and harmful and increases the chances of the sender to get black-listed as they more or less hit spam.
Email verification tools diagnose and identify such hoax email accounts and servers and remove them for the email lists, thereby ensuring that email campaigns are carried out successfully.
- Cost Savings and increased RoI
Creating, storing and maintaining email databases, running email campaigns requires a huge amount of money from businesses. There is a cost associated with each and every email that goes out to the recipients. Even a single mail that reaches a spam account or a fraudulent email address increases bounce rate, increases spam rate and is a waste of a lot of money.
Email verification, by removing unwanted emails from the list, helps businesses save a lot of money by sending emails to genuine recipients. When emails reach the correct recipients, it translates into a reduced bounce rate, lowered spam rate, reduced cost and an increased RoI because it increases the chances of click-through and engagement.
Zebrista for Email Verification
- A sales acceleration tool, Zebrista, is a sales automation tool that automates your entire sales cycle by implementing prospecting automation, contact discovery, lead generation, email marketing, appointment generation and much more.
- Based on the criteria and filters selected, Zebrista helps you identify your target audience from 25+ sources like LinkedIn/angel/crunchbase etc.
- After identifying the correct audience, data of prospective clients like their contact information and email addresses is mined. Zebrista’ email validator is then used to perform data enrichment processes like doing email addresses verification and validation, discarding incorrect and out-of-date emails, updating relevant and latest emails etc.
- Scheduled and targeted email campaigns are executed to approach these clients and appointments are generated.
- Not only does Zebrista help companies build their own workflows depending on their criteria while searching the target audience but also provides a library of already existing workflows which companies can use, some examples of which are targeting recently funded companies, targeting actively hiring companies, etc.
- Zebrista doesn’t stop here, It does a whole lot of things - Connect with us now to see Zebrista in action and to ACCELERATE your SALES cycle.
