We’re excited to announce that Address Guard now offers Email Address & Phone Number Verification for our clients on Shopify as well as via our Custom API service. Now brands can achieve complete accuracy of their customer’s data for use in direct communication or via marketing campaigns. 

When we set out to build Email & Phone validation into Address Guard, we wanted to leverage our existing system, such as Rules, Tags, and Translations to ensure the new upgrade was seamless across the board. Our suggestion engine was also upgraded to help customers identify typos in their email domain (for major providers) and to offer suggestions to resolve. We’ve seen this as a common occurrence where a customer accidentally types “gnail” instead of “gmail” and results in a hard bounce. To learn more be sure to check out our email and phone feature page, and also our new knowledge base articles.

Email Address Validation

The new Email Address validation service will help brands ensure that customer communication emails are received by legitimate emails, and to help ensure hard bounces are reduced on marketing campaigns. At time of order, Address Guard will verify if the email address has any typos in the domain (from a large vendor such as Gmail), and offer suggestions to the customer if such issue exists. When an update is made, we will push the relevant email address and related tags to your Shopify orders page.

Be sure to read our Quick Setup Guide which will walk you through all aspects of our new Email Address Validation service.

Our service goes beyond the typo suggestions, and offers a complete validation suite for both consumer and business emails including: 

• Syntax check – only allowed characters and disallowed symbols are checked. 

• Live DNS check – we will perform a check if the email domain has the proper settings configured in order to accept email (ie: Email based DNS records). 

• Disposable email check – if the email is from a temporary / throwaway email provider, which could lead to hard bounces down the road. 

• Free detection – if the email belongs to a free email provider, such as Aol or Yahoo. 

• SMTP live testing – we will perform a live connection to the email server to confirm if the email address is real and can receive messages. 

In addition to our order validation service for emails, we also added a new Tools section where you can validate both Single Emails or Batch Emails in CSV format (up to 10k rows per file). 

To get started, click into: Order Automations > Email Validation

Phone Number Validation

The new Phone Number validation service will give brands the ability to know if a phone number is valid, can receive messages, and is ready to be used within their marketing campaigns. Often customers may enter a landline number, or prepaid number into checkout which leads to wasted spend with an SMS marketing provider in the future. We’ve also noticed that many customers may enter a fake number within a coupon popup to get their code. This leads the brand to have faulty information about their customer which will again lead to a communication issue down the road. 

By utilizing our phone number validation service, not only can we provide in real-time the type of phone that it is, but we can also perform a live check and make sure it’s valid to receive messages. Now you can have peace of mind, when you’re spending thousands of dollars on SMS marketing campaigns, that every single message is being delivered to a real customer. Be sure to read our Quick Setup Guide which will walk you through all aspects of our new Phone Number Validation service.

Later this month we will be introducing integrations with popular marketing tools such as Attentive, Klaviyo and Mailchimp to help brands automate their email & phone validation into their segmented customer lists. Have an integration suggestion in mind? Please let us know! 

Similar to Email Validation, we’ve also added a new tool where you can validate a single phone number in real-time to reveal in depth information about the number such as: 

• Verified / Valid Number
• Registration Location 
• Carrier Name
• Line Type (ex: mobile, voip, landline, prepaid, etc)

To get started, click into: Order Automations > Phone Validation

Benefits of Email & Phone Validation

To wrap up the announcement today, let’s look at the main benefits of each type of validation service. 

Benefits of Email Address Validation 

• Ensure the email address is valid and can receive messages. 
• Detect typos in common domains and offer correction suggestions (ex: Gnail > Gmail).
• Setup rules & tags to give your customer service team complete visibility into issues.
• Reduce hard bounces and sender reputation issues with invalid email addresses.

Benefits of Phone Number Validation

• Ensure the phone number is valid and active.
• Setup rules to require only mobile numbers on orders.
• Push tags to your Shopify orders page to be aware of the phone type and validity.
• Save on wasted marketing costs by ensuring SMS messages are received. 

We look forward to your feedback and helping your brand achieve better customer data quality by providing a full verification suite of services including Shipping Address, Email Address and Phone Number.
Be sure to view our new knowledge base area to learn more about our new features today.