When it comes to email list validation and email list verification, it can seem like any attempt to differentiate the two is little more than splitting hairs. Aren’t they basically the same? Tomayto, tomahto? Not exactly.
While it’s not exactly like comparing apples to oranges, email validation and email verification serve different but equally important roles in effective digital marketing and maintaining a clean email list. That’s why it’s important to understand how they relate and how they differ.
So stick around. Here’s a deeper dive into what is meant by the phrases “email validation” and “email verification,” along with a closer look at how each one makes email marketing for your business or organization a whole lot easier and more precise.
Email Validation: What it is and Why it’s Important
Also referred to as “email authentication,” email validation is a process that determines whether or not an email address is valid and deliverable in terms of its syntax and formatting. Validating an email involves checking an email address for typos (e.g. ensuring the domain name at the end of an email address is accurate such as gmail.com and not gmil.com or gmail.con; yahoo.com as opposed to yaho.com or yhoo.com, etc.), domain verification, mailbox existence, and other errors and issues that will affect deliverability.
In general, email validation does not require actually sending an email to validate and identify invalid email addresses. However, the email validation process will often query or ping the email server to make sure it exists.
When you’re working with a large number of email addresses, using an automation tool or an email validation service or email validation tool to validate email addresses saves valuable time and resources (while also cutting down on human error).
Benefits of Email Validation
Having the right email addresses in your data sets not only means you can communicate with leads, customers, vendors, and other stakeholders; it also provides benefits to your marketing efforts overall. Here are some of the benefits of email validation:
- Identifies invalid emails before they’re sent, which keeps deliverability rates of your overall list high and email bounce rates low
- Keeps invalid email addresses from cluttering up your email lists, so you have a more accurate picture of who you actually have contact information for
- Helps ensure your emails reach the intended recipients
- Protects you from sending communications to invalid email addresses that will result in hard bounces that can damage your sender reputation, affecting the deliverability of even your valid and verified email addresses
Email Verification: What It Is and Why It’s Important
Email verification takes the process of email validation and dials it in to make sure not only that the email domain exists, but also that the mailbox can accept incoming emails. Email verification also provides a boost to your email marketing campaigns by sussing out whether or not any email addresses in your list are unengaged or temporary email addresses — a common problem with free giveaways and trials that can result not only in failed lead capture, but can also yield inaccurate data.
If you don’t currently verify email addresses on your email list before you send out emails as a part of your marketing outreach, partner engagement, or customer success efforts, you’re reducing the effectiveness of your efforts and spending money to send emails into the void.
With email verification, a confirmation email is sent to the address in question, and the recipient then must open the email, click a link, or otherwise take some action to verify they own and use the email address. Email verification can also be employed in real-time in forms and on web pages to ensure accuracy, validity, and user engagement as people are entering their information.
Benefits of Verification
Here are some of the benefits of participating in an email verification process before sending out emails:
- Improved sender reputation. This will keep email service providers (ESPs) happy with your domain, which will equal high email deliverability rates
- Enhanced engagement rates. A verified email (especially one that required a double opt-in) will help ensure you’re reaching out to people who want to hear from you
- Can identify and rid your list of bot-generated addresses and email addresses associated with accept-all domains — notoriously low-quality email accounts
- Better data. You’ll see if your marketing messaging is off, or if you are just sending out too many emails to email addresses that haven’t been put through a verification and validation process
Key Differences Between Validation and Verification
As you can see, email validation checks and email verification checks have a lot in common, but they shouldn’t be combined, as each process provides value that will optimize your lists. Here’s a look at where the two processes overlap and where they differ:
Why Both Validation and Verification Are Critical
With email validation and verification, you can regain control over deliverability issues and other email marketing- and communication-related problems in a proactive way. Rather than waiting for problems to overwhelm you, you can clean your lists — and keep them clean — and ensure your efforts aren’t being impeded by bad addresses and inaccurate data.
Effective email hygiene requires both processes. Just utilizing email validation could mean a list without syntax errors and typos, but a statistically significant amount of abandoned, catch-all, or disposable email inboxes, which will skew your data and cost unnecessary spend. Just utilizing an email verifier can mean you miss syntax checks that could keep you from landing in a spam trap and on a blacklist.
Here’s a real-world look at how email hygiene can directly improve your campaign metrics:
When To Use Validation vs. Verification (Or Both)
Email validation is a great first step when gathering new email addresses from a signup form, gated content, social media giveaway, or other lead capture efforts. It’s also where you want to start when cleaning a bulk email list for the first time. Ensuring your initial data is valid makes a great launch pad for verification (and for further communication efforts).
Once validated, an email verification tool can ensure the inbox you’re targeting is engaged and safe to send to. From that point, making use of a verification tool in an ongoing fashion, to ensure engagement remains, should be used to both ensure a clean list and maintain a better ROI.
