Personalization is the name of the game when it comes to any email marketing strategy. Emails that stay out of the trash bin demonstrate an understanding of their intended audience. Consumers have said so themselves:

91% of consumers prefer brands that provide personalized offers and recommendations.

To truly nail personalization in your email marketing, however, requires clean and accurate data. If you don’t know who you’re talking to and how they might interact with your emails, you can’t hope to write emails that convert. 

That said, don’t think you have to do this alone and add hours of administrative burden to your plate—it is 2024 after all. Leveraging email address intelligence tools can help you work smarter (not harder) and propel your email marketing strategy to new heights for the new year. 

What Are Email Address Intelligence Tools?

Email address intelligence tools automate many of the otherwise manual administrative tasks associated with maintaining and managing an email database. A lot of these tools use AI to ensure your data is accurate, complete, and actually useful. HubSpot, MailChimp, ZoomInfo, and Seamless.AI are just a few. They all have overlapping capabilities and some that stack, so for today, we’ll be focusing on just the key capabilities you should be looking for and why. 

Let’s dive into 6 key benefits of email address intelligence tools. 

1. Email Verification

Manually auditing your email marketing list probably ranks pretty low in your priorities every quarter, but it's still important. Even if you do get around to it, however, you know bogus emails are inevitable—this isn’t the case with email address intelligence tools.

A lot of email address intelligence tools can sift through the valid and non-valid emails in your list. To test whether an email is active or not, they’ll communicate with the email server through simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) without actually sending an email. This doesn’t just save you time on menial tasks, it gets you cleaner data. 

When your efforts aren’t wasted on leads that were never really leads, you get a better idea of which ones actually aren’t engaging with your content.

2. Email Validation

You’ve made your email list. You’re checking it twice. Even if you’re pretty confident the folks you’re reaching out to with your email marketing are legitimate, nobody’s exempt from human error. Slipping up on formatting, typos, and syntax happen—blue light glasses or not. 

Leave this work to the machines. There are plenty of email intelligence tools equipped with the ability to automatically fix these errors that prevent our carefully-crafted marketing emails from reaching the intended audience. Even if you like proofing with your own eyes, it doesn’t hurt to remove the margin for error. 

3. Email List Enrichment

Are you using all the data you could be using? The difference between emails that convert and those that don’t lies in our ability to empathize with the unique pain points of a specific audience. If your email marketing is too broad, then it won’t resonate with who you want it to. The more data you have on a given audience, the more you can tailor your communications to them. To get that data, however, you’d almost need your own personal digital detective. 

The good news? Several email intelligence tools—like ZoomInfo—come with just that. By aggregating data from different sites an email is connected to, you can automatically build out comprehensive profiles of each email in your list. This might include demographic information, geographic location, or even job title. 

Enrich your email marketing strategy with more data and watch the click-through rates speak for themselves. 🚀

4. Risk Assessment

Unfortunately, not everyone is who they say they are on the internet. There’s always the chance bad actors could be hiding in your email list. If you happen to send your email marketing to a spam or phishing account, they might see it as an opportunity to exploit your good intentions. They could take on the guise of an interested customer and attempt a breach of your company’s sensitive data. 

Don’t give them the chance. Use email intelligence tools to identify high-risk and fraudulent emails and filter them out of your list. 

5. Email Deliverability Optimization

More often than not, it’s not the malicious actor hellbent on bringing down your company that hurts your email marketing strategy—it’s dormant emails. While you want to be sending your emails to accounts that might actually open them for obvious reasons, sender reputation might be the most paramount for effective email communication. 

Ever wondered how emails automatically end up in your spam folder? It all has to do with sender reputation. Most email providers grade senders based on several factors, including:

• The volume of emails sent
• How many emails are marked as spam
• The frequency of emails sent to invalid recipients
• Engagement metrics, like open and click-through rate

Ensuring that your email marketing only goes to active users has vast implications on whether your content ends up in the spam folder or not. Email intelligence tools help you optimize for this by providing you with:

• Engagement insights to measure how previous email marketing has performed.
• Predictive analytics to determine what kind of messaging to send to who, and when. 
• Identification and removal of spam traps from your email list. These are addresses service providers use to catch spammers. 
• Real-time analytics so you can make changes to your campaign on the fly. 

Use all of these, and you’ll be well on your way to a sender reputation that gets you into your audience’s priority mail. ✨

6. Audience Segmentation

There’s no one-size-fits-all email marketing strategy. You’ve probably heard the old adage more than a few times:

“If you talk to everybody, you talk to no one.”

Even for the most niche of industries, there are likely different buyer personas you’re going to want to cater your messaging to. Further, your audience might be at different stages of the buyer’s journey. By categorizing email addresses into groups based on characteristics, behaviors, or engagement history, you can effectively craft audience segments that you can tailor your messaging to. 

Email intelligence tools help you do this by identifying all the different characteristics you can use to build audience segments—so you can target them with the right message at the right time.