Improving Email Deliverability Through Data Validation

Even the most engaging emails won’t drive results if they never reach the inbox. Here’s how to reduce bounce rates, stay out of the spam folder, and get in front of the right subscribers by focusing on the data.

What underlies poor deliverability? Most marketers will tell you it’s primarily due to emails being sent to invalid, outdated, or spam-trap addresses. 

Yet, add to the pot poor segmentation (leading to low engagement rates), disregard for email sender requirements for bulk senders (like Google’s), and flooding subscribers with mass numbers of irrelevant emails and you’ve got a broiling undeliverable mess – both harming your sender reputation and impacting your campaigns’ performances.

According to a 2023 study, about 17% of marketing emails never reach the inbox due to poor sender reputation, bounces, or spam filters. 

Validating emails and subscriber data ensures that your emails reach real, engaged recipients instead of bouncing or landing in spam. 

Not only is maintaining a clean, validated email list essential to delivering to real inboxes checked by real people, but validating data is also an essential step in sending the right messages to the right customer segments–keeping your engagement rates high, too.

What is data validation? What does it have to do with email deliverability?

Data validation is the process of checking data for accuracy, completeness, and consistency. In the context of email marketing, data validation makes sure that the email addresses in a contact list are formatted properly and active. 

How to improve email deliverability using data validation:

Validate email addresses regularly

One of the biggest culprits of poor deliverability is invalid email addresses. According to HubSpot, 22.5% of email addresses decay annually–meaning they no longer lead to real users.

That means regular validation is crucial. Not only should you check for typos and filter out fake and disposable email addresses every time you receive an email from a customer, but you need to regularly check for domain validity, ensuring the real emails in your list continue to exist and stay active.

In fact, email marketers who regularly scrub their lists can gain up to a 30% increase in open rates and also receive fewer spam complaint rates, improving overall campaign success.

Identify and suppress spam traps and complainers

Spam traps—email addresses used by ISPs to catch spammers (aka senders with poor list hygiene)—can significantly damage your sender reputation. 

Data validation tools help detect all types of spam traps–including pristine spam traps (those emails that were never real and created explicitly to catch spam) and recycled spam traps, which were once valid. They can even catch user “spam traps”–that is, users who frequently mark emails as spam. 

Verify engagement and remove unengaged users

A disengaged email list can lead to poor deliverability, too. Regularly removing inactive subscribers can improve open and click-through rates by reducing your pool of subscribers to those who are actually interested in your services.

With a robust, validated dataset that takes into consideration the behavior of all your subscribers and with additional campaign analysis, you can check engagement metrics (opens, clicks) to filter out inactive subscribers.

Then, you can use a re-engagement campaign before removing dormant users to protect your sender reputation (and ad dollars!).

Monitor Blacklists & Sender Reputation

Regularly check if your domain/IP is blacklisted. And always, always authenticate emails with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to build trust. This isn’t just something you want to do–it’s something you have to do, per Google’s email sending requirements.

Why validate data?

By maintaining clean, validated data, you’ll reduce bounces, improve your sender reputation, and continually land in your subscribers’ inboxes.

And why stop there? With email marketing driving such high ROI, improving not only deliverability, but open rates and click-throughs too, should be a top priority. 

Want to take your email strategy to the next level? Start validating your data with Stirista today. We can help you take your email data strategy even further.