People will always debate whether stores put out their holiday merchandise too soon. (Not all of you like being reminded that the holidays are just around the corner!) But we can all agree on one thing: it is never too early to make sure that your email contact list is genuine, accurate and ready for your holiday marketing campaigns.

From Black Friday and Cyber Monday all the way to the end of the year, the holidays are the busiest season by far for many businesses, particularly retailers.

According to recent 2018 statistics, as much as 30% of their sales take place over the holiday period, with total holiday retail sales climbing over the US$1 trillion mark for the first time last year – and nearly a quarter of these sales were generated through email marketing.

As the holidays approach, email validation plays a vital role in communicating with your customers and prospects. It impacts customer service issues, order confirmation, promotional marketing campaigns and sales efforts. Let’s look at some of the ways it can help make your holiday business season a success.

What email validation can do for you

When you use our DOTS Email Validation product with your email contact list, here are some of the things it will do for your holiday marketing and customer contact efforts:

Make sure your contacts are real contacts. We screen for obviously fake email addresses, so they don’t become part of your marketing contact list forever. These checks include bogus addresses, invalid domains, garbage and vulgar names, and more.

Fix common errors. With our automated syntax and error correction capabilities, you won’t lose a valuable contact because they did things like leaving off the “.com” or misspelling Gmail.

Ensure deliverability. This capability sets our email validation apart from most of the industry: we have the ability to make sure your email addresses work. In short, we check to make sure the email server AND address is able to receive email. This also includes checks for blacklists, known greylisters, invalid DNS records, and more.

Keep the bad guys out. Not every email contact has the best of intentions, and the busy holidays are classically the peak season for retail fraud. Still others steal your time by being known spammers or bots. We check for suspicious email addresses that are bogus, disposable, or known bad actors, so you can take corrective action ahead of time.

Protect your sender reputation. Even when you are careful about obtaining your email contacts in the first place, you are at risk of sending emails that could get you blacklisted from ISPs or run afoul of the CAN-SPAM Act against unsolicited commercial email – because you have little control over what a contact enters. We warn you about addresses that are known spam traps, honeypots, and role email addresses (read more about the importance of identifying role addresses from our blog, Email Marketing Tip: Dealing With Role Addresses).

Save time and money. Above all, email validation helps you market cost-effectively to a cleaner list, reducing bounce rates by up to 90 percent and making sure your message gets through to more contacts, which ultimately drives more revenue.

Taking a best practice approach to data quality at the holidays

Email validation is an essential part of your data hygiene strategy, particularly during the busy holiday retail season. Moreover, since email contact information is constantly changing, it is important to validate these email addresses at both the time of data entry and each time you run a campaign.

We make this easy for you by checking your email against over 50 proprietary tests and returning an easy-to-interpret quality score from 0 to 4, as well as specific details on the results. And our API interfaces allow you to implement email validation directly in most popular CRM and marketing automation platforms.

Want to learn more about how email validation can make your holiday season more profitable? Download our free whitepaper The ROI of Real-Time Email Validation to learn more, or contact us for a free consultation on your own specific email marketing situation.

No matter the industry, you likely have jargon or terminology that’s specific to the work you do. The email world has a nomenclature all of its own, too. Understanding the lingo can keep you on the right side of the email servers.

Here are some key terms that can help you make the most of your email marketing efforts:

EMAIL SERVICE PROVIDER (ESP)

These are firms that provide email services, ranging from major providers such as Google’s Gmail or Microsoft’s Outlook to more specific offerings. The major firms often combine free offerings for consumers with expanded paid services for business.

DOMAIN NAME SYSTEM (DNS)

An Internet protocol that links a domain name with resources such as IP addresses, mail exchangers, and name servers. In short, it stores where valid domains live on the Internet.

MAIL EXCHANGERS (MX)

Also known as a message transfer agent (MTA), these are computers and software that execute protocols for sending and receiving a domain’s email messages and their attachments.

WHITELIST

A list of email addresses that are automatically approved for delivery, used to make sure that emails from familiar sources get through.

GREYLIST

A technique used to temporarily reject new or unfamiliar email, often by rejecting it at first with a “soft bounce,” and then accepting subsequent delivery attempts. It works because legitimate email servers will normally attempt redelivery, while spammers generally won’t.

BLACKLIST

Email addresses that are tagged to be rejected by a mail server, normally because it is suspected as being spam. Unsuspecting legitimate emails can get blacklisted, however, if the sender isn’t careful: see the definition of honeypots and spamtraps.

HONEYPOTS AND SPAMTRAPS

Unpublished email addresses used to trap spammers, particularly those who “scrape” addresses using webcrawlers. Purchased email lists from the wrong sources may contain such addresses, which in turn can get you banned from sending to their domains.

ROLE ADDRESSES

These are email addresses that belong to a job function, rather than an individual: for example, support@mycompany.com. Role addresses are a potential minefield for your contact database, because emails to addresses for multiple people can easily be flagged as spam.

DISPOSABLE EMAILS

These are email addresses that are generated for unique uses such as signing up for lists, or may expire after a period of time. The good news? They protect users from exposing their primary email addresses to spammers. The bad news? They are often used by Internet trolls, or people who want to sign up for your marketing goodie without being on your mailing list.

ADVANCED EMAIL ADDRESS VALIDATION

An advanced email validation and verification service, such as Service Objects’ DOTS Email Validation, validates email syntax to confirm there is a box name, an @-symbol, and a domain. Additionally, it flags improbable addresses, such as vulgar or famous names. Sophisticated algorithms check the existence of SMTP server and working mailbox, that the mail exchange record is valid and accepting mail, and that domain specific mailbox rules are met.

Why Email Validation Is Important

Email validation is a simple, painless, easy-to-implement capability that improves the quality and functionality of your email lists. By taking advantage of our validation infrastructure, as well as the live experience that goes into our extensive databases of validation criteria, you gain the following benefits:

• Substantially improving the ROI of your email marketing
• Reducing email bounce rates by up to 90% and maximizing deliverability
• Protecting your business from being blacklisted by valuable or important contact domains, by warning against potential spam traps and honeypots
• Combatting fraud by providing important MX-specific flags including catch-all, wireless, free, disposable, alias, domain quality and more
• Helping you document compliance with government regulations such as GDPR, CAN-SPAM and others, by ensuring that you have correct contact information
• Maintaining a good email “sender reputation” that enhances your contact effectiveness
• Better customer service through improved contact rates

To learn more about how email validation can help you avoid the dreaded blacklist, download our free whitepaper, The ROI of Real-Time Email Validation. The strategies presented will not only improve your response rates and effectiveness, they will help protect your organization from a host of issues including fraud, blacklisting and regulatory concerns.

How do you know if an email address is valid? There is more than one way to find out. In this article, we will show you how something we do – known as “ping testing” – makes these results much more accurate. More important, we will show you how to get the best out of these capabilities.

Email Verification 101

There are fundamentally three ways to make sure an email address is legitimate:

• Examine the email address itself for things like proper syntax, obvious misspellings (like “gmial” instead of “gmail”), and other problems (like missing “@” symbol).
• Compare this email address against lists of existing emails – both to see if it is a legitimate address, and also to flag known problem addresses such as spam traps, honeypots, known spammers, blacklisted addresses, and more.
• Physically test (or “ping”) the email server, domain and address to make sure the address is valid.

All three of these checks are important in their own way. Basic address testing quickly weeds out addresses that are clearly invalid, with fast response times. List testing is also quick but often isn’t enough, because of addresses that haven’t made the list yet. (According to a report from the Radicati Group, new email addresses get created at the rate of a quarter billion per year!)

Then there is “ping” testing, which involves checking the actual email server and address for a response, which is the gold standard for determining the validity of an address. It can also be important for applications such as fraud prevention, to guard against perpetrators who create email addresses in near-real time. There are three main types of ping checks:

• Testing an email server (STMP) to see if it is real and available.
• Testing to see if an email address is allowing emails at the domain (DNS) level.
• Testing to see if the address can reach an inbox.

Of course, Service Objects’ DOTS Email Validation service performs all of these checks. Now, let’s see how you can use them efficiently for your own email validation.

Here’s where you come in

Service Objects’ Email Validation capabilities give you a great deal of control over both performance levels and output tests. Here are some tips to get the most out of your email validation, taken from our developer guide:

To ping or not to ping: You can validate emails quickly – at the expense of possibly missing ping testing – by using our ValidateEmailFast operation. If a “ping” takes too long, it will not be considered in the check (and STMP data about this address will not be returned). However, be aware that this is a less accurate check.

Putting a lid on pinging. The amount of time a “ping” takes may vary widely, from nearly instant response to lengthy delays. If you are using email validation in a real-time application, or are concerned about response speed, the Timeout input variable is your friend. This value specifies how long the service is allowed to wait for all real-time network level checks to finish, such as STMP and DNS testing. Time is entered in milliseconds, with a minimum value of 200ms.

Email servers can be slow to respond to ping checks, and one of the most important aspects is how long you are willing to wait for a response. If you only wait a second or two – and you fail emails that do not respond in that time – you will get a lot of false negatives. If you can wait and/or update the results based on latent responses, you will get a more accurate verification.  If real-time responses are a priority, we recommend setting up a two-step verification process, to help mitigate slow email server response times and ensure a quality user experience.

Two-step validation. The initial step will validate the email address using real-time syntax and ping testing. Syntax issues and fast-responding email servers will provide accurate feedback, so issues can be flagged in real-time.  This allows for real-time notification of any issues, enabling user corrections before being captured by your application or CRM. The amount of time you are willing to wait should be considered in your user’s experience.

The second step is to accommodate slow-responding email servers that ‘timed-out’ in the initial step.  When capturing the email address to your database, include a Yes/No flag of whether the email validation timed-out before completing validation.  For those email addresses that timed-out, you can validate them again but with a much longer Timeout setting, allowing slower email servers time to respond and ensuring the email address has been fully validated.

Pinging isn’t perfect. Sometimes a non-existent address will still “ping” properly. Why? Because some email domains are “catch-all” domains, meaning that their servers will accept mail to any address within that domain. You can test for this using the IsCatchAllDomain output variable that comes back with your results.

Finally, remember that ping testing is not the only factor in effective email validation. Our developer guide has a wealth of tools you can use as part of your specific use case, ranging from optional email address correction to warning codes for bogus, vulgar or disposable email addresses. Check it out, or better yet, “ping” our friendly support team for expert advice. We’re always glad to help!

Few marketing channels share the power of email. It is immediate, urgent, personalized and inexpensive. And according to the Direct Marketing Association, it has the highest ROI of any marketing channel: an amazing 4300%.

Here are some of the key benefits of good email campaigns:

• The cost per contact of email is extremely low compared with other channels.
• Email is easily personalized by customer, market segment, or demographic.
• Email marketing is much kinder to the environment, versus using natural resources such as direct mail.
• Your email assets can help you make more informed decisions, develop more effective marketing strategies and strengthen customer/prospect relationships.

That said, your email marketing strategy is only as good as the quality of your email list.

The importance of data quality and email

The allure of email has always been its scalability: with one press of the “Return” key, your message can go out to dozens, hundreds, or even millions of people. Once you absorb the cost of acquiring email contact data, the costs of its re-use are minimal. So once upon a time, not that many years ago, marketers simply accepted a certain percentage of bad or misdirected email addresses as part of the process.

Today this is no longer the case. As people’s in-boxes have become flooded with spam, and marketers compete more than ever for busy peoples’ eyeballs, the quality of your email contact list has become extremely important. Here are just a few of the reasons why:

Time and money

As email lists continue to grow and expand, the human costs of processing bad data and updating contact lists continues to grow as well.

Brand image and customer reputation

Mis-directed email is almost universally unwelcome and perceived as spam, which in turn affects the public reputation of your brand and organization.

Wasted effort

When someone provides a bogus email address such as “HowdyDoody@nobody.com,” particularly in conjunction with other contact information, adding them to your list of leads potentially wastes marketing resources in all of your channels.

Regulatory compliance

Laws and regulations such as the US CAN-SPAM act or the European Union’s General Data protection Regulation (GDPR) restrict unsolicited email marketing nowadays, with potentially severe penalties.

Lost marketing opportunities

Send unwanted email to the wrong address, and you could be blacklisted from an entire corporate domain— losing access to all of their prospects and customers. These last two reasons are especially important, because bad data now has the potential to do real harm to your business. And all of these factors add up to a future where more accurate and careful email marketing has become an increasing necessity. Email lists are a valuable business asset, but data quality— particularly authenticity and accuracy—always wins out over quantity.

That’s where real-time email validation comes in to separate the good emails from the bad ones.

An advanced email address validation and verification service, such as Service Objects’ DOTS Email Validation, uses sophisticated algorithms and dozens of rules and tests to instantly weed out invalid email addresses. It will also cross reference proprietary data for known bogus emails or spamtraps. Every email validation system should also check for the following:

• Email address syntax
• Individual domain specific mailbox rules
• Improbable names (vulgar, famous, bogus, or suspicious keystroke sequences)
• Mail exchange record of domain is valid and accepting mail
• SMTP server for domain
• Mailbox is accepting mail (when possible)

Want to learn more? Download our free whitepaper, The ROI of Real-Time Email Validation, to explore how to get the most profitability and customer engagement from your email marketing. The strategies presented will not only improve your response rates and effectiveness, they will help protect your organization from a host of issues including fraud, blacklisting and regulatory concerns.