How can I verify active email addresses for teachers to improve deliverability?
Summary
What email marketers say9Marketer opinions
Email marketer from GMass explains segmenting the email list and sending to smaller chunks to improve reputation and deliverability.
Email marketer from Mailjet explains checking and being consistent with your sending habits to help teacher active users. Mailjet recommend you regularly review your lists to remove unengaged contacts, you stay consistent with your sending schedule, this helps maintain good sender reputation.
Marketer from Email Geeks offers a free test of their Activity Intelligence Report to identify deceleration in email address activity, noting it's not a perfect solution but may be helpful.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares his experience with the challenges of getting teachers to respond to verification requests, especially during the summer when they may no longer be at the same school or ignore emails.
Email marketer from Reddit shares that they have had success in reducing bounce rates for their email campaign by incorporating an email verification service into their workflow. Before sending out emails, they use the tool to weed out potentially problematic addresses, thereby improving deliverability.
Email marketer from ZeroBounce Blog responds recommending implementing double opt-in to ensure subscribers are genuinely interested and that the email address is valid from the start. They note this helps build a clean and engaged email list.
Email marketer from MailerCheck Blog explains the importance of regularly cleaning email lists to improve deliverability. They suggest removing inactive subscribers, those who haven't opened or clicked in a while, as they can negatively impact your sender reputation.
Email marketer from Email Marketing Forum answers that if you have a new IP address you need to 'warm up' your IP slowly by initially sending low volumes of emails and gradually increasing. They shared it is important to monitor the stats to check deliverability
Email marketer from NeverBounce Blog shares using email verification services before sending campaigns. These services can identify invalid, risky, and inactive email addresses, allowing you to remove them and protect your sender reputation.
What the experts say4Expert opinions
Expert from Email Geeks mentions contacting Kickbox to verify emails. Also states that schools often run their own infrastructure, and a single run with deliverability issues doesn't necessarily mean bad reputation.
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that one of the key points to consider is keeping the list up-to-date. By purging invalid e-mail addresses from a list, the organization reduces the bounce rate, which in turn improves the e-mail deliverability.
Expert from Email Geeks says the best hedge against poor deliverability is sending wanted emails and encouraging resubscribes. Suggests encouraging educators to use personal emails and sending more frequently to identify bad addresses sooner, assuming opted-in addresses and regular content.
Expert from Spam Resource explains that consistently practicing list hygiene techniques, such as removing unresponsive subscribers and validating email addresses, reduces bounce rates, increases engagement, and ultimately improves email deliverability, which is crucial when reaching out to educators.
What the documentation says4Technical articles
Documentation from SparkPost explains setting up bounce processing to automatically identify and remove invalid email addresses from your list. They say this helps maintain list hygiene and improve deliverability by reducing bounce rates.
Documentation from RFC explains looking at the SMTP error codes and bounce handling, review the SMTP error codes received when sending emails to teachers. These codes provide insight into why emails are not being delivered, such as invalid addresses or server issues. Implement proper bounce handling to automatically process and remove invalid email addresses from your list.
Documentation from AWS explains using Amazon SES's feedback loop to monitor bounces and complaints. It recommends setting up notifications to automatically remove problematic email addresses from your sending list, preventing future deliverability issues.
Documentation from SendGrid explains using their Email Validation API to check email addresses in real-time before sending. This API identifies invalid or risky email addresses, helping to prevent bounces and improve deliverability.