5 Best Ways to Build a Valid Email Address List
Individual email addresses are worth nearly $50 to businesses, each. Imagine if the emails those businesses send end up in spam folders or they are never delivered. That’s a lot of money to lose. More importantly, it affects email deliverability and is likely to result in poor ROI.
To achieve a higher email deliverability rate, building a valid email address list is critical. It refers to gathering the right email addresses; addresses that are structured correctly, active, and verified.
How do I build a valid email list? The answer lies in double-opt-ins, verified recipients, and regular hygiene. The most important of the three is list-cleaning. At Campaign Refinery, our clients get access to an automated list-cleaning feature that detects invalid email addresses and removes them, but more on that later. Now, let’s go through helpful information about building a valid email address list and the importance of domain validation for senders.
Table of Contents
- What is a Valid Email Address List?
- Building a Valid Email Address List: 5+1 Best Methods
- Why is Email Domain Validation Important For Senders?
- A Sophisticated Way to Build a Valid Email Address List
What is a Valid Email Address List?
Every day, millions of customers receive tons of unsolicited emails they didn’t sign up for. That means their addresses somehow ended up on lists traded around the internet. Although it may not seem like a big deal, buying such email lists and emailing without consent is a dreadful idea — it’s spammy behavior, illegal in many regions, and soon even more restricted from Gmail and Yahoo services. The best way to steer clear of spamming is to build a valid email address list.
A valid email address list consists of active email addresses; and these email addresses belong to subscribers who willingly signed up to receive your emails. These are the only email addresses you should ever use in email marketing.
A valid email address has two components:
- Username,
- Domain name.
For example: username@domainname.com
Despite a huge number of linguistic variations, not all email address formats are acceptable, and usually, there are specific requirements to meet.
| Component | Syntax Requirements | Valid Email Address Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Username | Latin CharactersNumbers (0-9)Underscores, periods, and dashes. | stephen.sam@domain.com sarah_parker55@domain.com jen-joe656@domain.com |
| Domain name | Must contain two characters: .com, .org, .cc Latin characters (a-z)Numbers (0-9)Dashes (not to be used at the beginning or end). | fills@domain.org doe@mail-provider.cc jane@companywebsite.com |
Note: At Campaign Refinery, we know the importance of sender reputation; that’s why we insist our clients use valid email address lists and have a strict policy against spam. Accounts with spam complaints above 0.1% will be automatically suspended. In line with this policy, cold emailing is aprohibited.
It can take a long time to build a list of valid email addresses. To help you out, we’ve compiled the best approaches to help you deal with the complexities.
Building a Valid Email Address List: 5+1 Best Methods
Using a valid email address list helps increase trust in your business. When you validate subscribers’ email addresses, your emails reach the right people at the right time. Additionally, you can be certain that your email lists are verified and clean.
1. Obtain Permission — Opt-in and double opt-in
Subscribers opt out or mark emails as spam when they haven’t signed up to receive your emails and still keep receiving them. These incidents occur because they weren’t presented with any opt-in options, the best one being the double opt-in forms.
Obtaining permission to send your emails to a recipient’s address is a critical step in email marketing. Once people sign up to your list, an automated sequence will send them the confirmation link adding another step as an additional layer of consent.
2. Email Address Validation
Even when the recipients’ email addresses are formatted correctly, it doesn’t mean they are valid. It’s possible that they are inactive or the email provider has shut down all operations. In this case, the best solution is to check if the email address is active on the internet through a process called email validation.
The email validation process gives you insights into the recipients’ domain status, so MX records and syntax checks of the email address should be obligatory. Not validating recipients’ email addresses can make it challenging to grow email lists the right way.
3. Use Email Validation Tools
When performing manual checks, testing a single email address is easier than testing bulk addresses. To test a single address, send an email to a specific address and wait for the status.
However, bulk testing can become complicated due to a larger list and email infrastructure issues. Under these circumstances, using an email validation tool will be the best choice. It’s a one-step process, and these tools are quicker in validating email addresses.
4. Monitor Engagement
Engagement refers to the percentage of open rates, click-through rates, spam complaints, and click-to-open rates on emails. Except for spam complaints, a higher percentage in the key performance indicators (KPI) indicates higher ROI.
Monitoring these metrics will give you a glimpse into the delivery rates, allowing you to identify inactive email addresses. For example, if your open rates are low, a possibility is that the emails haven’t been delivered because of invalid email addresses.
5. Clean up and Update the Email List
Email lists are your most valuable asset. Having a clean and updated email list means more engagement and higher ROI. Cleaning your lists starts with removing invalid email addresses, correcting typos, and eliminating role addresses. It also helps to remove merged or duplicate email addresses (people who have signed up twice).
Through this process, two important steps are:
- Respecting your recipients and allowing them to unsubscribe easily so they will remove themselves at will.
- Identifying the inactive addresses that need to be removed and deleting them from the list.
6. Use Campaign Refinery’s Automatic List Cleaning Feature
Cleaning your email lists removes unwanted and old email addresses, keeping your list fresh and relevant. We understand the importance of email list quality and the sophistication of its maintenance, especially if you’re a large sender. That’s why we created the automatic email list-cleaning feature that removes harmful emails before sending them.
Campaign Refinery clients report an increase in deliverability rates of up to 6x using this feature.
We believe the tips above will assist you in developing a useful email address list. If you prefer working on your own, we have more reasons to tell you about the importance of email domain validation.
Why is Email Domain Validation Important For Senders?
Sender’s domain validation is a critical component to establish reliability as a sender. While you need to perform checks on recipients’ email addresses, it’s equally important to validate your domain for increased ESP authority.
Here are additional reasons why email domain validation is important:
- Higher deliverability: Validating your domain ensures your emails reach your customers, ensuring higher deliverability, while keeping your sender’s reputation clean.
- Engagement: Higher deliverability is a result of having lower spam complaints and a better domain reputation. All of which happens when you validate your email domain.
- Compliance: When you are a large-volume sender, validating your email domain helps maintain a good sender reputation, and adheres to GDPR. It also prevents your domain from phishing attacks and data breaches.
- No blacklists: Validated email domains will almost never see the dark of blacklists or spam folders. You’ll also be able to manage bounce rates and improve the performance of your campaigns.
- Increase in trust: When your domain is not validated, there’s a high chance ESPs and ISPs will lose trust in you as a sender. By validating your domain, you will build credibility and keep the trust in place.
Domain validation and email list hygiene are some of Campaign Refinery core values, so we dedicated s team that ensures our clients’ domains are authenticated! As for the email list hygiene, our exclusive ‘automatic list-cleaning feature’ takes care of that, and here’s how.
A Sophisticated Way to Build a Valid Email Address List
Pruning your email list is challenging, especially when you have a huge list of recipients. But with the right features and tools, you can build a clean email list and get higher deliverability rates.
A simplified approach to this is Campaign Refinery’s automatic list-cleaning feature. Although we say ‘automatic’, our clients still have control over the cleaning process. By default, the email lists will be cleaned every 90 days from the last clean date. However, clients can also manually adjust the email cleaning schedule on the platform, anywhere between 30-180 days.
We hope that this post will assist you in building a valid email address list and improving your deliverability rates.
And to help your deliverability we present you with The Inbox Formula: a comprehensive guide on best practices and industry secrets that guarantee a clean email sending operation and improved deliverability.
Interested? You can get The Inbox Formula today completely free of charge!
We know it works — try it and let us know how much your open rates increased!
