If you are someone who has even the most basic foundation of what email marketing means, then you have probably already heard these terms before email verification, email validation and hygiene. Even if at first they seem to have the exact same meaning, these three procedures are differentiated by key elements that make them all crucial for your email marketing program. Here is everything you need to know and understand about the difference between email validation, email verification, and hygiene so that you can use them in order to create a successful email strategy.
Email Validation
Validation is what can be considered a full service, due to the fact that it consists of Validation, Verification, and Hygiene. Considering the fact that validation is the first pass at an email address evaluation, it is not consistently irrefutable by itself. There are further steps that need to be taken in order to make sure the concluding status of an email address, specifically verification and hygiene.
Email Verification
Verification represents the following step in the email evaluation procedure and the validation service. By now, the email address is analyzed against a number of historical data points from emails sent to that email address, such as:
- Transactional data
- Historical data
- Open data
- Bounce data
Verification aids you in the process of further concluding if the replay the server offered you was valid or invalid, but this relies greatly on the data utilized to inspect the email address.
Email Hygiene
The third and concluding step in the process of the validation service is Hygiene. This probably represents the term people are most familiarized with because of its frequent usage in the email marketing domain, and a lot of people would agree it is the most generally accepted term for a non-SMTP check. Hygiene is also responsible for analyzing the email’s historical data, but to be more specific, it checks its historical factors of risk, which could consist of the following:
- Is this a potential spam trap email?
- Is it a known complainer?
- Is it tied to a spam litigator?
- Does it pose a higher risk to email to?
As the market has developed over time, so have these three processes. But at the end of the day, the quality of data remains a critical element of finding new revenue.
Whether people realize it or not, there is a price tag attached to every email address in their database. How well a business manages the quality of those addresses can represent the difference between:
- A profit or a loss on the email marketing efforts;
- A lot of satisfied customers or a costly lawsuit;
- A lucrative holiday season or missed sales goals and irate executives
Concluding on email validation overall, if you have lists that are composed of thousands or millions, it is humanly impossible to go through each email address with a magnifying glass in order to fix disposables, false positives, slow response, forwarders, format errors, Unicode characters, bad MX or invalid emails by hand. Consequently, it would be highly advised that you search for email detection tools to remove spam traps or detect spam trap email addresses.
