How many of the emails sitting in your marketing system right now are outdated or, worse, a threat to the deliverability of your costly campaigns?
You may be shocked to know it could be 30% or more, as that’s how many emails go bad after just a single year.
If you want to level up the impact of your email marketing efforts, you have to turn your attention to email verification tooling.
Let’s explore email verification and how to choose the best tool to automate the heavy lift of keeping your lists clean so you can create marketing that matters.
First Up: What’s Email Validation, Exactly?
Email validation is the process of checking if an email address is real, active, and can be delivered to.
This is a crucial step in businesses that run email campaigns, as it helps ensure the accuracy and effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
Here are some of the tasks email validation tooling can perform to help you with email list management:
- Syntax Check: This verifies that an email address follows a known format without formatting issues, misspellings, etc.
- DKIM Test: Sending DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) tests a domain to confirm it is configured correctly by adding a digital signature to sent emails, and checking if it’s decoded correctly on the other end.
- SMTP Verification: Simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) is used by servers to relay emails. An SMTP test makes sure your SMTP server setup is optimized for deliverability.
- MX Record Scan: Mail exchange (MX) records specify the mail servers responsible for receiving email messages. An MX record validation makes sure the records are pointing to a server that is configured to receive email.
- Disposable Email Check: Disposable email addresses (like fakeemail5@gmail.com) are often just used for short-term purposes, making them clutter in your marketing platforms. Many companies and websites block such addresses to reduce spam and maintain a clean email list.
- Spam Trap Detection: Spam traps are email addresses set up specifically to catch spammers. Sending emails to these addresses can lead to severe deliverability issues.
- DNSBL Identification: Domain name system blacklist monitoring (DNSBL monitoring) looks to see if the domain or IP address associated with an email is listed on any DNS-based blacklists. When you deliver to these, it can hurt your sender reputation.
- Catch-All and Role-Based Email Elimination: Some marketing teams don’t want to spend more than they have to sending emails to addresses that aren’t associated with real people. For this reason, some choose to sort out emails with “support” or “contact” in their name.
Why Should I Choose an Email Validation Tool?
Using an email validation tool offers several significant benefits for businesses that rely on email communication, especially for marketing purposes.
Improve Deliverability Rates
Email validation helps ensure that your emails are delivered to valid and active addresses. This reduces the likelihood of emails bouncing back.
Considering the price and time associated with maintaining email lists and sending well-crafted email messages, a high bounce rate isn’t only a morale killer — it’s a budget buster and worse.
Protect Your Sender Reputation
Another thing about email bounces is that they can harm your sender reputation. This is a metric internet service providers (ISPs) use to score email domains.
A good sender reputation is crucial for email deliverability. Sending emails to inactive or invalid email addresses that bounce can get you marked as a spammer and lower your sender score. The lower your score, the more likely your emails will be locked in a vicious cycle of being marked as spam and diverted before they ever hit inboxes
Enhance Customer Engagement
If you measure the success of your email campaigns based on engagement, it’s critical you’re measuring based on emails that are actually getting delivered to and opened by real people.
Sending emails to active, engaged subscribers who want to receive them leads to higher interaction rates and better email marketing performance.
Increase ROI on Email Marketing Campaigns
Over time, email lists can accumulate a lot of invalid or inactive addresses.
Every time you store or send an email to an address like this, that’s money down the drain.
But the answer isn’t wasting a bunch of valuable employee time combing through emails. Manually checking and cleaning email lists can be time consuming and prone to human error.
Email verification tools automate this process, allowing you to focus on strategic aspects of email marketing while still improving your delivery rate — all of which lead to higher marketing return on investment (ROI).
Ensure Compliance
Email service providers (ESPs) often have strict policies regarding email list quality.
Using an email validation tool helps ensure that you meet their requirements, reducing the risk of your emails being flagged or blocked and your sender score being degraded.
Overall, using an email validation tool is a proactive and essential step for maintaining a healthy email marketing list and strategy.
NeverBounce: Fast, Accurate Email Validation for All Marketers
Developed for email marketers (by email marketers!), NeverBounce is an email verification service from ZoomInfo that prioritizes data security and accuracy, email list cleanliness, and speed.
Want to know why over 100K use NeverBounce to clean billions of emails in minutes?
Let’s talk about its leading features, integrations, payment packages, and more.
NeverBounce Core Features: Email Verification and List Cleaning
First up there’s Verify, which is NeverBounce’s platform that makes it easy to check the validity of a few one-off email addresses.
Better yet, you can actually add the Verify feature to forms on your website using an API, JavaScript, or Zapier integration method. This way, it helps guarantee that email addresses are correct at the very point of collection — no follow-up verification check needed.
Then there’s Clean, NeverBounce’s feature that makes bulk email list cleaning fast and simple.
Clean can run a quick initial check to tell you in an instant whether you need to clean up your entire list. And if you do, you can choose to use the dashboard on NeverBounce or again integrate it into your marketing flow via API for seamless verification of millions of email addresses.
If your list contains an excessive number of dubious email addresses, the platform will alert the NeverBounce team who will come in to do personal quality assurance and make sure your data is high quality.
Finally you have Sync, a wholly unique automated list cleaner that’s great for email-heavy marketing programs.
Link Sync with your email provider or customer relationship management (CRM) software to save tons of time when verifying email addresses. Sync routinely, automatically turns on to validate your email lists. With this helpful feature, You don't have to manually verify your data before launching email campaigns. Your lists are always ready so your messages can always be timely.
NeverBounce Accuracy
What is it that enables NeverBounce to deliver the best accuracy rate on email validation in the industry? It’s partially thanks to hybrid verification, which combines accept all detection with real-time verification. With this, NeverBounce guarantees up to 99.9% deliverability.
NeverBounce Speed
NeverBounce understands that shaving seconds is everything when you need to get your marketing and other messaging out the door.
That’s why the tech enables you to clean as much as ten thousand emails in just three minutes.
NeverBounce Support
NeverBounce knows a human touch is critical, especially in such a digital world.
Customer support staff and engineers are available to assist during normal business hours via email, phone, or live chat. And after hours, the Help Desk knowledge base is always on.
NeverBounce Security
We’re all protective of our emails when it feels like they’re constantly being traded in an attempt to sell us something.
NeverBounce not only promises to never use the emails you share for their own marketing purposes, they also keep them private using financial institution-level security features.
NeverBounce Integrations (Over 80!)
Another interesting thing about NeverBounce is its impressive 80+ integrations with everything from HubSpot to Pipedrive, Zoho, Zapier, Mailchimp, Intercom, Active Campaign, and beyond.
Integrate with customer service platforms, marketing automation tools, and more to make the transfer and verification of marketing data seamless.
NeverBounce Pricing
Pricing for the Verify and Clean features is pay as you go. Buy and share credits among your team instead of subscribing for recurring monthly payments. The more emails you have to clean, the less each credit costs. Custom enterprise packages are also available.
Price per email for up to 10,000 emails is $0.008. For up to 1,000,000 emails, that price drops to $0.003.
Because Sync runs on a continual basis, that feature is on a subscription plan. But it’s still priced based on number of emails to clean.
Who NeverBounce is Best For
NeverBounce was built for marketers across the board.
From startups where marketing is core to early success to nonprofits whose survival depends on maintaining donor email lists to enterprise businesses where a robust email program can be a key revenue drive — businesses of all sizes can rely on NeverBounce for fast and accurate email verification and cleaning.
ZeroBounce: Email Management Features for Enterprise
ZeroBounce is another email verification and list cleaning service. It’s designed to help businesses improve their email marketing efforts by ensuring that the addresses in their lists are valid and accurate.
ZeroBounce Core Features
ZeroBounce offers various services.
Their email validation feature, which uses AI to help verify email addresses, can be tapped into via bulk upload or API integration into your existing systems.
Email Finder helps marketers track down new contacts, a suite of email testing tools helps you view email deliverability before sending, and Activity Data monitors email engagement once sent.
ZeroBounce Accuracy
For AOL, Yahoo, and office 365 email addresses, ZeroBounce promises a 96%+ accuracy level. For any other email provider, that number rises to 99%.
ZeroBounce Speed
ZeroBounce says it will take their platform about 45 minutes to verify emails for a list with 100,000 contacts. On average, verifying a single email address takes about three seconds.
ZeroBounce Support
You can reach out to ZeroBounce’s support team any time via their chat, phone or email channels.
ZeroBounce Security
To keep emails safe while their system is verifying them, ZeroBounce uses what they call “military-grade data encryption” as well as recognized content delivery networks.
ZeroBounce Integrations
ZeroBounce integrates with around 50 workplace platforms and applications to help marketers automate processes.
ZeroBounce Pricing
ZeroBounce uses a credit system that can be charged monthly or pay-as-you-go.
You’ll spend one credit per email address when using their email validation, Activity Data, or email scoring features. The Email Finder feature uses twenty credits per successful query.
On the pay-as-you-go plan, from 10,000 emails the price per credit starts at $0.0065.
Who ZeroBounce is Best For
The target audience for ZeroBounce’s website seems to be enterprise marketers, for whom they offer scalability, onboarding and training, account management, custom agreements, and continuous support.
Level Up Email Validation With NeverBounce
As a leading, trusted email verifier with a focus on marketers across industries and business sizes, we recommend NeverBounce for building a robust email validation workflow.
When you register for an account with NeverBounce, you automatically get free credits to start.
So go ahead and sign up today to try every single feature — from verifying one-off emails to using the API — to make sure it’s a great fit for your team.
