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 coordinate if they wanted to, they don’t. The result is that there’s an adversarial relationship between the two. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) block Email Service Providers (ESPs)… and ESPs are forced to block clients.
If over 10% of your emails are bad, less than 44% are delivered!
In the industry, it’s not as simple as double opt-in. 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. That’s been a huge headache. Email service providers don’t care about your opt-in methodology or audit trail; they simply assume you’re a spammer.
ESPs like Intuit Mailchimp have implemented intelligence on email addresses in Omnivore. With Omnivore, Mailchimp sent 50,000 warnings and shut down 45,905 malicious accounts in one year alone. While 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.
Over 20 percent of email registrations contain typos, syntax, domain, and other errors.
Jupiter Research
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 daily to catch you. The irony, in my opinion, is that I believe it’s easier for a SPAMMER to get an 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 campaigns. Well, duh… the first send captures 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 constructed correctly, while email verification utilizes methodologies to predict its likelihood of being delivered.
Why Do You Need Email List Cleansing?
Email hygiene is necessary to have a great email deliverability program and maintain a good sender reputation. Here are four scenarios where email list cleaning is a necessity:
- Migration: If you’re moving to a new provider, email list cleaning is essential to your IP warming strategy.
- Low Inbox Placement: Your emails may go directly to the junk folder because your list has so many spam traps and bounced email addresses.
- Low Open Rates: If you’re not measuring your inbox placement rate and have low open rates, your emails may go to the junk folder due to many spam traps and bounced email addresses.
- Re-Engagement: If you have a list you haven’t sent to in months, you will want to cleanse it to avoid a spike in bounces that may impact your deliverability rates.
How to Choose An Email List Cleaning Service
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 that ensures it does 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 the company had a means of contacting them via email, a contact form, or phone number, and whether anyone actually responded to the request.
- Integrations: Bulk processing of email addresses is one thing, but integrating all of your systems and entry points where you’re collecting email addresses is a far more efficient process.
- API: Do they have a well-documented API where you can integrate your platforms directly?
- Compliance – whether or not the company resides in a country with privacy regulations such as GDPR or email spam compliance legislation.
Our Email List Cleaning Sponsors:
Upload List
MailerCheck offers email verification, analysis, and list cleaning designed for people who want a quick and reliable tool without all the fuss and upsells. There are just three simple steps to optimize your list.
Integration
A simple JSON API you can integrate into any platform to verify the existence, validity, and quality of any email address simply by passing it into the request URL.
Leading Email List Cleaning and 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 respond to support requests:
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 Internet Service Providers, and reduce your 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 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.
- Aeroleads: Find prospects’ business emails and phone numbers. They have a Chrome extension also.
- Atdata: Helps companies that depend on email to drive revenue by building, updating, segmenting, and cleaning their email lists.
- Bouncer: User-friendly email verification and list cleaning tool that help you maintain communication and reach out to a real person easily and promptly.
- BriteVerify (now part of Validity): 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 want to integrate your email verification with them!
- Clearout: This bulk email verifier enables you to upload the email database and clean up your email list with just a single click.
- DeBounce: The DeBounce service allows you to upload and validate lists of email addresses quickly and securely.
- Emailable: Emailable 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.
- Impressionwise: Their 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 various email-based threats.
- Informatica: 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%.
- Kickbox: Kickbox ensures you only send emails to real users and helps you separate low-quality addresses from high-value contacts. Protect your reputation, increase open rates, and save money with Kickbox.
- Mailboxlayer: Verify any email address’s existence, validity, and quality simply by passing it into the request URL.
- Mailcheck: Ensure that your mailing list contains only real email addresses and get rid of bots and inactive users.
- MailerCheck: Email verification, analysis, and list cleaning designed for people who want a quick and reliable tool without all the fuss and upsells. Just 3 simple steps to optimize your list.
- MillionVerifier: Email verification with guaranteed high accuracy and affordable rates.
- NeverBounce: Eliminates invalid email addresses and dramatically reduces overall bounce rates for maximized deliverability.
- Proofy: Quickly validate and verify your email lists. EU-US Privacy Shield compliant.
- Snov.io: Cold outreach automation – find, validate, and email prospects with Snovio for better conversion rates.
- 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 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.
- Antideo: Email Validation API service to weed out Disposable / Temporary email addresses, spam emails, etc, to keep your lists clean.
- 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.
- ContactOut: Find anyone’s personal email address as well as phone number
- 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: 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 that are used daily by subscribers worldwide.
- EmailHippo: Email validation online service for professional marketers and their clients
- emailvalidation.io: Automate your email validation process by validating contact information with their intuitive email checker.
- 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 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 the emails you send exist. Protect your domain’s reputation and increase your open rate.
- ListWise: We analyzed 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
- 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 a complete detailed report.
- Truemail: Email Verification. Easy, fast, and cheap. Clean your mailing list and increase your deliverability rate by up to 99%. The email address validation process was never so easy.
- Verifalia: Verifalia is a web-based email validation service that lets you upload and validate lists of email addresses 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. We are using affiliate links within this article.
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