Email Validation

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I think that this article will be useful to read for those who, like me, are new to email newsletters, or for those who, like me, decided to make a cold customer base mailing list. According to the database of Clients who did not fill out the form on the site, but were raised from the archive of questionnaires, back in the era of the absence of marketing at the enterprise in which I work. Well, or for those who, purely by chance, of course, took the base on the side (bought, expropriated, parsed or something else).

So, we decided to try to revive old contacts. We decided to add everything to the database with standard fields: full name, birthday, phone, mail (later, of course, we will expand the number of fields for more accurate segmentation).

At first, we decided to order a mailing list by mail with a good price offer and a limited validity period, and then also send an SMS mailing list to those contacts who received our letter. So we decided to increase the conversion of the mailing list.

4222 contacts entered into the database.

Well, it’s said and done! Contacts were filled in, the letter was composed.

They started to send and … Unisender stopped mailing at 1000 sent letters. The reason is a large number of non-existent and invalid contacts. Exit – you need to clean the database before sending, or Unisender will stop it again.

The statistic was this:
Total contacts – 4222.
Sent – 1000 (23.7%).
Delivered – 552 (13.1%).
Read – 85 / 113 (2%).
Transitions – 6 / 9 (0.1%).
Unsubscribe – 0 (0%).
Spam complaints – 7 (0.2%).

At this stage, not a single order came in, more precisely, there was one order, but it worked not for the mailing list, but for community members on Facebook who saw the web version of the letter, which is also quite interesting. 🙂

Then my weekend was a lot of fun – finding a way to check email addresses for existence.

The only conclusion that can be drawn from my searches and attempts is that there is no correct and 100% effective service, software product or way to validate addresses!

There are services, by the way, paid ones that will check your addresses only for the existence of a mail server and syntax, for example, the ePochta service. There is almost no sense in such a check, as for me, because you need to check whether the contact to which you are sending the letter is “alive”. Because a service like Unisender, which I use for mailing lists, is not designed to validate contacts, which means that you will be charged money for all contacts from the list, even if the address does not exist. Therefore, checking contacts before mailing is also a savings.

There are other services that can check your contacts, but they do not do it en masse, and I didn’t have to check 4000 contacts at one request.

Next, my eyes were attracted by the free MLV program – Mail List Validator. The program is far from ideal, and in order to use it in our open spaces, you need to perform sickly dances with a tambourine. Here is the setup video

I did everything as in this video, but in fact this method does not work with our providers, which still block port 25, which is so necessary for contact validation.

The essence of the process is very simple and complex at the same time: the program must take your contact, process it, then send a request to the mail server corresponding to the contact, simulating the sending of a letter, then the server must issue a response, and now the answer will be analyzed by the program. At the output, we get a diagnosis – “dead”, “sick” or “healthy”. After that, all healthy contacts can be uploaded to a file and then mailed to them.

But in fact, due to the blocking of the 25th port by our providers, dynamic IP and other mystical things, the program produces incomprehensible results. For example – “error”, “long server response”, “oh, that’s it …”, etc.

As the author of the program himself explained to me, whom I asked all weekend, and then also on weekdays, you need to upload the program to a VPS server under the Windows operating system, deploy the program on the server, configure it, and work from there. Because this is the only way I can get a real fixed IP address.

Note: if you have a fixed ip at work or at home, for which you or your employer pays extra money to the provider. That still won’t work, because. such ips are issued from a common pool of client addresses, which does not suit this program, or rather mail servers. That’s it.

I was not going to rent a server for a month, for money that was not included in my budget. Therefore, I tested the program on a fixed IP at home (provider Triolan). The program still did not work adequately, but this time it at least weeded out a few contacts, which, in the absence of money and strength for further dances with a tambourine, already inspired hope.

Result: received 3527 contacts. Only those that the program determined were 100% invalid were excluded.

Next, I again filled in the contacts in Unisender. And I slightly redid the letter, taking into account the comments from the community subscribers on Facebook, and the comments of colleagues.

Statistics:

Total – 3527 (100%)
Sent – 3527 (100%)
Delivered – 2353 (66.7%)
Read – 376 / 613 (10.7%)
Clicks – 39 / 46 (1.1%)
Unsubscribe – 4 (0.1%)
Spam complaints – 12 (0.3%)

Received 7 orders with promo code.

Then we sent an SMS to everyone who received the letter (not read it, but received it). And after that we received another order. And that 8 orders.

According to calculations, the profitability of such a company was doubtful, that is, we did not go into the red, but we did not earn much either.

But at the output we have an email database that did not reject our proposals and with which we can continue closer communication, and of course, the experience of dancing with a tambourine on the topic of contact validation.

How do you check contacts?

P.S. Commentary from the marketing agency MAVR