It is estimated that 30% of email lists turnover (become inactive) per year. Simply divide 30% by 12 months, and you will realize that upwards of 3% of your list could be deprecating each month. Sadly, a list generated from an event last week will already have some invalid email addresses. That means you need to update your email lists before you enter them into your marketing automation or email sending platform—so that you don’t negatively affect your email deliverability rate and compromise your sender reputation.

So how do you clean up lists before you load them? The best way is use an email validation service. They are easy and inexpensive (usually between .005 and .008 cents per email), and the best way to maintain the quality of the lists going into your email systems—or to validate a list you haven’t emailed in awhile (it happens!).

How to Interpret the Results of Email Validation Services

About nine different email validation services are available, and they all do approximately the same thing. They vary in their ease of loading data and understanding their reports. Here’s the ones we’re aware of in no particular order:

• Kickbox
• Snov.io
• ZeroBounce
• NeverBounce
• FindThatLead
• BriteVerify (by Validity)
• Bounceless
• Voila Norbert
• Hunter.io

The two we’re most familiar with and like a lot are NeverBounce and BritevBerify (by Validity). Once you load your list into either of these tools, you’ll almost instantly get a report showing the quality of the list. The report shows in a dashboard that gives you an idea of the list overall health, and then each email address is given a value. NeverBounce and BriteVerify have slightly different values, so we’ll talk about them separately:

NeverBounce

The dashboard report for NeverBounce looks like the image below (Figure 1). It gives you an overall report of how many emails were Valid, Accept All (Unverifiable), Unknown, Disposable, and Invalid. We explain what those values mean below.

Figure 1.

NeverBounce report dashboard.

BriteVerify (by Validity):

The dashboard report for BriteVerify looks like the image below (Figure 2). It gives you an overall report of how many emails were Valid, Invalid, Unknown or Accept All. The values are very similar but a bit simpler than NeverBounce, which we like because quite frankly the extra detail in NeverBounce results isn’t that useful. We will explain what those values mean below.

Figure 2.

Briteverify report dashboard.

What the Deliverability Values Mean for Both NeverBounce and BriteVerify

When you get your list back from either of these services an “email status” column will be added to the list giving each email a deliverability value. When we first starting using the tools, the values seemed a little confusing to us and frankly hard to get clarity from their websites, so we’ll put a definition for the values for you below to save you time and aggravation. This will guide you on which emails to keep and which ones to think about not sending … or sending very carefully.

• Valid
• A valid email address has been verified as a real email that is currently accepting mail.
• SAFE—These emails exist and have been verified for safe sending.

• Invalid
• An invalid email address has been verified as a bad recipient address that does not exist or is not accepting mail. Invalid emails will result in a bounce.
• DON’T SEND—These emails do not exist and are not safe for sending.

• Disposable
• Disposable emails are temporary accounts used to avoid using a real personal account during a sign-up process. Common providers of disposable emails include Mailinator, Guerilla Mail, AirMail, and 10 Minute Mail.
• DON’T SEND—These emails are fake or temporary emails and are not safe for sending.

• Accept All (Unverifiable)
• This is also known as a “catch all”. This is a domain-wide setting where all emails on this domain will be reported as an “accept all”. There is no definitive way to determine whether this email is valid or invalid.
• An accept all address is commonly used in small businesses to ensure a company receives any email that has been sent to them, regardless of typos. Additionally, these are also found in larger government, medical and educational organizations. Oftentimes these are in fact valid emails. However some organizations may utilize this setting as a security feature to prevent unsolicited emails.
• SAFE—If you have a dedicated email server with your own IPs, accept all emails may be safe for sending dependent on the overall health of your list.
• DON’T SEND—If you use a third party email provider that requires a bounce rate below 4%, these emails are not safe for sending.

• Unknown
• We are unable to definitively determine this email’s status. This email appears to be OK, however the domain and/or server is not responding to our requests. This may be due to an issue with their internal network or expired domain names. Unknown addresses are checked up to 75 times before this result code is given.
• SAFE—If you have a dedicated email server with your own IPs, unknown emails are normally safe for sending.
• DON’T SEND—If you use a third party email provider that requires a bounce rate below 4%, these emails are not safe for sending.

The “accept all” and “unknown” emails are the two grey areas marketers struggle with the most because they can make up 10 to 15% of any given database validation effort. We’re often asked our opinion on what to do with those. The easy answer is don’t send them. The nuanced answer is you can try sending them little by little by breaking them into small bits such that if they all bounced your undeliverability rate for that email campaign would not exceed 10%. That takes some reverse math to figure out how big of an overall good deliverable email list to mix your questionable emails into. You have to decide whether it’s worth the effort and risk.

With email list verification tools like we’ve discussed here you can overcome email list churn and improve your deliverability. You might even be able to revive some lists that may have laid dormant during the pandemic and start emailing like a champ again. The tools are out there. Go for it!

by Laurie Beasley

Need help with your email lists or email marketing? Contact us.

The post How to Use Email Validation Services—and Understand their Results appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

A company which makes Product Management software asked us to help them re-design their email template. Their old template felt to them like it wasn’t organized well with several separate, disparate sections. It also didn’t follow mobile aware and mobile responsive email marketing best practices. We wanted to modify the template to do the following.

1. Show off their clean brand identity.
2. Make sure the imagery would appeal to their target audience.
3. Re-design the template to be more compatible with desktop and mobile viewing.
4. And, simplify the design to bring the reader down through the email.

Making the New Template Compatible with Multiple Email Browsers

Designing an email is much more complicated than designing a web page if you’re trying to make it effective on as many email browsers as possible. With a web page you only need to worry about five major internet browsers. For emails you have to worry about the display on over 13 email browsers.

This is the first thing we wanted our client to remember

In the desire to have a mobile aware and mobile responsive email, you should not forget about optimizing for desktop browsers. Especially if you’re mailing to B2B prospects like they were. Emails viewed on smartphones experience significantly less conversions than emails viewed on the desktop. We theorize that folks skim emails on mobile and actually read the emails on desktop. Therefore, they may be induced to click or buy when they read the value proposition more thoroughly.

Here’s the second thing to remember

Some desktop browsers block images by default. Including Outlook, web viewers such as Yahoo!, and mobile viewers such as Android. So if your email has multiple images in it and the recipient hasn’t manually downloaded them, they will not be seen. There will be white boxes with alt tags replacing images, just like the email example below. We don’t feel an email can be effective if the offer is obscured mostly in white boxes. Further, after optimizing client email for all browsers, including Outlook, removing and/or repositioning images, they’ve consistently seen a 1-3% increase in click through.

Should I Optimize for Outlook?

Some may wonder if Outlook is that prevalent any more. It has certainly seen a falloff in the percentage of email viewers since the introduction of smartphones. However, Outlook still has around 8% of all email views and a significant percentage of B2B viewers reading their emails on their desktops at work.

According to Litmus, the list below shows the top ten email clients. Apple iPhone, Gmail, and Apple iPad hold the top three spots. However, Outlook, Outlook.com, Yahoo!, and Android devices (all which block images by default) is 21.3% of all email readership . You certainly should want to optimize your emails for that high a percentage of email viewers!

1. Apple iPhone: 33.0%
2. Gmail: 15.8%
3. Apple iPad: 11.6%
4. Android: 10.3%
5. Apple Mail: 7.6%
6. Outlook: 6.7%
7. Yahoo! Mail: 3.0%
8. Outlook.com: 2.1%
9. Windows Live Mail: 1.3%
10. Thunderbird: 0.7%

Making the New Mobile Aware and Mobile Responsive Email Template

Our client was concerned about making their emails look good on mobile. The reason: the high percentage of emails viewed on smartphones today, per the chart above. There are two methods for making emails mobile optimized: Mobile Aware and Responsive Design.

Mobile Aware is when you make simple improvements in the design to make sure it renders well on mobile. This means starting off with a narrower email, larger text, and larger buttons so that when they shrink down to a smartphone, the screen still looks good.

Mobile Responsive Email Design is when you deliver a customized mobile experience with special design and code using media queries. Beware, not all mobile email browsers support media queries, as the chart below shows.

Source: Loren McDonald, “Email is Your Largest Mobile Channel”, IBM Marketing Cloud 

Mobile Aware and Mobile Responsive Email Design for Pardot

For our Product Management client, we wanted to make the email template as easy for multiple worldwide marketing managers to use in their Pardot system (part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud) as possible. This meant weighing the tradeoffs of the simplicity of Mobile Aware design versus the complexity of Responsive design. We didn’t anticipate the need for re-stacking of columns or eliminating elements that a typical eCommerce email might require.

This template is an event invitation, so the design didn’t need to support complex content areas. So we chose to make the new design Mobile Aware with a single column layout, making editing and testing as easy as possible. In Mobile Aware the email tends to start off narrower (about 600 pixels, vs. a 900- to 1200-pixel wide standard email design). And, it has large enough fonts and buttons so that when it scales down to a smartphone it is still very readable.

Mobile Aware Design on Devices

On desktop or laptop computers, Mobile Aware emails still fill the majority of the viewing pane and are easy to read. On tablet and mobile devices, the 600-pixel wide Mobile-scales down slightly. This is because the design anticipates the need for larger buttons and fonts. The elements are still readable and the design provides a comfortable user experience.

We also wanted to make sure that the headline was readable whether images were blocked or not, and so we moved the headline to the top. You’ll see that we made the image take up less vertical space than their original email template This allowed room for more information on the event. By using a thoughtful approach to image selection and cropping, the new size saved space while supporting the message to the audience.

The Call-to-Action (CTA)

We also made sure there were Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons in several locations in the email as someone would scroll down. We’ve observed that mobile email readers tend to click on links at the top and bottom of emails more than the middle ones. You need to be sure that actions are possible all through the email.

How to Present the Company Overview

We created a section in a box at the base of the body area to support and set apart a brief overview about the company. This allowed a reader to easily learn more without interrupting the main email message.

The Winning Results

In conclusion, by implementing mobile aware and mobile responsive email best practices we were able to create a new template worldwide marketing managers could easily use. As a result, they saved time in the creation of new email programs. By making sure all copy is scaled to be readable and images are sized appropriately for the mobile environment, we were able to improve the prospect reader’s experience. Thus, making it easier for them to register for the event.

Read more about leveraging email campaigns with direct mail here.

 

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