Email marketing is a blood sport. In the last 20 years, the only thing that’s changed with email is that good email senders continue to get punished more and more by email service providers. While ISPs and ESPs could totally coordinate if they wanted to, they simply don’t. The result is that there’s an adversarial relationship between the two. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) block Email Service Providers (ESPs)… and then ESPs are forced to block clients.
If over 10% of your emails are bad, less than 44% are delivered!
It’s not as simple as double opt-in in the industry. Sites like ours work with partners on shared campaigns with vendors and clients. We don’t give them access to our list, but many times we collect email addresses together to execute campaigns on. That’s been a huge headache. Email service providers don’t care about your optin methodology nor your audit trail; they simply assume you’re a spammer.
ESPs like MailChimp have implemented intelligence on email addresses in a system called Omnivore. With Omnivore, Mailchimp sent 50,000 warnings and shut down 45,905 malicious accounts in 2011 alone. They may promote the fact that those accounts were malicious… I’d argue that many of them were simply companies sending to their lists and not using best practices.
According to Jupiter Research, more than 20 percent of email registrations contain typos, syntax, domain and other errors. Doing something as simple as sending to an old list where a particular threshold of email addresses bounces can set off their threshold. That’s not malicious. Not to mention bots out there pushing SPAM trap email addresses through systems every day to try and catch you. The irony, in my opinion, is that I believe it’s easier for a SPAMMER to get email into your inbox than the average company sending a valid message.
Email Service Providers aren’t too honest about their deliverability rates, either. Often, they’ll tout a 99% deliverability rating, but the small print states that it’s after a few email sends. Well, duh… the first sends capture the invalid email addresses! The average acceptance rate for a Sender Score of 91 or greater is 88%. Having 1% of your list bad can drop your deliverability by over 10%!
Thankfully, there are email verification and list hygiene providers on the market who gather intelligence and will help you clean your lists before getting caught up in this mess. Keep in mind that there’s a huge difference between email validation versus email verification services. Email validation verifies that the email address is properly constructed, while email verification utilizes methodologies to predict its likelihood to be delivered.
Verify an Email Address with Neverbounce
This page has become incredibly popular, so we want to ensure we provide some guidance in selecting a provider and why we segmented the list below into recommended and unknown email list hygiene services. Our recommendations were based on the following:
- Terms – does the service have terms and a privacy policy in place that ensures that they do not resell or release your email addresses to any third party?
- Transparency – is the service registered openly online with contact information for their domain ownership, business location, and contact information? Is the business a dedicated office space (and not a PO Box or shared office)?
- Support – whether or not the company had a means of contacting them via email, a contact form, or phone number and did anyone actually respond to the request.
- Integrations – bulk processing of email addresses is one thing, but if you can integrate all of your systems and entry points where you’re collecting email addresses, that’s a far more efficient process.
- API – do they have a well-documented API where you can integrate your own platforms directly with them?
- Legal – whether or not the company resides in a country with privacy and email spam compliance legislation.
Leading Email Verification and List Hygiene Providers
Here are the leading email verification and list hygiene services. All of these include an online platform where you are not required to contact a sales team and they all have terms on data usage, are transparent, and actively responded to support requests:
- NeverBounce eliminates invalid email addresses and dramatically reduces overall bounce rates for the ultimate deliverability. NeverBounce offers a comprehensive API with integrations to Marketo and VerticalResponse. NeverBounce is a partner and sponsor of MarTech and we utilize their service for our own list hygiene.
NeverBounce has productized integrations with Act-On, Active Campaign, Activetrail, Agile CRM, Aiva Labs, Autopilot, Aweber, Bombbomb, Bronto, Campaign-Monitor, Checkmarket, Cleverreach, Clickfunnels, Cognito Forms, Constant Contact, Contactually, Convertkit, Curated, Drip, Formdesk, Formsite, Fulcrum, Getsitecontrol, Google Forms, Highrise, Hubspot, Icontact Pro, IContact, Insightly, Instapage, Intercom, Jotform, Kickofflabs, Mailchimp, Mailerlite, Mailjet, Mailup, Marketo, Moosend, Nocrmio, Paperform, Powr, Qualaroo, Quicktapsurvey, Referral Rock, Salesforce Pardot, Sendgrid, Sendpulse, Sendx, SharpSpring, Smartemailing, Smartsurvey, Smoove, Sparkpost, Survey-Anyplace, Typeform, Unbounce, Verticalresponse, Vision6, Woobox, Wufoo, Zapier, Zendesk, Zoho CRM, and Zoho Forms
Utilization of these list hygiene services can improve the percentage of emails that make it to the inbox, reduce your risk of being blocked by the Internet Service Providers, and reduce the risk of getting fired by your Email Service Provider… they’re worth the investment if you’ve got an old list or are collaborating on one. Keep in mind that you’ll simply never reach 100% accuracy on your lists. People change jobs and providers often, abandoning their old email addresses.
Most of these providers also offer an API so that you can integrate it into your acquisition process.
- BriteVerify – tools you need to remove invalid emails from your customer databases, email marketing campaigns, or online newsletters and keep them out for good. You can easily drag and drop a file, share the file via the cloud, and get detailed reporting on your list without ever contacting the company. They also have an API if you’d like to integrate your email verification with them!
- Email Checker – Identifies fake or invalid email addresses for you.
- Email Checker – (different from above) Email Checker is one of the original pioneers within the email verification sector, helping to improve the deliverability of email communications.
- Experian Data Quality – an email verification solution that instantly identifies whether an email address is valid and deliverable.
- FreshAddress helps companies that depend on email to drive revenue by building, updating, segmenting, and cleaning their email lists.
- HuBuCo – market leading deliverability, low cost, and guaranteed bounce rate results.
- Impressionwise‘s data intelligence platform is based on policy-driven rule sets and real-time scanning algorithms that use a multi-layered approach to identify, validate and protect against a wide range of e-mail-based threats.
- Kickbox – Kickbox ensures you only send email to real users and helps you separate the low-quality addresses from high-value contacts. Protect your reputation, increase open rates, and save money with Kickbox.
- Proofy – Quickly validate and verify your email lists. EU-US Privacy Shield compliant.
- StrikeIron – Quickly and effortlessly verify and validate email addresses and domains to ensure their accuracy before you spend unnecessary time, energy and money, increasing your message deliverability by 90%.
- TheChecker – 1,000’s of professionals from 80+ countries rely on our bulk email verification and email list cleaning services.
- TowerData – Increase your inbox delivery rate by cleaning your email list of invalid and fraudulent email addresses.
- Xverify – Know you are emailing an account that will not bounce. Xverify can verify email addresses in real time and via batch.
- Webbula – Email hygiene and data enhancement services.
Other Email Verification Services Online
Here are other email verification and hygiene services that did not have all of the trust indicators of the companies above.
- Ampliz – Ampliz verifies your customer email addresses in real-time and helps you to maintain an email hygiene delivering maximum response rate. This domain is also registered to the Bounceless service. Bounceless will clean your email lists by detecting unverified emails, spam traps, and disposable domains.
- Block Disposable Email Addresses – Detect and block disposable, one-time, throwaway, temporary email addresses.
- Bulk Email Validator – a web application that can verify if an email address is real or fake. Anyone who sends emails regularly can benefit from using the system.
- CaptainVerify – check & clean your mailing lists quickly. Drag and drop your file in our tool and we do the rest. Simple, fast and secure.
- CleanTheList.com – cleaning and validation of emails.
- DataValidation – Validate your email list fast. Link a MailChimp or Constant Contact account for ongoing monitoring and list maintenance.
- DeBounce – DeBounce service allows you to upload and validate lists of email addresses quickly and in a secure way.
- Emailmarker – Emailmarker helps you filter low-quality emails from high-value contacts. We ensure you only send an email to real users and protect your reputation, Boost your email campaign, and save money with Emailmarker.
- eHygienics is a professional email verification company. They remove bounces, threats, protestors, litigators and all other perceivable hazards from subscriber databases. eHygienics offers real time API platforms which are used daily by subscribers worldwide.
- Email Answers – secure email list cleaning and validation service that will scrub, clean, validate and verify your existing email address database.
- EmailHippo – Email validation online service for professional marketers and their clients
- EmailInspector – Cleanse and remove invalid email addresses from your marketing lists
- Email List Verify – Email list verified protects you from penalties by offering the most comprehensive email verification solution on the market, making sure that your email lists are bounce free, valid and delivering high ROI.
- Email YoYo – Professional email validation list cleaning solutions.
- Email Validator – With the Byteplant Real-Time Online Email Validator you can easily verify if an email address exists and is valid.
- Klemail – Klemail allows you to check that emails you send exist. Protect your domain’s reputation and increase your open rate.
- ListWise – We analysed the results of the hundreds of millions of email addresses we have cleaned to design a new email list-cleaning engine that is more powerful than ever. Try ListWise II for free and take your email marketing performance to new highs.
- MailboxValidator – connects to the mail server and checks whether the mailbox exists or not.
- Mastersoft Group – focused on Australian data
- Quick Email Verification – A web-based service to verify email addresses in bulk or real-time using a REST API. They detect invalid and non-working emails and provide you with complete detailed report.
- SiftLogic – Email Verification & Scoring to help inbox placement and maximize sender reputation.
- Snovio – Cold outreach automation – find, validate and email prospects with Snovio for better conversion rates.
- Verifalia – Verifalia is a web-based email validation service that lets you upload and validate lists of email addresses simply and easily.
Disclosure: We do not take any responsibility for your success in selecting one of these providers, we just wanted to provide a comprehensive list with some additional trust verifiers.
The Relevancy Ring: ESP Buyer's Guide
The Email Service Provider (ESP) has matured and continues to adapt to meet marketer aspirations.
The post Verify Your Email Marketing Lists Online: Why, How, and Where appeared first on martech zone.
