How Email Scoring Can Save Your Valid Leads and Boost Your Email Marketing

So, you’ve heard about email scoring, but you’re not sure how it can boost your email marketing? Having your leads scored helps you find out who your audience really is and how they are going to interact with your emails. If you want to get the most out of your list, you have to implement this simple habit in your strategy.

Email marketing has been on the rise in the past few years, and most organizations are striving to expand their email lists. They put up content offers, they promote discounts and special deals and see every new subscriber as a new opportunity.

But with over 53% of the world email traffic being spam, email data quality matters more than ever. Great email marketing starts with genuine, responsive leads. How do you know whether your leads are truly valuable?

First step: let an email verification system prune your list

If you decided to take care of your email hygiene, it wouldn’t make sense to start by having your list scored. First, you want to make sure you have no invalid addresses taking a bite out of your email marketing budget.

Most Email Service Providers charge based on the size of your email list. If your bounce rate exceeds 2%, you know it’s time to use an email verification system and stop throwing money out the window.

How do you use an email verification service? Most platforms are intuitive and don’t require any particular knowledge on the topic. You have two options:

• To use a bulk email verifier. This is ideal when you already have an email list and you know it needs some pruning. You upload it on the platform and the system returns it free of unwanted email addresses.
• To install an email verification API on your signup forms. Once your list is clean, the API ensures it stays that way for a longer period of time. How? By preventing risky email addresses from signing up on your list.

A good email verifier should be able to identify and remove misspelled, catch-all, role-based, abuse, and temporary email addresses. The more advanced ones also remove spam traps, thus maintaining your sender reputation and boosting your deliverability.

Want to have all of your APIs in one place?

If you know you need an API to verify incoming leads, but you’re looking for faster access to it, then RapidAPI is your answer. The platform now integrates directly with ZeroBounce, reliable email verification, and email scoring system.

By using ZeroBounce through RapidAPI:

• you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing your email list stays in great shape
• all of your APIs will be accessible from one single platform
• you’ll be able to check the billing for the apps you use directly on RapidAPI
• staying organized will foster your productivity and lead to better results
• there are more than 8,000 APIs you can discover, test and deploy

The RapidAPI – ZeroBounce integration makes email verification easier for marketers and business owners who care about their data quality.

Related: How to Validate Email Addresses in Google Sheets

Next: email scoring tells you how valuable your leads are

Now that you know your list only contains good email addresses, you can continue by letting an email scoring system assess how good your contacts really are.

What makes for a “good” email address?

• a real human being is on the other end, waiting to receive your email
• that person is genuinely interested in your content
• as a result, they will engage with it, contributing to your open and click-through rates
• now it’s up to you to write compelling emails and get that person to click the “buy” button. Bingo!

How email scoring works

Ok, but how does email scoring work, you may ask?

ZeroBounce’s system scans your email list, analyzes every address, and returns a quality score for each. The higher the score, the more likely for the owner of that email address to engage with your content.

Each company uses its proprietary algorithms to score leads so the process and the results may differ. But a dependable email scoring system should be able to determine whether a certain email address belongs to a real human who is potentially responsive to the messages they receive.

What are the benefits?

• you gain a clearer perspective on the quality of your leads
• it’s easier to assess who are your most active – and thus most valuable – subscribers
• with this information in hand, you can craft better-targeted campaigns
• you can save money by removing seemingly valid email addresses that are nothing but dead ends

Email scoring: an excellent way to validate catch-all emails

If you’ve used an email verifier to clean your list, some of the results you got may have been catch-all emails. These are email addresses set up by organizations that want to make sure they don’t miss any communication sent to their domain. So they design these addresses to catch all the emails sent to that particular domain, even if the address is incorrect.

However, emails sent to catch-all accounts can hard bounce and have a negative impact on your sender reputation. Therefore, the catch-all address is generally considered risky, and many email verification companies will advise you to get rid of them.

But what if you have a significant number of catch-alls, and some of them are perfectly valid? By detecting activity levels, an email scoring system can tell you whether that’s the case and helps you save precious leads you can further nurture.

Think of email scoring as a zoom lens that goes deeper into your email hygiene and gives you a better perspective on your data quality. Use it once you know your list is clean, to focus your efforts on the leads that matter and boost your email marketing.

The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of RapidAPI.