Invalid email address is the ultimate reason for email not being delivered. Moreover, an invalid email address can cause a bounce. That’s why knowing how to fix an invalid email address is extremely necessary. Invalid email is a common problem in marketing campaigns. Sign-up lists sometimes get affected by this email invalid problem. It’s no big deal to clean up these problems, but it’s always recommended to learn the basics about whatever you’re working with.
We’ll start with the basics of invalid email addresses and get into the topic of how to fix an invalid email address later. Addressing the problem first will make the understanding process of the solution easier and more sensible.
What is an invalid email address?
‘Invalid email address’ is a self-explanatory term. An invalid address is an incorrect email address. As it’s incorrect for any reason, it doesn’t exist or causes the delivery to the wrong individual.
Most of the email lists contain a huge amount of invalid email addresses. It might surprise you that the number of invalid email addresses in a large-scale database can be varied from 5% to 30%. No matter how large or broad your email list is, 30% sounds like a big number that can hurt.
To plan your next email campaign accordingly and keep the delivery rate as high as possible, cleaning up invalid emails from your email bucket is extremely important. Let’s learn first how you can check if an email is valid or invalid.
How a Valid Email Looks Like
What does a legit email look like – that might be a question worth asking. An email basically contains three parts. These three parts of an email address are the local address, the domain name, the identifier of the domain.
Every part mentioned are factor checked by email validation services to check if an email is valid or invalid. Let’s have an example and understand as better as possible.
example@server.com
In this example, “example” happens to be the local address that is the name of a particular address stored into the domain server. “server” is the domain name, and “.com” identifies that domain name.
And yee, there is that “@” right before every domain name in every email which means “at-the”. So, the email we mentioned above would be read as ” example at the server dot com”. Every email contains these parts. Missing or mistyping any of them can result in an immediate invalid mail.
Why an Email Address Might be Invalid
You gathered some valuable email addresses and made a list. Good Job, mate. But remember that these are human-submitted email addresses. We, humans, are not robots. So, we make a few mistakes here and there. Might be a sad part for a campaign manager like you, but it’s true that the email submission form of yours, catches a lot of invalid email addresses.
But people making mistakes aren’t the only reason why an email might be invalid. We’ll surely learn how to fix an invalid email address. But first, let’s find out what’s causing the problem in the first place.
Typos
As a part of being human, typos are the most common reason for an email being invalid. Every letter and symbol is important when it comes to an email address. That’s why even an extra letter or a letter less of any typed email address can cause you to end up with an invalid email.
Typos are the most obvious reason for an invalid. The majority of the time, people tend to fill up asked mail as fast as possible. Hence there are invalid email addresses and unwanted problems for you to fix. If you are a Gmail/Gsuit user you can try autocorrect.
Change of Email
Another possible reason for that search result via email verifier being invalid can be the person you’re trying to reach changing their email address. Many people seem to enjoy changing their emails now and then. This way, they meant to keep their email addresses fresh & exclusive over time.
What these mood-changers do is trash the previous one and have a new one. Worst case scenario is they don’t even care to delete that unused and inactive email. A story of some whimsical and you end up with some email address that provides zero value at all.
Change of Position
Companies keep switching people from this position to that position. So, the company assigns their people’s email addresses that use the company’s server. Just a little promotion to the position or a change of position of work can cause an inactive email.
From every giant to startup, every company causes this chaos. And it ended up your task to clean this mess up.
Dead Domain
If the domain of a company is dead, then the connected emails are more likely to be the same as well. The email will count as invalid as there would be no domain to refer to.
If a domain is dead, it’s because either the company is out of business or the domain must be changed. If something like the company is dead happens to be the reason, then filtering out all other emails with the same domain can be a good step too.
Dead Email Provider or Server
It doesn’t matter if a domain is down or just gone for good. Both the effects cause the same consequences. When an email tries to reach that specific hosting server, it ends up being counted as invalid.
While surfing through your list, it’s a major concern to check whether a company you Know is out of business, or the email provider they use is experiencing a dead server. Sometimes it’s just technical issues. But the possibility of an email provider being out of business is a reasonable cause as well.
How to Fix an Invalid Email Address
Enough of all this knowledge. Let’s get into the solution. So, what can you do to fix an invalid email address? You can take a few small steps and work your way out of this mess very easily.
Communication First
Communicating via email has always been a professional courtesy in the game. But why not get connected with that important person you’re sending emails to and maybe you get the update on whether he changed his email or not. Being connected in the first place provides you the opportunity to channel your query of what actually happened to that person’s email address.
That’s why any company executives should be “Communication First” followers. If a marketing list happens to be in an invalid email crisis, then a simple check to the LinkedIn profile can provide quite the solution. Also, there is other social media that a person may use.
Inform The Individuals
A client just disappeared from that side of an email conversation even before closing the deal? Well, that seems to be an easier problem to solve than it sounds like. Just contact the parent company you were working with. They’ll let you know what is up with that person.
Most of the time the switches of position make these problems. So, going ahead and asking the parent company about the situation is always a good idea.
Domain Checkup
It’s not very uncommon to trash stuff we don’t need or want online. Be that gentle and naive while dealing with the email provider you use. If an email provider is dead or down, then it could be like that forever. So, don’t use your valuable time and resources for nothing.
When your domain provider seems to be down or dead for a while, you can basically do nothing to fix it. You better move on and find a better alternative.
Professional Help
We talked of every tool we could use to hammer this pin. But everything can’t be fixed indoors. Having a problem is totally okay. Calling for professional help is the wise choice if you know when, where and how to go for it.
So, don’t hesitate to call out for an expert if anything seems to be out of your hands.
How to Capture Valid Email Addresses
We addressed problems, understood them, and figured out the solution as well. Anyway, there is a lesson for us so that these misconducts don’t happen in the near future and we don’t have to worry about these things.
Actually, you can do a lot more than you think to capture valid email addresses. Let’s go fishing and catch some juicy email addresses then.
Never Buy Email Lists
First of all, never ever pay a single penny for an email list. These email lists are flooded with invalid emails and often feature spam traps. Email from these paid lists isn’t expecting you to send mail. So, your mail is gonna be irrelevant anyway and end up landing in the spam folder.
Confirm Your Email Address, Please!
Yes, that extra boring box can save you a lot of hassle and time. So why not? Just add an extra input option for the people who are going to sign up. Manually typing the same address will likely fix any mistakes that could result in an invalid email capture.
Another way of capturing valid email can be providing the option to confirm their subscription via a sent email. This can be a tricky one but still gets the job done.
Engagement Tricks
Don’t put up an email signup prompt onto the face of a visitor just the second they visited your second. This way, you make yourself a bad reputation even when a visitor just landed on your website for the first time. Utilize spaces on your websites and use them to property and ask visitors for their valuable email addresses.
Also, don’t mention what you’re gonna send to their inboxes. Inform them about what their benefits are going to be when they sign up. You can always put a banner or popup signup form. But make sure to delay the timing of appearance from a visitor’s perspective.
Plus, why not ask a client to email the receipt instead of a printed one? There are hundreds more clever, yet friendly ways to capture more valuable email addresses.
Gated Content Marketing
If you’re providing a great content marketing offer, make sure to have an attractive landing page. Having a landing page helps visitors gather more information and convinces them to be converted to leads.
Business Cards Exchange
This is the most legit way you can even think to fill up that thirst for emails. Next time, just exchange business cards with colleagues and industry leaders in a friendly way. And yeah, make sure to add them to your Customer Relationship Management resources.
How to Check if an Email is Valid for Free
So you want to check off your email list before starting that amazing campaign. But what’s the right tool to use to check if an email is valid or invalid? That’s kind of an easy task.
There are various free email verifiers out there. But as you’re already reading this blog on MailRefine’s website, why not try out the free email verifier tool by MailRefine? MailRefine developed the ultimate free tool to check whether an email is valid or not.
How to use the free email verifier by MailRefine, you may ask. That’s a comparatively easy question to answer. All you have to do is enter the email address you want to verify in the query box of the tool and hit Verify. MailRefine will come up with the results you were looking for, in a second.
To check if an email is valid or invalid for free:
# Head over to the free email verifier page
# Enter any email you want to verify for free
# Hit “Verify” after writing the email
If the email you entered is valid, you’ll see a message saying “Your Email is Valid.” If the email address you provided is an invalid one, you’ll see the “Your Email is Invalid” message.
What if you’re about to launch a campaign and you want to verify the validity of a lot of email addresses? Well, all of those blogs on the web will convince you to try out their so-called free models which are pretty much nothing useful as a whole. So what do you do?
Guess what? MailRefine is in the rescue once again. MailRefine provides 1000 free credits when you sign up for a new MailRefine account! Can you believe this? When all the other email verifier tools basically provide you something like a hundred credits for signing up there is MailRefine to help you kickstart your success without even spending anything.
However, you either don’t have to worry if you ever run out of those sweet free credits. You can upgrade for 10,000 email verification by spending as low as $25, all without compromising any features.
Why Email Verification is Important
We learned to use the free gems available in hand. But why bother checking through hundreds of email addresses anyway? Well, the answer to this question is easy to answer, yet might be shocking for you to understand the true potential of email verification.
Did you know that more than 20 percent of email registrations contain typos, syntax, domain & various other errors? There’s no doubt that your email signup list is also affected by the just-mentioned fact. So, cleaning up the mess the subscribers created unwillingly is your must-to-do. Not only do you save money spent on email campaigns, you actually get more accurate insights as well. And there is the rise of customer engagement that is the best achievement from all of this.
Conclusion
Email marketing has always been the talk of the town when it comes to the marketing side of the business. It also has been proven as the best one yet so far. Effective email campaigns require some fieldwork. Consider email validation as one of them.
To get the maximum out of your next email campaign, follow along with the mentioned tips and tricks. Find those invalid email addresses, trash them or recapture them. Just do whatever it needs to have the cleanest email list possible and make your next campaign worth the effort you’re going to put on.
