What is email verification and why is it important?
When you’ve finished generating a list of your ideal prospects, it’s crucial that you verify the emails you’ve got. Why? Because if 50% of your emails are invalid, you’re wasting a crazy amount of time adding them to your funnels, researching them, generating personalised emails, and most importantly, you’re damaging your domain when you start sending emails out to them. How? Well, because if you repeatedly send campaigns that are hitting over the industry average of a 2% bounce rate, receiving ISPs will reduce your sendability and reputation, or worst case scenario, blacklist your domain, forcing you to create a new one, and start the warm-up process again from scratch.
I’ll cover how to do this in a separate blog, because unfortunately, it happens to the best of us sometimes. Now let’s cover how you can ensure this doesn’t happen.
The percentage of emails that will be invalid in a list of, let’s say, 1000, depends on the industry, location, and data source. But we expect an average of 25-30% of email addresses to be flagged as invalid. However, in some cases, we see upwards of 50-60% bad email addresses, in fast-paced industries where turnover rates are high (the prospect in your list no longer works at the company).
We also tend to see high invalid rates with Linkedin Sales Navigator searches due to old emails being used, accounts that have not been updated properly, among other factors.
1. Neverbounce
Neverbounce is an easy-to-use email verification tool that, for the most part, does a decent job of cleaning your lists. You can also choose which emails you’d like to export by category.
Here’s what that looks like:
Here, you can choose if you want to export Accept All emails or not. What is an Accept All email you ask?
Well, according to Neverbounce themselves, it’s an address commonly used by small businesses to ensure a company receives all email sent to them regardless of typos. They are often valid email addresses, but cannot be verified. In our experience, it can be a gamble sending to these addresses because, if they turn out to be invalid and therefore bounce, your domain health can be compromised, resulting in lower deliverability, and worse case scenario, being blacklisted.
If you trust that the rest of your list is of great quality (all valid email), you can probably get away with sending to these addresses without damaging your domain. Remember, you’re aiming for no more than a 4% bounce rate with your campaigns to avoid negative consequences.
2. GMASS
If you’re looking for a free tool, then GMASS is a good option. Unlike Neverbounce, GMASS email verifier is completely free to use.
After landing on the GMASS Email Verifier, you’ll be greeted with a box to input your emails into. Either copy and paste them from your prospect list, or type them in manually, and select ‘Find The Email Addresses’. Once all of the emails have been scanned through, you can select ‘Verify These Addresses’ at the bottom. You’ll then be able to see which are valid according to their system. One issue you might encounter is how to put the valid emails back into your spreadsheet. Unfortunately this is a little trickier, and requires some manual work.
You’ll have to go in and replace the rest of the contact details with the valid emails, and delete the invalid contacts. Alternatively, you could create a separate funnel for the contacts with invalid emails involving LinkedIn, or calling, providing you have that information on the contact. I’ll cover this in more detail in a future blog.
As for the reliability and accuracy of GMASS, I can’t really say. We don’t typically use it in our tech stack, but I know a few people who use it regularly and are happy with the results. We recommend that you use multiple tools to verify your prospects if possible.
3. Snov
The third option we’re going to look at is Snov. You get a fairly generous 50 free checks with Snov’s Email Verifier so if you’re working with large batches of data, you’ll need to sign up to one of their paid subscriptions.
Snov’s verifier is straightforward to use – you can check an individual email address without signing up, or you can upload a list for bulk verification after creating a free account. You can also integrate Snov with CRMs like Hubspot to keep your database clean and protect your sender reputation.
One of the Snov’s main selling points is its 7-tier verification process. While it’s not a tool I’ve personally got much experience with, Snov say that they offer MX record checks, SMTP pings and greylist bypassing to ensure extra precise verification.
All in all, Snov looks like a really good option if you’re working with small batches of data. However, unlike Neverbouce, they don’t offer pay-as-you-go pricing, so if you want to verify a large amount of emails, you’ll probably only want to subscribe to Snov if you’re going to make use of their other tools.
And now know how to verify prospects’ email addresses!
I’ve tried to give you 3 options to verify your contact emails in this post, and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each platform.
In summary:
Neverbounce: a good all around platform for a good price, including PAYG options
GMASS: a free option providing good results, but requires manual work to put the emails back into your prospect list
Snov: provides a great verification tool, but is pretty expensive and requires a monthly commitment
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me – chris@flowd.co.uk
See you in the next post!
