How to Verify Email Addresses for Cold Emails?
Ever wondered what will happen when you send emails to incorrect or non-existent email addresses? It will lead to bounces that can affect your sender reputation and email deliverability to a great extent. Moreover, mailing spam traps repeatedly can increase the chances of getting marked as spam. Therefore, it is important to verify email addresses for cold emails.
Using email verification tools, you can reduce bounce rates and remove spammy and invalid addresses that help your mailing list stay clean.
Why should you verify email addresses for cold emails?
Before finding how to verify email addresses, it is essential to know why you should not miss the verification step. So, here is a list of reasons,
1. Keeps bounces away
Bounces can be detrimental for any cold email campaign, as already mentioned above. A high bounce rate can make your ESP or email service provider block you. It is not what you want.
By using an email verification tool, you can filter out the invalid addresses from the list. By doing this, you will automatically bring down your bounce rate.
2. Improves sender reputation and email deliverability
The ESP decides the quality of your email based on your sender reputation. Each email account has a sender reputation score. When your sender reputation score is higher, your email deliverability will also be higher.
Sending emails to invalid or spammy addresses can make ESPs suspend your account. That is why you have to verify the email addresses on your list.
3. Gets better results from email campaigns
Keeping your mailing list free of invalid addresses can go a long way in improving the outcome of your email campaigns. When the bad addresses are removed from your list, your deliverability will improve, i.e., you are likely to hit the intended recipient’s inbox. It would increase the open rate of the emails as well as the reply rate. As a result, you can see an increase in the performance of your campaign.
How to Verify Email Addresses?
You can verify email addresses using two approaches: by sending emails and without sending emails.
Here are the two ways to verify emails for cold email by sending emails,
1. Send an email and check for bounces
One of the easiest ways to verify an email address is by sending an email to it. If it bounces, you can remove the email address from the mailing list to stop you from sending an email to it in the future. However, this method of verifying emails is not appropriate. It can severely ruin your metrics and impact your domain reputation.
2. Send a test email
A simple yet quick solution to verifying emails involves sending a test email from a dummy account.
When you get a hard bounce, you can remove the email address from your mailing list. As you send the email from a different domain name, you don’t have to worry about your reputation getting affected.
This method is relatively easy but has its pitfalls as well. Using it, you have to check for the responses manually, which is both annoying and time-consuming. The results of this approach are also not entirely accurate as your messages can end up in the spam folder.
That makes us move on to other ways of verifying emails.
Here are ways to verify emails for cold email without sending emails,
1. Checking the syntax of the email
The most common problems with email addresses are typographical and syntactical errors. You have to check for them manually and change them.
To understand syntax errors better, you should know what an email address looks like.
A standard email address has the 3 parts: a unique identifier, @, and a domain name.
Consider this address — xyz@abc.com.
In this email address, xyz is the email’s unique identifier, and it has a limit of 64 characters. You can use English letters in uppercase and lowercase, digits from 0–9, and special characters ! # $ & % ‘ * + — / = ? ^ _ ` | {
The @abc is the domain name. It can be something like @gmail.com or @salesblink.io.
It is crucial to check whether the email follows the above syntax, or else the emails will bounce back. There are also chances of typographical errors like @gmol.com instead of @gmail.com, which makes emails bounce back.
2. Ping the server
Another way of verifying email addresses without sending emails is by pinging the server. To carry out this check, you require a dedicated tool such as PuTTY for Telnet in Windows. While pinging the server is an accurate way of verifying email addresses, it is challenging and can negatively affect your system.
3. DNS Lookup technique
Using the DNS Lookup technique, you can check the domain authenticity. You can do so easily when you use the right tool. One such tool is MXToolbox DNS Check.
Here is how to use it,
- Open MXToolbox DNS Check.
- Enter the domain name you want to check in the text box and click ‘DNS check’.
You can see the hostname and DNS record details.
In case the details of the domain do not appear, it means the domain is not available.
This technique helps you determine whether the domain exists or not but cannot guarantee you 100% deliverability.
4. IP address lookup
Another way of checking the authenticity of an email address is by performing an IP address lookup. Using this technique, you get the IP details of a recipient’s email account.
First, you have to find the IP address of the recipient. Again you can use MX Toolbox for this purpose.
- Enter the email address of the recipient in the text box and click ‘MX Lookup’.
- A list of IP addresses connected to the email address will appear. You can select any of them.
Next, use tools available on the internet for your IP address lookup. Enter the IP address in a tool of your choice and get the IP details of the recipient’s email server. You can check everything in the result of the lookup, and if there is something weird, it can be a case of email spoofing or the email address being risky.
5. Using an email verification tool
While all of the above techniques of verifying email addresses seem to work, it is always better to have a dedicated tool that would carry out all the verification for you in one place. With an automated verification tool, you only need to enter the mailing list, and the tool will do the verification for you. When you want to verify emails for cold email, choose a tool that checks bulk addresses and provides you results super-fast. Doing so will save you a lot of time, and you can put it to better use.
Using SalesBlink’s email verification tool
SalesBlink is a sales outreach automation suite. It helps salespeople find leads, automates cold outreach and manages deals. It can take you from prospecting to outreach to closing in the blink of an eye.
The platform has an email verification tool that verifies your mailing list so that you can proceed with the outreach phase without getting worried.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can verify the emails using SalesBlink’s email verification tool.
- Click on ‘Email Verification’ under tools in the sidebar.
- Enter the email address you want to verify.
- The tool will let you know whether it is valid or not.
The delivery statuses that will appear in results after validation are valid, invalid, and risky.
The ‘valid’ category has deliverable email addresses that can receive emails from a sender.
The ‘invalid’ category has undeliverable email addresses that can’t receive emails from a sender.
The ‘risky’ category has catch-all addresses that catch emails sent to addresses that don’t exist in a domain.
You must send cold emails only to the valid contact to keep your sender reputation intact.
With our email verification tool, you can verify email addresses in bulk by dragging and dropping your mailing list in the form of a CSV file in the email verifier. It lets you verify 1000 emails in one attempt.
Our email verifier has 99% accuracy, which is good enough for reducing the email bounce rates.
You can refer to the following video for a comprehensive tutorial on how to use SalesBlink’s email verification tool-
When should you verify your mailing list?
Now that you know that you can verify your prospects’ email addresses using SalesBlink’s email verifier, you must be wondering how frequently you should validate your mailing list. Here’s when you should do the check,
1. Upon getting a new mailing list
If you have a brand new mailing list for your email campaign, you must verify it before proceeding. There is a high chance of having invalid contacts or malicious contacts that can tarnish your sender reputation and thereby your email deliverability. However, once you verify the emails and have only genuine addresses on your list, you can move ahead in the sales cycle.
Our email verifier has 99% accuracy, which is good enough for reducing the email bounce rates.
2. When there is an increase in bounce rate
If you see an increase in the bounce rate of your campaign and you have been using the email list for a long time, you should get it rechecked. When there are too many bounces, your email deliverability will get affected. Therefore, it is better to verify email addresses and get rid of invalid ones from your list.
3. Periodically
Periodic checking of the mailing list is essential. You have to do so quarterly or half-yearly because the email address on your list can become invalid with time. For example, when an employee resigns his job or gets promoted his email address changes. So, the one on your list would not be active anymore.
There are many such genuine reasons due to which emails turn invalid. Thus, it is up to you to check your list from time to time and remove bad addresses.
The Final Word
Email address verification is an essential step you should follow before you start your cold email campaign. It will prevent email bounces and keep you away from sending emails to malicious addresses. It would be best to use a reliable email verification tool that allows you to validate email addresses in bulk.
