Leveraging Email Validation for an Improved Customer Experience

Email marketing is there, and it’s not going away very soon. It’s still a very potent means of reaching across to your subscribers. The case has been made for using an apt subject line since it determines the open email rates, however, there are some other essentials to consider when sending emails.

If you send high-volume email campaigns, you definitely need email validation. Your emails may come as a means of informing your customers of the latest developments in the brand.

They may also be means of addressing customers’ pain points and improving customer experience. But how do you ensure you are not putting your brand at risk? This is exactly what happens when you email a list of subscribers without first confirming the accuracy.

Email validation is absolutely necessary, and it’s a routine you must create and do constantly to ensure that your messages are sent to valid, active, even engaged email addresses. It ensures your sender’s reputation, email deliverability, and the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

You may not have given it a good thought, but every message you send costs some money, even if it’s small; this means that if you send a message to a fake email address, you have wasted some amount of money. There are ways you can get email addresses, such as asking individuals to fill out your sign-up forms, but this cannot always depend on the accuracy of the information you will get.

People can mistakenly fill in incorrect email addresses. Someone can intentionally give you a fake address, and in this age of bots, you can be sent a malicious email address. How you get a fake or malicious email address is not important, what you must ensure is that your subscriber lists are not corrupted with such practices, and that is the main reason you need email validation.

What is email validation?

For any marketing campaign to succeed, there must be a target audience. From the angle of an email marketer, the audience is the subscribers you associate with the email addresses on your lists.

If the quality of your lists is poor, your marketing campaigns tend towards failure. What constitutes the quality is the accurate data of your audience you gather at the onset.

You must endeavor to collect authentic and usable email addresses. Email validation, therefore, is the process you have to go through to verify the authenticity and ascertain the validity of entries in your sign-up form or database’s email field.

With a basic email validation verification, you can discover if a particular email address conforms to the necessary formatting standards that make it an authentic email. You can also use email validation to substantiate that an email box that matches a particular address has been actually registered with the receiving domain.

The following are some practical ways you can leverage email validation to improve customer experience.

1. Supply chain

It’s a fact that you have a lot of ways to communicate with contractors and other third parties you carry out transactions with, however, email remains one of the cheapest and most effective means of communication. The supply chain is very instrumental to satisfying your customers.

Availability of raw materials, when due, determines how you can meet your customers’ demands. If your product is not in the market when your customers need it, you have allowed the competition to take over, and a customer that has this kind of poor experience may not likely return.

Email validation ensures that you have the correct email addresses of your suppliers and can easily communicate with them when they need to stock up arises. If you send the wrong message to a supplier, it costs you money and time.

When you are supplied with the wrong material because you sent a message to the wrong email address, it falls on you to pay for the return, and the safety of the materials while in transit back to the supplier is your responsibility. You have lost your customers due to poor experience, and you are paying for inefficiency that you could have avoided with email validation.

2. Addressing customers’ pain points

Customers have several ways of reviewing your product, and you can have cases of negative reviews that can damage your brand’s reputation. You may want to respond to these reviews online, but your best option is to look for a means of handling the issue on a one-to-one basis.

Email serves this purpose very well. But, how do you go about this when you don’t have your customers’ accurate email addresses?

Customers want prompt and real-time responses to their pain points and concerns; having their email addresses enhances this. Assuaging their feelings means that they don’t influence other customers with their sentiments.

If you carry out email validation of your subscriber lists, you may not need to spend unnecessary funds in converting new customers, knowing fully well that it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.

Conclusion

Apart from the customer experience, you want to improve, a check is usually carried out by internet service providers (ISPs) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol servers (SMTPs) to monitor the bounces you get from your emails. Poor bouncing results can damage the reputation of your organization.

This will affect your processes and ultimately customer experience. Fortunately, you can outsource this task to reputable email validation service providers who can use different email validation tools to do your work at scale.

With email validation, you won’t have to go through the tortuous route of sending messages to non-existent or fake addresses. You will rather focus on authentic and active email recipients.