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If you're among the 60% of businesses spending $51 to $1,000 (or more) monthly on email marketing, those invalid addresses are costing you a pretty penny.
We’re talking higher bounce rates, decreased engagement, spam complaints, low deliverability, and even the big B — the risk of being blacklisted.
The solution? Email validation.
Just because you have stored an email address in your CRM, like Salesforce, or your email marketing tool, such as Mailchimp or Marketo, doesn't mean that it's an actual deliverable email address. You need to be able to validate email addresses prior to hitting send!
What is Email Validation?
Email validation is the process of confirming whether an email address is correct, error-free, and has a deliverable mailbox.
Jake's got cake on his fingers, Susie recently got a new company email, and Gemma doesn't want you to have their personal information.
The result is the same: an invalid email address.
And you don’t really want to send out emails to addresses that won't reach your intended recipients, do you?
That's where email validation steps in to save the day.
Email validation improves your data quality by removing temporary or invalid emails. (Bye bye, pesky bugs.)
Why Email Validation?
Email validation tightens your marketing efforts, and protects your sender reputation.
Let's say you're running an online clothing store and you've just launched a new promotion offering 20% off on all summer dresses.
You've spent time crafting the perfect email campaign announcing this promotion to your subscribers.
However, due to a typo in one of the email addresses on your list, instead of sending the email to "jane.doe@example.com," you accidentally send it to "jane.do@example.com."
So, Jane Doe never receives the email. And you miss out on the opportunity to drive traffic to your store and increase sales.
Worse - someone else named Jane Do (who uses jane.do@example.com and didn’t sign up for your mailing list) receives your email. She may end up marking your email as spam.
Either way, consider this — if a simple misspelling in one email address equals a dead-end, what happens if you’ve got millions of rows of emails in your database you don’t know are valid?
Therefore, it’s best to validate your emails. Before running a marketing campaign. Here are a few reasons why email validation is important:
- Saves money: Many email platforms charge based on your mailing list size. Why pay to send to dead-end addresses?
- Protects your sender reputation: High bounce rates and spam complaints are red flags for email providers. Email validation keeps your list clean, protecting your reputation.
- Eliminates hard bounces: This is when the email boomerangs back to your mailbox because the recipient's email either no longer exists, is temporary or fictitious, or was deactivated. (Keep in mind that many people sign up for subscription services for a free trial with a disposable email.)
- Decreases spam complaints: The acceptable industry standard for spam complaints is 1 in every 1,000 messages. That’s 0.1%. (Tougher than Harvard’s acceptance rate.)
- Reduces your chances of being blacklisted: Once you’re blacklisted, the server won’t accept your requests, even important ones like confirmation or transactional emails.
- Increases engagement: By having only active, interested subscribers on your list, your open rates and click-throughs will skyrocket!
Another benefit? Validating your email list provides insight into your list's overall health. As you analyze your list, you’ll learn what percentage is deliverable, how many addresses are catch-all addresses, and more. Then, with this data, you can plan your email strategy better.
Before you add subscribers to your mailing list, it’s important to validate the emails in your database at two key moments: when a lead converts into a new subscriber, and immediately after a lead signs up to your mailing list.
But who has the time to toil away manually checking so many email addresses?
Gigasheet lets you validate email addresses in bulk.
Let us show you how.
How to Validate Emails in Bulk Using Gigasheet and LeadMagic
Gather Your Email List
The first step is to gather your email list. The easiest thing to do is export from your CRM or marketing automation tool.
However, if you use Salesforce or Hubspot, avoid the hassle of exporting and uploading your email list by connecting directly with Gigasheet. Simply hit New+ and Data Connectors. Authenticate the system and then you can schedule a refresh so that the data is available when you need it.
Gigasheet can sync entire Salesforce objects, or choose your favorite report for scheduled imports.
How to Run the LeadMagic Email Validation Enrichment
- Upload or import your customer emails to Gigasheet - in a spreadsheet file.
- Click “Enrichments” from the top menu.
- Scroll down and click “Email Validation” enrichment. Or you can just search for it.
- Select the column (with emails) to apply the enrichment. For example, my emails are in column A, so I’ve chosen ‘A’ from the drop-down menu here. Then, click “Add.”
- Once you've added the enrichment to the column, click “Test.”
- And finally, click “Apply.”
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And et voila!
We have here, in just a matter of seconds and a few clicks, validated email addresses under the “Email Status” column.
You can filter out invalid emails using Gigasheet’s filtering feature. And export the list of valid emails in the form of a CSV.
The best part about using Gigasheet is that - our platform can handle very large datasets (we're talking one billion rows!)
So you can validate emails in bulk without breaking a sweat. Plus, it’s automated and codeless.
So, even if you don’t have an in-house tech team, you don’t have to play email roulette with invalid addresses.
But wait, there’s more.
Gigasheet goes one step further and helps you spot catch-all email addresses. Catch-all email accounts are email addresses that receive all emails sent to a particular domain name — yes, even the invalid ones.
The problem is that most catch-all email accounts are set up to accept emails to invalid addresses temporarily. Then, the user has the choice to bounce them back. And you’re left with the same problem — a hard bounce that harms your sender reputation. No bueno.
Below, see how one of the email addresses on the list has a Walmart domain and Gigasheet has correctly identified it as a ‘catch_all.’
You can go ahead and remove the ‘invalid’ and ‘catch_all’ email addresses from your list for a clean and accurate dataset.
Next, export the validated data from Gigasheet and integrate it with your CRM system.
Then, by analyzing the new, clean data, your sales team can track email performance metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. They can also confidently re-engage inactive subscribers knowing that your emails will reach real recipients!
Press Send With Confidence
Never again will you have to worry about your sender reputation with Gigasheet on your side.
No more getting lost in the trenches of manual labor sifting through the validity of millions of rows of emails.
Sign up for Gigasheet for a squeaky-clean email list that’ll bring in the deals! You'll be glad you did (and so will your budget).
The ease of a spreadsheet with the power of a database, at cloud scale.
