Great Marketers know that one of their top priorities is to optimize the time spent on leads for the sales organization. One way to achieve this is by verifying (more than just syntactically) the existence of an email address. Email verification is an effective means of filtering garbage, non-existent leads out of the sales process thereby preventing a considerable amount of a sales professional's time from being wasted.
For example, A lead should only be inserted into a CRM database from a Web form once it is confirmed that the email address is indeed a valid one (or definitely NOT an invalid one), otherwise a sales person could spend valuable time composing emails and trying to contact these phantom, non-existent leads while legitimate opportunities otherwise dangle in the wind. Of course, running an entire email list through a batch email verification can also go a long way in keeping customer and prospect data up to date, especially since people often leave organizations and once-valid email addresses are sometimes no longer valid (and this can trigger a sales-related activity as well once discovered trying to determine who the new contact is).
The first way to determine that an email address is invalid (within an algorithm) is to parse out the domain name from the email address and sure be certain that it does indeed exist. After the email structure is first validated structurally, existence checks can be achieved with an Internet "ping." Ensuring existence of the domain is one of the first of several tests.
One thing helpful to an email verification algorithm is that there are some level low-level SMTP (a standard protocol for sending email) functions that can be taken advantage of, enabling for the querying of the actual existence of email addresses without actually sending an email. Unfortunately, many different email server implementations may respond in many different ways to these queries, so pulling this off algorithmically can be very complex. In some scenarios, email servers will respond with success even though the email address does not really exist, meaning no individual has that address (and no one is certainly reading the emails). In these cases, email servers accept these unknown email deliveries and either discard the email or archive them. This kind of email server behavior is why email verification algorithms sometime respond with "unknown" (or equivalent) when an email verification check is performed. The server is saying "ok to send" even though nobody is using that particular email address. In other cases, some servers just take too long to respond (using distributed server locations as part of a commercial offering can help overcome this) and therefore the validity of an email address is also unknown in those cases.
The key to a good email verification process is to eliminate the 20-50% (or more) of made-up email addresses submitted by individuals who want to remain anonymous (and therefore submit email address such as mickey@mouse.com, elvis@graceland.com, etc.) or otherwise don't have any real interest in the product or service being offered. Achieving this kind of optimization is a big win for Marketing organizations because it enables sales reps to spend their time working on legitimate, interested leads.
For example, A lead should only be inserted into a CRM database from a Web form once it is confirmed that the email address is indeed a valid one (or definitely NOT an invalid one), otherwise a sales person could spend valuable time composing emails and trying to contact these phantom, non-existent leads while legitimate opportunities otherwise dangle in the wind. Of course, running an entire email list through a batch email verification can also go a long way in keeping customer and prospect data up to date, especially since people often leave organizations and once-valid email addresses are sometimes no longer valid (and this can trigger a sales-related activity as well once discovered trying to determine who the new contact is).
The first way to determine that an email address is invalid (within an algorithm) is to parse out the domain name from the email address and sure be certain that it does indeed exist. After the email structure is first validated structurally, existence checks can be achieved with an Internet "ping." Ensuring existence of the domain is one of the first of several tests.
One thing helpful to an email verification algorithm is that there are some level low-level SMTP (a standard protocol for sending email) functions that can be taken advantage of, enabling for the querying of the actual existence of email addresses without actually sending an email. Unfortunately, many different email server implementations may respond in many different ways to these queries, so pulling this off algorithmically can be very complex. In some scenarios, email servers will respond with success even though the email address does not really exist, meaning no individual has that address (and no one is certainly reading the emails). In these cases, email servers accept these unknown email deliveries and either discard the email or archive them. This kind of email server behavior is why email verification algorithms sometime respond with "unknown" (or equivalent) when an email verification check is performed. The server is saying "ok to send" even though nobody is using that particular email address. In other cases, some servers just take too long to respond (using distributed server locations as part of a commercial offering can help overcome this) and therefore the validity of an email address is also unknown in those cases.
The key to a good email verification process is to eliminate the 20-50% (or more) of made-up email addresses submitted by individuals who want to remain anonymous (and therefore submit email address such as mickey@mouse.com, elvis@graceland.com, etc.) or otherwise don't have any real interest in the product or service being offered. Achieving this kind of optimization is a big win for Marketing organizations because it enables sales reps to spend their time working on legitimate, interested leads.
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