What is Email Verification API? How Can Businesses Benefit From It?

Getting the most out of email marketing is crucial for all businesses. After all, every investment counts, considering that US$1 spent in email marketing may return an average of US$42. With that in mind, companies strive to use all tools and instruments at their disposal to optimize their email marketing strategies.

Employing email verification software, such as email verification APIs, has become one way for businesses to make sure their marketing campaigns can drive business growth. In fact, the email verification software market has been rapidly growing and is projected to reach US$160.85 million by 2027.

This post discusses the basics of email address verification and its importance, email verification APIs, and how they can help businesses.

What Is Email Verification?

Email verification is the process of verifying that the email addresses on your mailing list are valid and can receive messages. A popular way of doing this is through double opt-in, which entails sending email confirmation links to new subscribers. An example of a double opt-in strategy is Viber’s way of checking that the user typed in the correct email address.

The method certainly helps businesses verify email addresses and generate less spam complaints, but double opt-in also has a significant disadvantage. Without email verification services, users may not be able to notice spelling mistakes or typos in their email addresses when they type them. As a result, companies would get invalid email addresses on their list, while the customers would need to go through the whole signup process when they don’t receive the confirmation link in their correct email inbox.

For this reason some businesses use different email verification services, including email verification APIs, on their websites.

What Is an Email Verification API?

An email verification API is a program that enables developers or website administrators to integrate email validation into their existing systems. Application programming interfaces (APIs) act as intermediaries between different software. In the case of an email verification API, it connects your signup page, for instance, with an email verification service.

How Does an Email Verification API Work?

Email verification APIs pull data from email verification services that derive information from various email databases and other data sources. When a user signs up on a website with a built-in email verification API, the program will call the verification service, which in turn performs checks and looks up the email address on several databases.

For instance, an email verification service can obtain data from a mail server database, a disposable email domain database, and a free email provider database, as shown by the image below.

Real-Life Application of an Email Verification API

We mentioned earlier that email verification APIs can be integrated into signup pages, which is its most common application. We tested this on some of the most popular websites using the wrong email address janedoe@gmal[.]com.

HubSpot immediately let us know that there’s something wrong with the email address while Canva proceeded to send a code to the nonexistent address.

On Shopify, we were allowed to create a store using the same email address. Clicking the button to request a verification email also sent a link to the nonexistent address.

4 Reasons Why Email Verification Is Important

The examples in the previous sections may give you a hint at some of the reasons why email address verification is essential. Below are four of them.

• Email verification helps provide a good customer experience (CX): Imagine waiting for a verification code that never arrives because you entered the wrong email address. As a customer, that would be frustrating, and some may get discouraged or lose interest.
• Email verification reduces the likelihood of freemium abuse: This ensures that customers sign up for a free account using a working email address. The address checking process could help discourage freemium abusers from signing up using throwaway or invalid email addresses.
• Email verification increases the chance of conversion: Email marketing campaigns may fail when your email list contains invalid and nonexistent addresses as these can’t receive messages. Performing email validation ensures that users can receive your marketing emails, increasing their chances of converting.
• Email verification helps improve email-sending reputation: A company’s email-sending reputation can be affected by high bounce rates, which becomes more likely when there are nonexistent email addresses on the list. There is also the possibility of getting tagged as spammers and blocked.

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Email verification can be done in several ways, including performing real-time email validation with the help of an email verification API. The process not just ensures customers sign up using valid and existing email addresses, your business can also benefit in terms of email marketing optimization, CX improvement, and overall business protection against freemium abuse.