How to Verify Your Email List to Maximize Email Deliverability

A good email list is the backbone of any online business. Regardless of how good your products and services are, you won’t generate any profit if you have nobody to sell them to. 

Once you generate a decent number of leads and create a high-converting email campaign, the money will come rolling in. One thing to realize, though, is that not every email address you capture equals a lead. 

What we mean by this is that people often subscribe to free trials and other lead magnets by using fake or inactive email addresses. Sending promotional emails to these addresses is nothing but a waste of time, money, and energy. 

Emails sent to non-existent addresses will bounce right back, lowering your sender score. If you’re not paying close attention to your bounce rates, the situation can get out of hand quickly. As your sender score drops, more and more of your promotional emails will end up in the spam folder, so you’ll have trouble reaching actual leads. 

What can you do to prevent this? You can verify your email list and frequently update it—by removing inactive users—to ensure you get the most out of your email marketing efforts.

Why You Should Verify Your Email List

Hard bounces are one of many reasons why you should seriously consider verifying your email list. Hard bounces are essentially error messages you receive from the ESP (Email Service Provider), telling you that the email couldn’t be delivered. The primary reason is that the address you want to send the email to doesn’t exist.

Too many hard bounces, and you’ll be flagged as a spammer by the ESP. The reason for this is that hard bounces are a good indicator that you don’t care about who you’re sending the emails to. Keep it up for a while, and you’ll have to start sending from a different address—and build your mailing list from scratch—because the bulk of your emails will sit lost and forgotten in people’s spam folders.

Apart from hard bounces, email list verification allows you to:

1. Save money

2. Get better campaign insights

3. Remove deleted, inactive, and temporary addresses

4. Find typos

Save Money

When it comes to online businesses, efficiency is what maximizes your profits. When creating and running email marketing campaigns, you need to ask yourself how much time and money you’re investing compared to what you’re getting in return.

If you don’t verify your email list, you’ll be spending days crafting perfect emails and sending them to a bunch of bogus addresses, without a chance of them ever getting opened. You would have to spend just as much time on email creation, regardless of how many addresses on your list are invalid because you’re also reaching real leads with them.

The much bigger issue here is that you’re wasting money. Most email marketing automation tools charge you per number of contacts you import and have limitations regarding the number of emails you can send each month.

Say you’re paying $50/month for the autoresponder. If a quarter of your email list is non-existent addresses or inactive subscribers, you’re practically flushing $12.50 down the drain each month. 

It may not seem like much—but it’s not about the $12.50 at all. You need to think about opportunity costs. Each email lead is a potential customer. With that in mind, you’re not wasting just the $12.50—you’re also wasting hundreds of dollars from potential sales you could generate if the emails actually reached your target audience.

Get Better Campaign Insights

It’s vital to keep track of your campaign’s performance. By monitoring the email marketing metrics, you’ll be able to figure out exactly what works and what needs improvement. 

It’s next-to-impossible to nail email marketing on the first try. You will most likely need to try out a few different approaches to figure out what works best for your audience and tweak your emails accordingly.

Although email marketing metrics can be invaluable, without a verified email list, you’ll get a skewed view of your campaigns. What good would it do you to check your email open rates if 25% of your emails are sent to fake and inactive addresses? 

You might get the impression that your email subject lines aren’t impactful enough, and might even spend days tweaking them, hoping to boost email opens. The open rates might improve, but only slightly, given that you haven’t done anything about the fact that a quarter of them never even got delivered. If there’s nobody on the other end to actually click on the emails, the metrics won’t do you much good.

It’s not just email open rates—the same goes for conversions, engagement, and click-through rates. Before you can accurately assess the performance of your email marketing campaign, you must ensure that your mailing list is up to date and free from fake addresses.

Remove Deleted, Inactive, and Temporary Addresses

Apart from fake email addresses, people might subscribe with the ones they’re not actually using or create new accounts to sign up for your free trial. We’ve all done it—when the trial expires, we hop to Gmail and create a new email account in minutes. In theory, you can repeat the process as many times as you like and take advantage of the “infinite” free trial.

As a business, you want to avoid this at all costs. There are quite a few mechanisms you could apply, like tying the free trial to the IP address, rather than the email address. Even then, there are VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) that can easily bypass the IP restriction. Some businesses require double verification—but what’s to stop people from clicking the verification link sent to the email address they just created?

The most common approach nowadays is to restrict the features you offer via the free trial. That’s what a free trial should be—a glimpse into what the software can do and a “tease” of sorts, with premium features being locked behind a paid plan.

That’s all well and good, but it still doesn’t solve the problem of sending promotional emails to inactive or deleted addresses. Any email list validator tool can help you do this. It’ll show you addresses associated with hard bounces, as well as the ones that show absolutely no activity.

You should delete both. If the address doesn’t exist, you should remove it from your list as soon as possible. The same goes for inactive ones—the email account could have been deleted or the person may not be checking it and is only using it as a “spam address” to sign up for free trials and lead magnets—it doesn’t even matter. You’re not converting them either way, so delete these contacts and stop wasting resources on sending promotional emails that will never get opened.

Find Typos

Not everyone is trying to “trick” you by giving you a fake or inactive email address. It can happen that people make typos when inserting their email addresses. They might forget a letter, mistype Gmail, or hit two keys at once. 

One way to avoid this is by having two fields for the email address—one for the first entry and the second one for the confirmation. The chances that a person will make the same typo twice in a row are slim. 

Apart from that, double verification solves the problem here. If they mistyped the email address, they’d never receive the verification email. You can set up your sequences in a way that a new subscriber receives only the welcome email and is moved to a different sequence after clicking the verification link. 

Still, you’d be getting hard bounces every time someone enters the wrong address, as the autoresponder will be sending verification emails to addresses that don’t exist.

Prevent Fake Email Registration With Sell SaaS

There is a quick and easy way to solve all your problems regarding fake email registrations and typos. Sell SaaS provides an API that you can integrate into your opt-in forms to ensure that every email address you capture is valid. 

The way our API works is rather simple—you connect it to your forms, and the software compares all the email addresses your prospects input against an extensive email database automatically. If the API detects that a user is trying to opt-in with a disposable or fake email address, it will prevent them from signing up. 

How Sell SaaS API Works

The API literally takes minutes to set up, and you’ll never have to worry about fake email registrations again. This way, you’ll prevent hard bounces and won’t waste money on sending emails to people who will never open them. 

The best part about the Sell SaaS API and other software we offer is that it’s fully white-label. What this means is that you can resell it to your clients that might be having the same issue under your own brand and at the price you choose! 

All you need to do is add your company name, logo, and colors to the software, and you can start reselling it immediately. There are no reseller licenses or any other fees. You get to keep between 60% and 80% of each sale, meaning you can leverage our software to create a recurring, passive revenue stream!

Sign up to become a Sell SaaS partner for free and launch your own lucrative SaaS business today! 

What About My Existing Mailing Lists?

The Sell SaaS API can help you with future email registrations, but what about the mailing lists you already have? You’d want to keep them clean by removing any bogus or inactive addresses before you launch your campaigns. 

Thankfully, there are quite a few email list validation tools—both free and paid ones—that can help you tackle this task. We’ll go over the five most popular ones, but before we do, we want to take a moment to explain how email verification works.

How Do Email Validators Work?

Email validation software utilizes a number of validation techniques and, sometimes, proprietary algorithms to determine the legitimacy of an email address. 

Here’s a brief explanation of the email validation process, step-by-step:

1. Syntax Check — This check relies on IETF (The Internet Engineering Task Force) standards to scan the email addresses and remove the ones that don’t fit the standard format, preventing typos

2. Domain/MX Records Check — In this step, the tool verifies the DNS (Domain Name Server) of an email address. Any address with an invalid domain or a missing MX entry is flagged as fake. 

3. Disposable Email Address (DEA) Detection —  The email validator recognizes disposable domains and flags all addresses with the said domains. 

4. Spam Trap Detection —  This feature can detect bots, spam seeds, and fake/blacklisted email addresses by comparing them against a list of email addresses and domains that are used for trapping spammers.  

5. Final Verification —  Finally, the tool performs a thorough SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) verification of every email address on your mailing list. The great thing about this check is the fact that it pings each email address to see if it exists, without actually sending an email to each one, thus preventing possible hard bounces. 

Top Five Email Verification Tools

Email list validation is not a new concept. Businesses around the globe are well-aware of the issues that can stem from sending out emails to bogus addresses. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there are hundreds of email list verification services out there.

We hand-picked the ones that we know do a great job of email verification, so you don’t have to spend hours scouring the web in search of a simple email validation tool. 

Here are our top five recommendations:

1. Pabbly

2. MyEmailVerifier

3. EmailListVerify

4. ZeroBounce

5. QuickEmailVerification

Pabbly

Pabbly is an affordable email verification tool that boasts an incredible 98% deliverability rate.

Pabbly Homepage

Pabbly understands that email verification isn’t just about speed. The tool takes on a different approach—performing slower, manual-like verification that guarantees maximum accuracy. With less frequent pings, the software ensures that you receive accurate data from email servers and eliminates false positives.

Pabbly’s features include:

• Syntax elimination

• Domain confirmation

• Email deduplication

• Spam-trap removal

• Risk validation

• Anti-greylisting

On top of that, Pabbly deletes inactive addresses and invalid domains automatically, making sure your mailing list is always as clean as it can be.

MyEmailVerifier

MyEmailVerifier is fast and easy to use. The service guarantees a 98% deliverability, which earns it a place on our list. You can try out the service for free and verify up to 100 email 

addresses. 

MyEmailVerifier Homepage

MyEmailVerifier integrates with the most popular autoresponders, greatly facilitating the verification process and ensuring you send emails only to legitimate addresses without any hassle.

This email validation service stands out from the competition because it can identify “disabled users” in Yahoo and AOL. It also offers a real-time email verification API, helping you keep your lists clean in the future. 

EmailListVerify

EmailListVerify is a robust email verification tool that enables quick and easy bulk email verification. The tool employs eight advanced verification processes, which enables it to achieve an astounding 99% accuracy. 

EmailListVerify Homepage

EmailListVerify’s email verification algorithm includes:

• Syntax verification 

• Domain and SMTP validation 

• MTA validation 

• MX records validation 

• Spam-trap detection 

• Catch-all domains checking 

• Email duplicates removal 

• Disposable emails cleaning 

• Hard bounce checking 

The software also features a real-time API to prevent fake email registrations. You can try it out for free with 100 email verification tokens. 

ZeroBounce

There’s a good reason why ZeroBounce is #40 on the Inc 5,000 list of fastest-growing companies in the U.S.—this email verification tool provides consistent, reliable results. 

The tool relies on a powerful AI and machine learning to ensure that its email list verification is as accurate as it can possibly be. 

ZeroBounce Homepage

ZeroBounce is geared towards medium-size companies and enterprises that heavily rely on email marketing. It’s email validation and deliverability toolkit enables you to verify thousands of emails in minutes and ensure your messages reach the right people.

ZeroBounce does this through a combination of advanced verification algorithms, IP address verification, and AI email scoring. 

The tool also includes an email append—the feature that keeps track of your subscribers’ demographics, such as:

• Name

• Gender

• State

• City

• Zip Code

• MX record

• Corporate domain provider

• SMTP provider

ZeroBounce isn’t the cheapest option, but it’s a useful tool if you’re generating hundreds of leads each month. The credits carry over, so you won’t have to worry about not taking full advantage of the software.

QuickEmailVerification

QuickEmailVerification is another robust, enterprise-level email address validator. 

QuickEmailVerification Homepage

With a 99% deliverability, affordable pricing, and incredible speed—the tool can check 200,000 email addresses in under three hours—QuickEmailVerification is an excellent option if you have enormous email lists you’d like to keep clean.

The tool is also GDPR compliant and offers advanced data encryption and protection. QuickEmailVerification also features two APIs—one for real-time verification and another for bulk email address checking.

Turn Email Marketing Into a Revenue-Generating Machine With Sell SaaS

Managing your email list and keeping it clean from fake and inactive addresses is just one way to maximize the efficiency—and, consequently, the revenue—of your email marketing campaigns.

Sell SaaS offers you premium email marketing and lead generation tools that you can both use and resell! Our software helps you optimize every aspect of your email marketing efforts, from lead capturing to creating and launching high-converting campaigns.

The best part is that you can resell all of our software solutions under your own brand. We handle everything from product updates to customer support, so you can focus on selling and creating a reliable, consistent revenue stream.

Click here to sign up today for free and skyrocket your revenue!