Email address correction software and how it works

February 24, 2019

Email address correction software and how it works

Every marketer knows how important it is to run an email or outreach campaign for their business at least once using an email address correction software. Email marketing is a proven and best marketing method in introducing your business services to prospect leads and current customers.

The most important and very first step of your campaign is email address hygiene. It is crucial that the email list you have on-hand is 100% accurate to make your email campaign performance successful. This article will explore what’s behind email address scrubbing services and how they improve the results of email campaigns.

What is email address hygiene?

Email address standardization is an online service that allows marketers and businessmen to verify, cleanup a single email address, or a whole list of email addresses to make sure that the contacts exist, are working and valid.

These days, most email address hygiene concepts available are represented as online services due to the fact that it can easily be accessed anytime, anywhere and from any device. All marketers need is a stable internet connection that can be easily backed up and updated by the developer and provider of the service. However, the most significant reason is that you can use multiple stable servers for verification process and not just by using your own IP address(es).

How email verification works

Despite the fact that many people and marketers have heard about email verifiers and perhaps have applied for it in their business, merely all are still hazy in understanding the technical attributes of the service. We will explain to you how it works by expounding on the main technical features and verification steps that will enable you to quickly learn how email addresses are validated.

The Email address verification main features and validation steps:

Step 1: Syntax check - This is the primary feature, the initial step of validation for email address standardization services. Syntax check makes it possible to verify whether an email address is spelled correctly, if whether it has no spaces, commas, and all the @s, dots and domain extensions are in the right place.

Step 2: Domain check - The second step of the email address scrubbing process. It is by domain check that permits you to see if the domain name the email address is hosted is actually existing, registered and working properly on the hosting domain.

Step 3: Email ping - This is the most advanced step of email verification. Email ping is the technical and complex process of an email scrubbing service, pinging the exact email address with an EHLO message, then anticipates the response from the email server. The received server-response will validate the email address truly exists on the server and is active.

Reasons to verify emails

There are just A FEW RESONS AS TO WHY an email address might not be working, bounced back, or considered as invalid. It can be technical reasons, while some is related due to personal reasons. So, let us take a look at the most common reasons as to why you should always verify your email lists.

Changed of Email Provider.

Probably one of the most common factor. Like for example; a person used their email provider’s email service (a local one) and then switched to Gmail, or vice versa. Another one is if a person changed from one popular email provider to another. Most importantly, regardless if the first email address is still “active”, the first email address continues to be “active” even if a message sent to it will never be read.

Person switched position within the company.

In most companies, especially bigger ones, employees are provided different email address types according to their positions. Low-level employees, mid-level employees and C-level employees usually have different formats of email addresses, and if he or she is placed from a mid-level manager to a C-level decision maker, or from a hands-on specialist to a manager, the previous email address will instantly become invalid, thus making your email messages bounce.

Person changed jobs.

Another most known cause of undelivered messages, especially in B2B niches, wherein many specialists and decision-makers change careers once every few years. When a person leaves a business or resigns from the company, their email becomes unreachable or is simply redirected to the person that replaced them. Though your message may be delivered you won’t reach the individual you want to reach.

Domain is dead.

A basic reason and quite a technical one. If the website is unreachable, the domain is lifeless, or a mail server on the domain’s server is down, therefore, it is most likely that your message won’t be able to be delivered to its recipient. It is a very good heads-up that the company is out of business, so all you need to do is to filter out those email addresses from your list.

Public email provider is deceased or down.

If the email provider is out of business or the servers are down, therefore it is impossible to deliver your email message to its receiver. Online email providers can close business, while there are times when they just experience technical problems with servers (especially smaller email providers).

All reasons are quite different, and all of them are checked by using different technical mechanisms within an email address correction software. It’s important to double check your email verifier supports various verification algorithms such as syntax check, domain check and deliverability checks etc.