How to Verify an Email Address for Cold Email Outreach
A handy tactic for freelancers who want to make money selling their services via cold emails.
Cold emailing is a powerful outreach method used by successful freelancers and small businesses to expand their network and connect with potential clients.
If you’re new to freelancing:
Cold email outreach is the process of sending out emails to a group of people with whom you have no prior contact for a specific end goal (eg. build a connection, sell your products or services, etc.)
The first step to cold emailing is gathering the emails of the people you want to reach out to. From here, most people jump straight to sending out emails, which is a huge mistake.
The second step you need to take is email verification.
Email verification is a process to confirm whether an email address actually exists.
Why You Should Verify an Email Address
You can choose to skip the email verification step and send an email to an address anyway. If it doesn’t exist, your email service provider (eg. Gmail) will let you know that your email wasn’t delivered. This is known as a “hard bounce”.
A hard bounce simply means your email failed to send because the address specified is invalid.
The more cold emails you send, the higher your chances of receiving hard bounces. The more hard bounces you get, two main things happen:
❌ You hurt your email deliverability. This means emails you send to “valid” addresses do not get delivered into your recipient’s inbox. They are automatically dropped in the spam section, where it is never read and later trashed.
❌ Your email account risks getting blocked. As your email deliverability suffers, you damage your sender reputation. From here, your email service provider could suspend your account, making it impossible to recover.
Top 3 Methods to Verify an Email Address
Before you hit send, here are 3 simple methods you can use to verify an email address.
They are not 100% perfect, but their accuracy gets you to about 95%, which is enough to drastically reduce your hard bounces.
1️⃣ Check for typos
This sounds obvious, yet it is often overlooked. By missing just one letter, you risk sending an email to an invalid address.
To ensure that an email address is correct:
👉 Double-check your text for typos
👉 Use spell-checking tools (eg. Grammarly)
👉 Read the address to yourself
Using this method on its own is not enough, because you still don’t know if an email is valid. However, if you are going to use the rest of the methods below, you need to have error-free email addresses.
Note: You can easily skip this step if you copied your email address directly from an email finder tool.
2️⃣ Use an email checker
With this method, all you need to do is plug in an email address into an email checker such as …
👉 Snov.io
…and get a validity result, which commonly falls under these categories:
📌 Green: This means valid, it is 100% safe to send.
📌 Yellow: This means uncertain, you may send at your own risk.
📌 Red: This means invalid, do not send.
Most email checkers have a “bulk email verifier” feature, which is helpful for quickly verifying long lists of email addresses.
3️⃣ Use Gmail
This method is very helpful if you want to quickly verify a single email address.
It can also be used alongside the email checker method above. If you get the “yellow” response, you can double check with Gmail to confirm if it’s safe to send.
Here’s how it works.
When you add an email address to Gmail and a profile photo appears, then it’s valid.
If a profile photo does not appear, you need to take a few extra steps.
Hover your cursor over the email you’ve entered into the address section, so that the pop-up box (shown in the screenshot below) appears.
Click on the Open in detailed view button.
If the Send message button has a blue color, then the address is valid.
That’s it!
Let me know in the comment section if you’ve ever tried this Gmail hack, and whether it worked for you.
Boost Your Cold Outreach Performance with Email Verification
By using the methods discussed in this post, you can drastically reduce hard bounces, maintain a good sender reputation, boost deliverability and the overall success of your cold email outreach.
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