Chapter 04.

Open, click, buy: how to boost email conversion rates on Black Friday & Cyber Monday

You know the feeling. You’ve spent weeks working on an email campaign: getting sign off to run a special offer, briefing a designer, a copywriter, and building the email into your CRM. Everything is good to go. Then you hit send and you’re instantly met with multiple bounce backs.

It’s an all-too-familiar situation for businesses across the globe. But it doesn’t need to be this way.

Here, we explore how email validation will ensure your marketing efforts don’t go to waste so you can reach those crucial sales targets this Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

What is email validation?

As well as verifying that an email is correct, email validation checks whether an address really exists and is able to receive incoming mail.

If an email address is mistyped, email validation software lets customers know at the point of entry so they get a chance to fix it before submitting.

Why do I need email validation?

There are over 4.26 billion email users worldwide. But research by Marketing Week indicates that over 60% of consumers have intentionally provided incorrect information when submitting personal details online, and a further 10% of email addresses entered into checkouts, sign up forms and internal systems are invalid.

And with email data degrading at a rate of 7% per year, you can see why marketers struggle with low open rates and conversions on their email campaigns.

Email validation ensures that emails are captured correctly at the point of entry. Allowing customers to free-type their email address without validation means you run the risk of collecting useless data, which can have a devastating impact.

The benefits of email validation

Increase email deliverability

More accurate emails in your database leads to an uplift in successful email marketing campaigns, more efficient onboarding for new customers and a decrease in fake registrations.

Eliminate hard bounces

Hard bounces mostly occur because the email address no longer exists, was a fictitious email address, or was closed by the user.

Reduce spam complaints

Best practice dictates that for every 5,000 email messages sent out you should receive less than five spam complaints.

Avoid blacklists

Getting blacklisted stops your messages (including vital transactional emails) from getting accepted by the server.

What type of email validation is right for my business?

Regex email validation

There are several issues with regex email validation. The main problem is that it’s extremely restrictive, failing to cater for rare email addresses. Characters such as !#$%&'*+-/=?^_`{|}~ are all valid, but not recognised by regex when used before the @ symbol, meaning any email address that includes these before the local string will not be recognised as valid.

Regex also fails to check several important factors, such as whether the email domain exists, and whether the user account exists.

Post email validation

A second option when it comes to email validation is post validation, or double opt-in, where an email is sent to the email address that was provided and the user then clicks through to confirm their email address. While this is obligatory in many European countries, if an email address is mistyped, the user won’t receive a confirmation email, meaning you will never capture the email address.

When it comes to selecting an effective email validation tool, checking the syntax is obviously an important characteristic. However, it shouldn’t be the main or only characteristic. Investing in a tool that conducts additional, rigorous checks in order for accurate and valid responses to be returned is essential and should not be disregarded.

Real-time email validation

To ensure an email address is valid, an email validation solution should also check that the domain exists, and it is able to receive inbound messages in real-time.

Real-time email validation is not only better from a user experience point of view, it also sends trust signals to your customers.

Batch email cleanse

Batch cleanse is a method that can be used to clean the email addresses you already hold in your database.

Customer data decays at a rate of 20% per year and it’s common for a user to register an email account only to never use it. So, regular checks can help to avoid incorrect data, which ultimately helps long term growth and efficiency.