Sending cold email campaigns is risky.
If you do it wrong, you can cause technical nightmares, like hurting your sender reputation so badly that you can’t even get an email delivered to one of your colleagues at your own company.
Or, you could hurt your company’s reputation and be considered a spammer, not just by algorithms, but by people.
But if you’re reading this article, you’re probably aware of everything you need to do to not be a spammy kind of person.
Staying in the good graces of email deliverability algorithms is trickier, though.
Besides setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for your server so that your emails are more likely to be delivered, you gotta verify email addresses before you send out campaigns.
Because every time you send an email to an address that doesn’t really exist (whether it never existed or has ceased to exist), that dings you a tiny bit.
And all those dings can add up fast when you’re sending out 100 or 200 cold emails a day.
And it’ll hurt your sender reputation.
And yeah, you know the drill, if you hurt your sender reputation then your emails won’t get delivered, you won’t have people opening your emails, and the whole campaign will be a failure.
And all future campaigns can be a failure too because you’ve ruined your reputation.
Buying or scraping leads?
Yeah, perhaps you’re not really supposed to do that, but tons of marketers do it.
Compiling leads from your own research by pouring over company websites or LinkedIn or social media to figure out a bunch of emails to try to send to, that’s the better approach, but it’s time consuming, and still, you could find some non-working email addresses that way. (Companies can have ex-employees listed on staff pages for years before getting around to fixing it.)
Or if you’re using a tool like Soleadify or FindThatLead or whatever, which makes it quick and easy to compile a ton of people to reach out to, you definitely need to verify those, because you have no idea of the recency or quality of that data.
Those tools make it easy to get a LOT of leads to try, but if you end up sending out campaigns with verifying email addresses first, you’ll see a bunch of bounces, and it won’t help you out at all.
It could hurt you. A lot.
Plus, it’s a waste of your time!
Sending out just 50 emails a day to get started? If 10 of them are junk, those are a waste of your time. Why not filter them out and send emails that are actually going to be delivered?
Emailing old customers?
My screen printing company has been in business since 2006, so we’ve got a large list of old customers, and all their email addresses.
If I wanted to reach out to old customers to see if we could do any printing for them again, I definitely should not just take those old ass email addresses and assume they work, and feed them all into an email system.
And if you’re in the same situation with old customers, you shouldn’t either.
People leave companies, they graduate from university, they abandon email accounts and move to newer ones over the years.
You can’t assume those old email accounts are still valid. You need to verify.
Using email addresses for custom audiences?
This isn’t something that people usually think about when they set up custom audiences based on CRMs, but you should verify email addresses before you create custom audiences too.
What do I mean by custom audiences? For example, in Facebook, or some ad platforms like AdRoll, you can upload a CSV of email addresses and then show ads to it.
(If you didn’t think about uploading a CSV of leads to show ads to before, your eyes may have just lit up and there’s a big light bulb above your head now)
When you upload your CSV to Facebook, etc, it works to connect those email addresses to accounts on their platform.
And since it knows that people could abuse this, it wants to make sure what you’re uploading is legit, and it will give it a quality score.
So you should do whatever you can to make sure that data you upload is as good as possible.
And one thing you can do is weed out all the crap email addresses so that your data is cleaner and Facebook is a bit happier with what you’re setting up.
Keep your list clean, keep your ability to deliver.
There are several factors that go into getting youremail delivered, and you need to do what you can to keep your sender reputation good.
Keeping your list clean is key. Removing junk email addresses from bought lists, scraped leads, or old CRM data is really cheap, and it’s easy to do.
You will pay way less than a penny with most email list verification services per email to verify it.
It’s totally worth it.
So if you’re trying to get better open rates and actually see results with your email campaigns, it’s time to verify!
It’s not launched yet, but we plan to have a free beta service for people this year. If you’d like to be able to verify 10,000 email addresses per month for free and see better open and engagement rates, get on the wait list below!