It is hard to imagine doing business today without email. A phone conversation or a live meeting might be more convenient at times. But when arranging a new deal with a prospective client, a large volume of correspondence is inevitably done via email — one of the reasons why it’s sometimes called the king of communication. Be it for interacting with many suppliers, conducting a marketing campaign, or as a tool for confirming thousands of online purchases, email’s mass communication capabilities just make it faster and easier. However, the nature of the channel also exposes it to various downsides.

The use of misspelled or fake email addresses, for example, is a problem that entrepreneurs can’t ignore. These can cause issues for a company, including bouncing marketing emails, abuses of a product’s trial period, and the inability to reset passwords. But there is a simple solution to this. Utilizing email verification can help your company verify the existence, validity, and quality of email addresses, preventing mistakes and fraud. Let’s now look at 5 circumstances where verification can work to your benefit.

Discourage freemium misuse

When offering a free trial of your product, you want to prevent people from taking advantage of the situation each month with a new email address. Unfortunately, the Internet is full of free disposable email providers which enable quick email creation at no cost. These services are used by consumers to apply for the same freemium plans repeatedly and avoid monthly payments.

Furthermore, because this type of address is only used to reapply, inboxes are not regularly checked and are useless from a marketing standpoint. With email verification, you can detect disposable emails upfront and require users to provide details from a more reliable email service provider.

Serve your customers

Verification is vital to protect your legitimate consumers as well. Simple spelling mistakes when signing up for a service can have serious ramifications. With wrong email addresses, customers are not able to reset their account and confirm their identity should they forget their password, something that has honestly happened to all of us.

Moreover, all further communications — e.g., newsletters, purchase confirmation, etc. — will be strained or not working with inaccurate addresses. In extreme cases, this could turn into a liability if a customer doesn’t receive their digital purchases, like concert or plane tickets.

Build dependable email lists

Using email verification while building your mailing lists reduces the risk of soft and hard bounces — instances in which an email does not get delivered because the recipient’s address doesn’t exist or the inbox is full. Bounces not only reduce deliverability rates and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, they also send a bad signal to email service providers, potentially affecting your sender reputation and your ability to reach subscribers in the future.

Understand subscribers better

By reducing the number of bounces and improving deliver ability, your email marketing results become more representative as you can get precise data on the effectiveness of your campaigns. Superior insights then allow you to identify what works best to boost conversion, create more targeted content, and, therefore, achieve higher sales and revenues.

Avoid spam traps

Spam traps are email addresses set up for detecting and preventing spammy behaviors. They are not used by anyone and are often concealed in the code of a web page, waiting to be picked up by email addresses harvesters. When these traps end up on an email list and start receiving communications, senders risk being blacklisted by internet service providers. You can avoid this by bulk verifying all email addresses in your mailing lists, detecting bad ones, and deleting them.

By using email verification, you can spare yourself from a multitude of communication troubles and ensure smooth business interactions with recipients and subscribers.

About the Author –

Jonathan Zhang is the founder and CEO of Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) — a data, tool, and API provider that specializes in automated threat detection, security analysis and threat intelligence solutions for Fortune 1000 and cyber-security companies. TIP is part of the Whois API Inc. family which is a trusted intelligence vendor by over 50,000 clients.