Email marketing is at the heart of any good inbound marketing campaign. Email helps provide communication about your brand, spread the word about promotions, and get the attention of potential customers.
Whether or not we want to believe it, email is by no means dead. Think about any of your inboxes right now—I use the term “any” because if you’re like me, you’ve got at least three. They’re likely cluttered with all sorts of offers and content from brands and companies that are vying for your attention. The trick is to get your brand to stand out against the rest.
With that said, as joyous as some may find email, there is the side of email marketing that causes us as marketers a great deal of anxiety: dirty contact data, and how to clean it.
A Clean Email Database Is Critical
Although email marketing is important, I’m a strong believer that behind email marketing lies the importance of a clean database. That’s right—in order to be effective with email marketing, you have to know who you’re sending to and ensure the emails are, in fact, valid. The last thing any email marketer wants to face is an email-sending suspension from HubSpot.
There are two types of marketing email suspensions:
- Email deliverability protection system: This detects excessive hard bounces, unsubscribes, spam reports, blocklisting, or abuse complaints.
- Fraudulent activity detection: This type of suspension detects poor sending behavior from your HubSpot-hosted inbox.
So, you might be wondering, “How can I avoid this?”
For those who have uploaded lists to HubSpot and determined that it’s OK to send marketing emails to these contacts, you’ll still want to be sure that you’ve cleaned your email lists appropriately. With the help of email validation tools, you’ll be able to rest assured knowing that your contacts have verified email addresses.
Best-Bet Email Validation Tools
Here are my top four email validation tools and how you can leverage them.
1. NeverBounce
This is at the top of my list when it comes to email validation. When recommending a tool that I personally prefer, NeverBounce is cost effective and has tons of integrations to work with platforms like HubSpot and Marketo. In addition, for those of you using ZoomInfo, NeverBounce is offered within this platform to clean your data before lists are even exported. For clients uploading smaller lists or one-time uploads, this tool is priced effectively starting at 1 cent per email address, which can be affordable depending on the list. Check out what you’ll pay for an upload with this pricing tool.
With that said, according to Capterra, this tool isn’t the highest rated compared to its competitors. Users complain that integrations are clunky and the ability to truly and fully clean data might falter.
2. mailfloss
Unlike NeverBounce, mailfloss is priced on a monthly basis and provides automatic daily cleanup up to a set number of emails per month, depending on your plan. There are also integrations available for this tool, however they appear to have a slightly smaller selection than NeverBounce. The benefits of this service include great customer service and the fact that it’s a perfect tool for regular email validation.
3. Proofy
Proofy’s pricing model varies slightly from the top two competitors. With Proofy, you’ll purchase a set number of credits at a reasonable rate. However, unlike mailfloss and NeverBounce, Proofy does not have spam detection. Users highlight that this tool is very easy to use and validation is complete no matter list size. Proofy does have a limited number of integrations compared to its counterparts. Unlike other platforms, Proofy provides 24/7 live support.
4. Bouncer
Bouncer offers pricing for both subscriptions and singular options. However, like Proofy, it does not offer spam detection. Users of the platform have complaints about long response times and believe that pricing is fairly expensive compared to its competitors. Bouncer does also have a limited number of integrations available to users. Check out its free email checker tool. Bouncer also has a variety of online tools to help marketers better understand and learn how to use its platform.
Choose Your Email Validation Tool Wisely
So, the choice is yours—but it is important to evaluate all available options for these tools before picking one for your business. In doing so, you reduce the risk of emails being stopped by your sending platform, like HubSpot. Furthermore, you eliminate or significantly decrease the risk of being blocked from sending altogether.
For more about these validation tool evaluations, check out the ratings from Capterra to help you make the most informed decision.
Interested in diving deeper into email marketing? As a self-proclaimed email marketing guru, I love the opportunity to benchmark my emails against industry trends and learn more from others in the industry. Check out our COVID-19 Email Marketing Impact Report for the latest stats and information about how COVID-19 could impact your email marketing efforts.
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