Email verification, also known as email validation, plays a crucial role in maintaining a healthy and effective outbound sales campaign.
By verifying email addresses, businesses can ensure that their messages reach the intended recipients, improve deliverability rates, and enhance overall outreach success.
Uptics understands the significance of email verification and provides users with robust features to streamline this process within their sales automation workflows.
This article will cover the following:
What is Email Verification?
Why is Email Verification Important?
What are the Email Validation Responses?
What email validation responses are safe to send to?
How to use the different Uptics Email Verification Features?
Bulk Email Verification
Email Verification Sequences
Automated Email Verification
Global Account Level Automated Email Verification Settings
Sequence Level Automated Email Verification Settings
How can I check the validation status of my records?
Email verification is the process of verifying the authenticity and validity of an email address.
It involves checking if an email address exists, is active, and is capable of receiving messages by checking the syntax for the existence of the domain and performing a simple mail exchange (SMTP) check.
Email validation does not guarantee that an email address is actually in use or that the person providing the address is the owner of that address. It is often used to ensure that a user has entered their email address correctly before sending them an email or to prevent invalid email addresses from being added to a mailing list.
Validating email addresses is important for businesses because it allows them to:
Prevent (or minimize) Bounced Emails: Validating email addresses helps to identify and remove invalid or non-existent addresses from your contact lists. These addresses often result in bounced emails and can negatively affect your sender reputation, potentially leading to blacklisting and poor deliverability rates.
Improve Deliverability: Maintaining a clean and accurate email list ensures that your messages reach the intended recipients' inboxes and avoids being flagged as spam. By removing invalid addresses, your emails are more likely to be delivered successfully, maximizing the impact of your outreach efforts.
Enhance Sender Reputation: Email verification prevents sending emails to spam traps and known bad domains, which can harm your sender reputation. By maintaining a high-quality email list, you can build trust with internet service providers (ISPs) and achieve better inbox placement rates.
Reduced Costs: Email validation can help reduce the cost of sending emails by removing invalid email addresses from your mailing list. This can help to decrease the number of bounced emails and lower the cost of your email service.
There are several different email validation response codes that can be returned, depending on the service or tool that is being used.
Keep in mind that different validation services might use different codes and wording but the general meaning behind the code should be the same.
Some common codes and their meanings include:
Valid: This indicates the address is properly formatted and appears to be valid. The email address has passed all the checks of the email verifier, including syntax, domain, mail server, etc. Most importantly, it has confirmed that the mailbox exists. Emails sent to a valid email address are very likely to be delivered.
Invalid: This indicates that the email address is not valid, either because it is improperly formatted or because the domain or email address does not exist.
Catch-All: This indicates the address is valid, but the domain is configured to accept all emails sent to it. which makes it difficult to know if it is actually in use. A "Catch-all" email address is a mailbox that will "catch" any and all emails that are addressed to the domain that do not exist in the mail server. This means that whether or not the email address to which you are sending exists, the email will be received in the catch-all mailbox. It's a fallback mechanism to ensure no email sent to the domain gets lost, even if the specific address isn't valid.
Unknown: This indicates that the verification service was unable to determine the status of the address.
Spamtrap: This indicates that the email address is a known "spam trap" used to identify and block unsolicited emails.
Abuse: This indicates that the email address is used by companies to report fraudulent or spam behavior coming from their domain.
Do Not Mail: This indicates that the email address is used just for sending transactional emails and not receiving emails.
For more information about the different email validation responses, check out the article inside our Help Center: What do the different Email Validation statuses mean?
Valid and Catch-all are both generally safe to send to, but the catch-all responses do pose a higher risk than the valid responses. Below we will discuss this in a bit more detail.
The higher risk comes in with catch-all responses for email marketing efforts because they tend to have lower engagement rates and higher bounce rates.
Plus, lots of catch-all email servers are configured to double as spam traps, which can lead to your domain being blacklisted.
The bounce rate of catch-all emails can vary significantly and it is difficult to provide a specific percentage. This is because the bounce rate is influenced by numerous factors, including the management policies of the recipient's email server, the quality of your email list, and more.
In some cases, catch-all email servers may accept all incoming mail initially, but then later delete or bounce messages to nonexistent or inactive addresses.
In other situations, the catch-all email server might be set up to deliver all messages to a specific mailbox.
Depending on these factors, catch-all addresses can have a higher bounce rate than normal, in the range of 20-50% or even more, but this can vary widely. Given the uncertainty and potential for high bounce rates, many businesses choose to exclude catch-all addresses from their email campaigns to protect their sender reputation.
Uptics provides users with three powerful email verification features to ensure accurate and effective outreach:
Bulk Email Verification
Email Verification Sequences
Automated Email Verification
Uptics allows you to perform bulk email verification effortlessly. Once validated, you will be able to use this data to segment the leads you wish to send to based on their email validation statuses.
Bulk Email Validation can be performed by taking the followings steps:
Select the records you'd like to validate from any Contact List page using the checkboxes on the left side of the page. Note: you may narrow down the list you'd like to validate by selecting any existing smartlist or running filters prior to the bulk validation.
Select All on the left side of the blue Bulk Action Banner.
Select the 'Email Validation LookUp' action.
Enter the number of records you are attempting to validate.
Select the 'Submit' button.
Once validated, you will receive an in-app notification in the upper right-hand corner that the bulk action has been completed.
Uptics offers an Email Verification Sequence step within the sequence builder to use email validation as an automated workflow.
To utilize the Email Verification Sequences feature:
Begin by either creating a new sequence, or going into an existing sequence, and proceed to the Sequence Steps and Builder page.
Click the Plus sign to add a new step.
Click on Workflows.
Click Validate and the validations will begin to occur as contacts enter the sequence based on your Sequence Settings.
This feature automates the email validation process based on specified criteria when you enroll your contacts into a sequence automatically via SmartList, or when you manually add contacts to a sequence.
By saving filters as a smartlist, contacts can be automatically enrolled in a sequence that performs an email validation step before initiating outreach. This streamlines the workflow and eliminates the need for manual bulk email verification.
You could either use the workflow step as a freestanding sequence which allows you to only enroll those prospects falling within your approved email validation statuses into your actual live campaigns, or you could set an auto-unenrollment smartlist filter to unenroll those contacts who fall outside of the email validation statuses you are comfortable sending to.
Uptics' automated email verification feature ensures that only validated emails and approved verification statuses are used for sending.
If an email address has not been validated, the system automatically performs validation before sending the message for any emails sent via Sequence or Bulk Email Action. Additionally, if a recipient's email has already been validated, the system will re-validate it if it hasn't been validated in the last 30 days, ensuring ongoing accuracy.
Users can configure the settings at both the Global Account Level and the Sequence Level, specifying which validation statuses are considered acceptable.
The Global Email Validation Settings will allow you to determine the following, by default, when sending emails from your sequences or via bulk action:
If you'd like Uptics to validate all email addresses prior to sending (Uptics will validate every time if an email hasn't been validated in the last 30 days).
Limit email sends to certain email addresses based on the respective email validation status codes that return.
To access and adjust your Global Account Level Automated Email Validation Settings:
Proceed to your Profile icon in the bottom left-hand corner, click, and select 'Settings'.
Click on Email & Phone, then expand the Email Validations section, and you will see the Settings.
To validate all email addresses prior to sending, turn on the toggle (it will be blue if it is turned on).
Under the Only Send Emails To section, choose the returned status codes that you would like emails sent to from Uptics. Sending emails to email addresses with "valid" and "catch-all" status codes are recommended, however, you can add in whatever other status codes you'd like. Please note: sending emails to addresses with status codes other than "valid" or "catch-all" may increase the risk of your emails being flagged as spam or hurting your IP reputation.
The Sequence Email Validation Settings will allow you to adjust your settings if you'd like them different than your default (or Global Account Level Settings as discussed above).
To access and adjust your Sequence level Automated Email Validation Settings:
Begin by either creating a new sequence, or going into an existing sequence, and proceed to the Sequence Settings page.
Proceed to the Sequence Settings page.
To validate all email addresses prior to sending, turn on the toggle (it will be blue if it is turned on).
Under the Only Send Emails To section, choose the returned status codes that you would like emails sent to from Uptics. Sending emails to email addresses with "valid" and "catch-all" status codes are recommended, however, you can add in whatever other status codes you'd like. Please note: sending emails to addresses with status codes other than "valid" or "catch-all" may increase the risk of your emails being flagged as spam or hurting your IP reputation.
There are many ways you can check the email validation statuses of your contact records within Uptics:
Contact Details Page
Contact List Page
Run Email Validation Filters
Sequence Stats Page - Email Validations
To check the Email Validation Status for a particular contact record, you can open up the Contact Details Card by clicking into any contact and hovering over the icon to the right of their name.
You can add the Email Validation property to be viewable on your List Page by customizing columns.
You can run filters on your Contacts Pages to query groups of records that have certain statuses you are looking for. These lists can be used and saved as SmartLists to enroll into other channel outreach sequences, to export, or for anything else you may need to query this information for.
Lastly, your sequence stats page will also show this information on a high level for the sequence when you use the Automated Email Verification feature. This table will let you know what percentage of your list falls under each email validation status, and can be helpful in determining your overall list quality (in terms of email validation).
Email verification is a vital component of successful sales outreach and email marketing campaigns.
Uptics offers comprehensive email verification features, including bulk email verification, email verification sequences, and automated email verification, which help businesses validate and maintain a clean email list.
By ensuring that messages reach the right audience and maintaining a strong sender reputation, Uptics empowers users to optimize their outreach efforts and achieve better deliverability rates.
With these features at your disposal, you can focus on engaging with qualified leads and nurturing valuable customer relationships.
