Measuring trustworthiness is of critical importance in email marketing. Sender scores, for example, indicate to email clients and recipients whether a sender can be considered trustworthy, with a direct impact on email deliverability (i.e., the measure of whether or not messages reach their intended audiences).
What’s more, in today’s digital age, trust from both an email marketing and general marketing perspective must also encompass cybersecurity and brand abuse detection. So, while it’s not necessarily marketers’ core responsibility to ensure their organizations’ overall well-being and safety, they play an important role.
Let’s illustrate. This post takes a look at what email verification as a whole and more specific solutions like Email Verification API can bring to the table.
How Email Verification API Benefits Digital Marketers from a Cybersecurity Angle
1. Prevents Malicious Spam from Reaching Corporate Inboxes
Spam comprises 54.68% of all the emails users receive. And 85% of the spam emails we receive are malicious. Said emails typically come with embedded links that lead those who happen to click to malware download hosts. And so victims lose their online credentials to cyber attackers. These statistics make it critical for business owners to ensure that their marketers and all other employees, for that matter, don’t inadvertently end up communicating with cybercriminals in the course of performing their jobs. Otherwise, they may end up with compromised systems and networks that ultimately lead to a dwindling bottom line.
An email validation API helps users detect email senders posing as customers or potential business partners when they’re actually people with questionable intentions or maybe even cybercriminals. The API can identify messages coming from disposable email addresses (issued by providers like 10MinuteMail, GuerrillaMail, Mailinator, and 2,000 others) that attackers commonly use to evade detection. The API can also spot misspellings in popular domains that cyber attackers may be mimicking. What’s more, it checks if the email address has a corresponding inbox, mail server, and the necessary mail exchanger (MX) records to function correctly.
2. Protects Against Product or Service Abuse
Any organization that offers free trials and freemium services are potential victims of abuse. Marketers tasked to protect their brands should thus always be on the lookout for typical signs of freeloading like the use of a disposable email address. Individuals who sign up with these addresses rarely ever turn into paying subscribers. Including them in your marketing distribution list would, therefore, do more harm than good.
An email verifier API can automatically detect disposable email addresses even upon sign-up. Users can integrate it into registration forms to disallow the use of such addresses from the get-go, thus, ensuring a lean and mean distribution list. It also keeps fake email address users off distribution lists in that the API makes sure that addresses meet predetermined Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards.
3. Helps Marketers Avoid Spam Traps
Most email and Internet service providers (ISPs) use sophisticated measures to weed out spammers from their infrastructure. One of these is setting up spam traps to identify email senders who add addresses to their distribution lists without their owners’ consent. Spam traps can cause marketers to get high bounce rates and eventually land them on a spam blocklist. And so, no matter how good their campaigns are, these won’t succeed because they can’t reach their intended audiences.
An email validation API enables users to check if an email address has a corresponding mailbox even without sending an actual message. It does so via a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) check along with a scan for the email sender’s domain’s MX records. Spam traps are not designed to send emails, and so they typically don’t have valid SMTP connections or the necessary MX records.
4. Provides More Accurate Deliverability Insights
Finally, email marketers rely on statistics to gauge the success or failure of campaigns. Part of the process is making sure the presence of invalid email addresses wouldn’t distort the results of their analysis. Unreliable data is, after all, the primary cause of a faulty analysis that ultimately leads to erroneous conclusions and recommendations.
Additionally, continuously delivering emails to nonexistent inboxes or owners is negatively affecting their organizations’ deliverability scores. Email and ISPs normally associate high bounce rates with spamming. An email verifier API can help users minimize hard bounces, thus preventing them from getting tagged as “spammers.”
Takeaway
Digital marketing amid today’s threat landscape is no longer about just keeping a clean distribution list. Marketers also share the infosec staff’s responsibility to keep customer trust. That means keeping their networks threat-free and ensuring they are not considered threats either. Email Verification API can help them do just that.