Sellers rely on email to reach out to contacts when working on deals. The new email address validation feature in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales flags email addresses in your customer relationship management (CRM) system that are in the wrong format or have an expired or fictitious domain. That lets your sellers connect with subscribers and boost their conversion rates without wasting time and energy trying to communicate with uninterested or non-existent customers.

Improve lead quality with email address validation

Email address validation in Dynamics 365 Sales finds and removes non-working email addresses in your CRM. This lets your sellers prioritize leads that have a valid email address for lower email bounce rates, improved engagement, and a better return on their time.

Email address validation looks for the following errors:

• Incorrect syntax: An address that does not have both a username and an email domain
• Disposable domain: An address that has a known disposable or temporary email domain
• Test or spam address: An address that has known indicators of a test or spam address in the email header or metadata, IP address, HTML code, and email content and formatting
• Expired address: An email account that has expired and can no longer receive or send email
• Address with unregistered domain: A domain that does not appear in the domain registry

You can view flagged email addresses on primary entity and sales insights forms as well as on the Up next widget and work list items.

If you try to send an email to a flagged address, a notification gives you the reason the system marked the address as not valid.

• If you know the email address is correct, select Mark valid. The system marks the address as valid and removes the alert.
• If you don’t know the email address is correct but you still want to send the email, select Compose anyway.

More data hygiene improvements in Dynamics 365 Sales

In addition to email address validation, we have also implemented duplicate detection for leads. Dynamics 365 Sales uses AI and “fuzzy” matching algorithms to detect duplicate leads. By “fuzzy,” we mean that the system identifies as duplicates not only records that have exactly matching field values, but also records that have approximately matching field values. This helps sellers focus on the records that truly matter and clears out any “noise” that they would otherwise have to spend time manually reducing.

On top of that, we are continuously working on even more improvements to data hygiene in Dynamics 365 Sales to help your sellers be more focused and productive. 

Next steps

Increasing your sales team’s productivity could be as simple as eliminating leads with incomplete, non-working, or spam email addresses—and Dynamics 365 Sales makes it easy.

To get started with email address validation, read the documentation:

Not a Dynamics 365 Sales customer yet? Take a guided tour and sign up for a free trial at Dynamics 365 Sales overview.

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