Use an online email checking website to test the email address. We recommend http://mailtester.com , but there are many more—just Google “email verification” if you’d like some other choices.
MailTester.com will give you an answer in just a couple of seconds, telling you if the domain is correct, and if the username is correct within that domain. (The domain is the part after the @ symbol…so in an email address like [email protected], “gmail.com” is the domain and “joesmith” is the username. Obviously, both have to be correct to have a valid email address. If the email is correct you can go on with the rest of the steps with confidence.
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If it’s an invalid email address, you can save yourself a lot of time and trouble by skipping the rest of the steps, and have the system refund your money for the lead. Just reply to the offer text with the command for Bad Email, which is “BE” followed by the Lead Offer number. Remember, for a lead to be refundable due to a Bad Email, you have to notify the system within a set amount of time after receiving the lead. Of course, you must be ready to process the lead when you receive it, so you should learn this info pretty quickly and be ready to claim the refund if needed.
However, before you decide that it’s a bad email address, take a second look and see if there is an obvious misspelling in the email address. For instance, if you have a lead named “David Letterman”, and the email address he gave you is [email protected], it’s a pretty good bet that poor old Dave just made a typo on the email address (single “t” instead of a double “t”). Look at the second half, the domain name, as well. We see people enter “.cm” instead of “.com”. Or “gmal.com” instead of “gmail.com” all the time. If there are doubled characters (or triples) try removing one of them. Recently we had a bad email from “maryymarcos” …we guessed that it was supposed to be “marymarcos” and we were right.
We find that about half of the bad emails are merely typos that can be figured out and verified through testing. So don’t forget to use the MailTester.com website to try out a couple of possibilities before you throw in the towel on the lead!
MailTester.com will work with most email addresses, however some email providers will not permit email validation. In those cases, the email will say it can’t be verified, but that’s not the same as not valid. For instance, if you try to verify any email address that is with yahoo.com, or with hotmail.com, you’ll get a notification that “the server doesn’t allow email verification”. No worries, that just means that in those cases we have to do it the old fashioned way—send the email and see if it bounces!
When you have verified a correct email address, you are ready for the next step, “Enter the Lead into your Peak Performance system.”