Email verification and validation play a vital role in your email campaign's success. Validating and verifying the recipients' email addresses before kicking off your email campaign helps improve the campaign performance.
This guide will discuss email verification and validation, why it is done, and what tools you can use to carry out email verifications, along with their unique features and capabilities.
Table of contents
- What is email verification?
- Why is it essential to use email verification tools?
- Benefits of email verification services
- How is email verification done?
- What should you look for in good email verification and validation tool?
- Email verification tools
- Conclusion
What is email verification?
Email verification ensures whether the recipient's mailbox is active and accepts emails. It also identifies different email address discrepancies and possible spam traps before it gets flagged by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or mailbox providers, which can cause severe damage to your reputation.
In other words, email verification enhances deliverability by cleaning up your emails and helps deliver messages to your target audience.
Why is it essential to use email verification tools?
There are different reasons why an email address may turn invalid or stop working. Sometimes it may be due to behavioral factors like a person changing their email address, and sometimes it is because of certain technical glitches.
Below are a few reasons why email addresses might become invalid, and hence verifying your email lists before sending out an email campaign becomes essential.
1. When the recipient changes their email service/provider
Let's say a person uses a local email service provider, and then they switch to Gmail/Hotmail. Your emails will not be delivered to the recipient in these cases, though the old one may still be active.
2. When the recipient changes their email ID within the same email service provider
If a person uses the same email service provider but switches to a new email address, your emails will not deliver and bounce back immediately.
3. When the recipient switches positions within a company
Every employee will have a different email address based on their designation. C-level employees, mid-level, and junior cadre employees have other email address formats. When a person gets promoted from a junior position to a mid-level, their email address becomes invalid, which can cause your email messages to bounce.
4. When the recipient changes jobs
Many decision-makers and specialists often change jobs every few years, and in this case, emails get redirected to another person or become unreachable when a person leaves the company.
To prevent this kind of situation, you can set up email autoresponders. Learn more about them here - A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding Email Autoresponder
5. When the domain is dead, it's a familiar and technical reason to verify the email.
If you find any website unreachable, it indicates that the mail server is down or the domain is dead. In this case, you can't deliver the message to your recipient. When the public email provider is down or dead: There is no chance for the email message to reach the recipient if the server is down or when the email provider is out of business. Sometimes online email providers experience technical server problems or even shut their businesses.
Now that you are clear about the importance of verifying emails and the working mechanism, the next step is to verify email ids. The simplest way is to use an email verification and validation tool. These tools come with many benefits that can help you improve your email campaigns' performance.
Benefits of email verification services
The major benefits of using an email verification service are as follows.
• Lowers bounce rate
Prevent bounces and preserve your sender's reputation. An email verification tool will remove non-existing email addresses misspelled email addresses, thereby lowering bounce rate and protecting your IP reputation.
• Scrubs your email database
Enhance your email list with an email scrub. By scrubbing your list, you will be able to collect valuable data about your leads and segment the list based on the data. This will help improve your conversion rates.
• Analyzes your email headers
Email verification tools will analyze your email headers to ensure your mail server is set up and configured correctly, all to make sure that your emails reach their recipients.
• Monitors your IP and domain
It's essential to check your IP and domain reputation and be notified when they are listed on a blacklist. You'll be provided alerts should your IP or domain show up on a list.
To choose a good email verification and validation tool, you need to understand the basics of email verification and the different features you should look for in a tool. Let's start with understanding how email verification works.
How is email verification done?
Though many of us use email verifying tools, most don't understand how email verification works. Below are a few steps that explain how email verifiers work and their process.
• Syntax check
It helps ensure whether the email address is correct, checks spelling, commas, spaces, special characters, and whether the domain extensions are in the right place.
• Domain check
It checks whether the domain name used in the email address exists and is registered and whether it is working correctly on its hosted domain.
• Email ping
Email Ping is the technical process, which pings an EHLO message to the exact email address and then waits for the server's response. If there is a response, it indicates that the email address is correct, exists, and the server is active.
What should you look for in good email verification and validation tool?
Now that you understand the basics of how email verification works, you can start looking out for a verification and email validation tool that uses these processes to perform testing. As you sift through various tools, here is the list of features you need to look at before making your final choice.
✅ Online tool
Make sure that it is an online email verification tool that works as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Online tools don't need any computer resources as they are accessible anywhere and anytime from any device. You also don't use your IP for the verification process; instead, it uses the service's IPs which work better.
✅ Scalability
The email verifier you choose should be capable of verifying both single email addresses and extensive email lists. Bigger email lists take time in some cases but are mostly done instantly.
✅ Personal and corporate emails
You need to ensure whether the email verifier can verify private and corporate/business email addresses.
✅ Different verification mechanism
The email verifier you choose should verify many aspects by running other validation mechanisms like email server ping, domain check, and syntax check.
✅ All-in-one/connectivity/integrations
Ensure that your verifier integrates or connects with different tools like email list management tools, email sending tools, email generation tools, and more.
Email verification tools
We at Mailmodo went through many popular and not-so-popular email validation and verification tools and rated them based on the above features and benefits. Here are some of the useful email verification tools that we recommend.
1. Zero Bounce
Zero Bounce is one of the leading and popular online email validation services that ensure the companies sending high volume and complex emails lead to [better email deliverability. The email verifier tool can eradicate bounces, remove invalid email addresses, verify key recipient demographics, and confirm IP addresses.
Features
Some of this tool's key and unique features include disposable email detection, syntax check, bulk email verification, single email verification, domain check, catch-all server detection, and spam detection.
This tool provides inbox placement tester and other deliverability tools, which are prevalent for testing the leading email providers for spam/inbox placement and mail server tester.
It protects the senders' reputation for email marketing and detects and eradicates known spam and abuse trap emails, toxic, temporary addresses, and catch-all domains.
It provides information about the subscribers and boosts deliverability.
This tool also includes API integrations, and it is an effortless and fastest tool to validate emails.
Pricing (Offers free trial & freemium benefits)
The basic plan starts at $15 per month, and they also have a freemium version. Freemium works based on credit score.
2. Bouncer
Bouncer decreases bounce rate, protects the sender's reputation, and enhances your deliverability by not allowing unknown, risky, or a single email address to enter into the lists of your email. Bouncer is user-friendly and helps deliver messages to your audience with promptness and ease.
Features
Some of the key unique features include disposable email detection, syntax check, bulk email verification, single email verification, domain check, and catch-all server detection.
Bouncer's easy-to-integrate and ultrafast email verification APIs provide various advantages that include countless possibilities to validate your emails.
You can also use bulk email verification or verify the emails in real-time in batches or at once.
Pricing (Offers freemium benefits)
It serves based on the pay-as-you-go model. It costs about $0.0025 per email. If you want to take a trial run, you could use the free 1000 credits to play around with the tool.
3. TheChecker
TheChecker is an affordable, fast, and accurate email verification tool that removes bad bounces and emails. TheChecker can help you to increase the ROI of your email campaign and help you to stop being blocked by Spamhaus and other anti-spam organizations.
Features
Some unique features include a quick email checker, filetype compatibility, anti-greylisting technology, misspelled domain detection, risk validation, customized exports, and more.
This tool claims it has the latest anti-greylisting technology and offers you the most accurate email validation results.
It can also check addresses for syntax errors.
Pricing (Offers free trial & freemium benefits)
It serves based on the pay-as-you-go model. It costs about $0.0019 per email. You can also sign up for a free trial and validate up to 100 emails for free.
4. Hunter Email Verifier
Email Verifier from Hunter is a handy tool that every email marketer should have since it verifies email addresses from the list, ensuring all the emails will be delivered to the correct recipients. Hunter Email Verifier is a user-friendly email verifier where you paste the email address you'd like to verify, and you'll get a verification score in less than a few seconds.
Features
A fast and accurate email verification process that returns the results in seconds increases your chances of conversions.
Bulk email verification with detailed reporting.
Email verification API that you can reuse for your projects.
Pricing (Offers free version suitable for small businesses)
Price varies on the amount of Hunter requests available each month. If you'd like to try the tool, a free version provides 25 searches and 50 verifications per month. The "Growth" option offers 2,500 searches and 5,000 verification at 99 Euros per month for established businesses with more extensive email lists.
5. DeBounce
DeBounce helps get rid of threatening emails and protects your domain. You can also deactivate emails from your list. Every email marketer who sends out email marketing campaigns can enjoy DeBounce.
Features
Some unique features include disposable email detection, syntax check, bulk email verification, single email verification, domain check, catch-all server detection, and spam detection.
You can use the API to instantly verify email addresses on your platform with this tool.
- This tool has intelligent spam-trap indicators which remove all records of spam.
Pricing (Offers free trial & freemium benefits)
It serves based on the pay-as-you-go model. The basic plan starts at $10.00, with which you will be able to verify up to 5000 emails. You can also sign up for a free trial and get 100 credits for free.
6. Clearout
Clearout.io is one of the 98%+ accuracy email validation and verification tools capable of carrying out more than 20+ refined validation checks. You can verify more than 15 million email IDs per day to remove invalid and temporary addresses, spam traps, and abuses.
Features
Some of the unique features of Clearout include WordPress plugin availability, Google Sheets Add-ons availability, secure data, fully compliant, secure data transmission, real-time verification, and more.
Bulk validation, real-time validation, and quick validation are a few ways in which you can verify your emails.
It also works with top CRMs and Email Service Providers (ESPs).
Pricing (Offers free trial & freemium benefits)
Pricing for Clearout works based on the credit score. One credit is equal to 1 email. You can buy 5000 credits for $25. You can also create a free account and get 100 credits for free to get started.
Conclusion
I hope the above list of email verification and validation tools has provided you with a clear understanding of which tools better suit your needs. Once you have picked the right email verification tool to validate your email lists and used them in maintaining list hygiene, your delivery, and open rates will improve.
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