Before we dive into the many email list cleaning services available, it’s important to understand why this step is so crucial to the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. Validating the contacts on your email list prior to launching your campaign is a vital part of your overall marketing strategy.
In order to have a successful campaign that generates user engagement and new leads for your business, email deliverability must be kept top-of-mind. (Your email marketing campaign depends on it!)
If your email list contains bad addresses, spam traps, and other nasty roadblocks, you run the risk of damaging your sender reputation. One metric to watch is hard bounces, which is a signal you are hitting invalid emails.
If you don’t pay attention to where your emails are ending up, you can quickly run into trouble with your Internet Service Provider or ESP and get your domain blacklisted. Your goal is to reach the mailbox of your intended recipients, not trigger one of the many factors that negatively affect deliverability.
Why you need a list cleaning service
A profitable email list is one that can effectively reach your target audience. You need to be able to reach the inbox of your clients without hitting spam filters and hard bounces. An email list cleaning (also called verification, validation or email scrubbing) will remove invalid emails and ones that owned by known spam abuse complainers.
The key is to isolate the spam traps from your database you don’t send any of your email marketing messages to those addresses. Advanced tools including A.I. email scoring can be leveraged to better understand inbox activity of specific contacts.
Some of the terms you’ll see in the following list cleaning services include:
- Spam trap checker
- Social Append
- Email Bounce Checker
- IP Information Append
- Toxic Domain Checker
- Overview Reports
- MX Record Detection
- SMTP Provider Information
- Email Typo Correction
This list was inspired from the features section of the ZeroBounce website, as its email list cleaning services are some of the most impressive and full-featured in the industry. (They even won an Affy Award for outstanding internet achievement for their email validation services.)
Some email verification and cleaning services can also enhance the quality of your database by filling in the missing pieces. It reads the data to accurately add contact details such as first and last name, gender, city and even IP address registration information.
ZeroBounce
ZeroBounce is an award-winning email validation service that offers a free trial of 100 email validation credits. Some of the most successful online companies like Trip Advisor and Shopify use Zero bounce to validate their email list.
What I like about ZeroBounce is that you can try out their email validation service on their website for free to see how it works. You simply type an email address into the field for a real-time result on the contact record of your choice.
The free email validation checker on Zero bounce
The email list cleaning features ZeroBounce offers is impressive. They feature a unique data append system that can protect your sender reputation and prevent email bounces. Here is a breakdown of their core services
- Email Bounce Checker
- Spam Trap & Abuse Email Checker
- Email Scoring and Catch-All Validation
- Email Address List Append
In the following press release, you can read how ZeroBounce has perfected its real-time email validation system to help businesses operate in “a safer and more productive digital environment”.
ZeroBounce Email List Cleaning Services – Press Release (2018)
With direct integrations to MailChimp, Zoho CRM and more, it’s hard to ignore the many features of ZeroBounce. They offer competitive pricing for validating emails from 5,000 to over 1 Million. If you have a bulk email list, I would seriously consider checking the email validation price for your list from ZeroBounce.
iContact
iContact is an email marketing company that offers the rare occurrence of an in-house email marketing consultant to help you with your campaigns. I don’t know how much this feature costs, but you can schedule a call on their website.
You don’t often see this option offered, but there is a huge demand for quality information about email marketing best practices, especially when dealing with a large list of email contacts. They offer a free 30-day trial of their email marketing service limited to 100 email addresses.
In terms of the exact list cleaning features of iContact, the website is a little vague compared to some of its competitors in this regard. They describe their service as “confident sending”, stating common value propositions such as the fact that your messages will avoid spam traps and hit ISP blacklists.
If you have used iContact to send large email marketing campaigns or experienced advice from one of their strategic advisors, please weigh in on this in the comments.
Verifalia
Verifalia is an email list cleaning and real-time verification service that has been operating since 2005. They remove invalid and mistaken email addresses, spam traps, and catch-all servers from your list to reduce your bounce rate and protect your sender reputation.
Developers will be happy to know that Verifalia has an email validation API that can deliver real-time email verification and batch email verification to automate your list hygiene. This service can stay on top of bad data in your system to correct new email addresses and existing ones that have decayed.
The Verifalia APO allows you to integrate it into your web forms or CRM, to prevent invalid emails from entering your system at sign up. It can be an effective way to safeguard your premium content and avoid fake sign-ups.
Learn more about the Verifalia Email Verification API
Verifalia lets your upload your existing database to their secure server using a user-friendly drag and drop interface. The email list is then cleaned and verified to include legitimate contact records, and you can download the results and additional list information for improved campaign performance.
They offer several credit packages depending on the size of your list and the number of validations needed. Also worth noting, is that they offer 3 levels of service from “standard quality” to “extreme quality”. All of the verifications are performed on their industry-leading engine that has been updated and refined since 2006.
NeverBounce
NeverBounce makes it clear right out of the gate that they proudly integrate with MailChimp, Marketo and Campaign Monitor. They have verified billions of emails and even offer a test validation service on their website.
This service lets you upload a native .CSV file to validate it without having to make any changes to the file or format. It will analyze your list to let you know how useful it will be in terms of campaign performance, along with an estimated bounce rate.
Here is a handy video that shows you how to validate an email list using NeverBounce:
Once you have downloaded the cleaned list of deliverable, valid emails, you’re able to save it as a new contact list for future email marketing campaigns. As you can see in the video above, this process is fast and easy.
Some notable NeverBounce customers include some big names like Dell, Uber and indeed. Their bulk email list verification tool cleans lists of any size in three steps. It’s an astonishingly simple process of uploading your existing list, downloading the cleaned version, and benefitting from an improved deliverability rate.
They also offer a real-time single email verification tool for registration and contact forms, as well as a stand-alone API for developers looking to integrate these tools into their own software.
Clickback MAIL
Clickback MAIL is a complete email sending platform (they call “email lead generation software”) that allows you to build and send effective email campaigns to a bulk list. They specialize in dealing with cold email lists, and the challenges involved with reaching the inbox of a non-opt-in campaign.
The email list cleaning features of Clickback MAIL include a robust suite of list hygiene steps that cover:
- Remove Duplicate Emails
- DNS Record Verification (Invalid Domains)
- Email Address Syntax (Improper Format)
- Detect Role-Based Accounts (info@example.com)
- Detect “Junk Collector” Emails (disposable addresses)
- Spam / Honeypot Detection (bots, bad emails, spam seeds)
- SMTP Verification (Ping Mailboxes)
Clickback MAIL email lead generation software
Clickback makes it quite clear that the purpose of the software is to generate B2B leads from a purchased list. The software includes an email builder that runs an advanced spam checker to confirm that your marketing messages do not create any unwanted attention from the spam appliances.
List cleaning is an integral part of deliverability optimization stage when dealing with a cold list of contacts. Clickback MAIL will only send email messages that are 100% CAN-SPAM, CASL and GDPR compliant so you can be sure that your email campaigns are delivered responsibly.
Mailgun
Like all of the services listed above, the Mailgun email list cleaning tool can help you verify your contacts to improve deliverability and avoid spam traps. Mailgun automatically processes bounce information in real-time, to filter out hard bounces from future delivery attempts.
Their website states that you can try out their free email list verification service to check 100 addresses, and receive unlimited support when you sign up. Impressive! In the video below, the user explains how to set up a custom email for free in Gmail:
Using Mailgun to set up a custom email in Gmail
Mailgun offers a mailing list API that can segment lists and categorize them more effectively. The API maintains a clean email list for you by fully parsing emails before posting them to your app. You can tag and track messages to perform A/B testing on your email list.
More Options:
I hope that the email cleaning services featured in the post help you get a better understanding of the options available to you when looking to improve the deliverability and overall performance of your email lists. Bounces, complaints, and spam traps can hinder your campaign performance.
Do yourself a favor and clean your email list to earn higher open rates, clicks, and conversions for your email marketing campaigns. Did we miss an email list cleaning or verification service on this list? Please let us know in the comments.