The best email verification tools for verifying email addresses

Email Verification Tools Definition: What are Email Verification Services?

At their core, email verification tools help marketers and salespeople determine if email addresses are valid or not. Such solutions are also referred to as email validation tools, email verification services, email checker tools or, in German, email verification software.

These programs are of high importance for many businesses. After all, email campaigns can only reach their full potential if the contacts used are functioning optimally, meaning they can actually reach the intended individuals. Additionally, frequently sending messages to invalid email addresses or even spam addresses can carry certain risks.

Good tools are able to accurately identify unreachable addresses, spam traps, and potentially harmful email contacts. Furthermore, with some of these solutions, email lists can be managed in detail. Some applications even allow you to gather additional information about the owners of individual email addresses.

Why should businesses use an Email Validation Tool?

Email marketing still maintains potentially the highest ROI of all marketing strategies. The same can also be said for sales activities via email. These activities are therefore an indispensable part of the marketing and sales mix for many companies. Maximum successes can only be achieved if the email addresses being used actually work.

Regardless of whether emails are used for lead management, cold acquisition or in newsletter marketing: It is essential to ensure messages are correctly delivered and the right people are addressed. If neither one can be guaranteed, the following threats emerge:

• Marketers or sales staff can ruin the sender's reputation if they repeatedly send emails to invalid contacts or if recipients mark their emails as spam. In serious cases, the sender's addresses may even be blocked by the recipients' providers. If too many emails are returned, it can affect overall deliverability. This means that even valid addresses may not be serviced.

• The days when successes could be scored simply by purchasing a huge list of email addresses and using mass mailings are long gone. Today, even adding people to the email list quickly and without clear interest in your email campaigns will no longer gain any benefits. In fact, such practices may attract more attention from data protection officers, especially since the GDPR came into force. Those who receive many spam reports are particularly at risk.

• Last but not least, email marketing measures or email sales activities that go to invalid addresses are absolutely inefficient. In the worst case, a lot of time is wasted on campaigns aimed at specific email groups, most of whom cannot be reached at all. Invalid email contacts always hamper the success measurement of the respective marketing or sales campaigns.

An email verification tool can help you clean up contact databases and get rid of problematic email addresses. However, the check is not a one-time thing, it should be done regularly. Verified email addresses can stop working faster than you might think. Ideally, an email validator tool should be used before each new campaign. The following are the most common reasons why email addresses become invalid.

• Change of workspace or the position of email users within the company.
• The company closing down, resulting in the non-existence of the domain.
• Typos or syntax errors of email addresses by the transmitters.
• Change of email service provider by the company.

How do Email Verification Tools work?

Different email address checker tools can have different functional approaches. However, many follow a three-step process. First, the email list to be checked is loaded into the tool. Then, the following steps take place.

1. Syntax check: This ensures that the emails do not come back unopened due to errors such as blank spaces and invalid characters.
2. Domain check: This checks whether the email addresses exist and operates in the domain.
3. Email ping check: The ping check determines the activity status of an email address in real time.

In general, an email validation service ensures with these and possibly further checking steps that the respective contact list is correct and free of errors. The tool helps you to determine whether the email addresses they have are current and truly belong to the individuals you want to contact.

An email verification tool ideally prevents emails from being marked as spam, the sender's value from being reduced or the sender's IP address from even getting blacklisted.

Email verification also provides support in refining contact lists. Some solutions, for example, allow you to segment leads according to their position in the sales process. In this way, marketers or sales professionals organize useful information to filter out inactive subscribers and uninterested leads.

Top-tier email verification services can even extract various additional information about the email addresses. This allows you to find out, among other things, whether the domain is free or chargeable and if the owners of email addresses have accounts on social networks. This makes email verification software a great tool when it comes to getting to know your own target customers better.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of Email Validation Software?

In addition to various necessities, many clear advantages of email validation software have already been highlighted above. Now, a detailed list of the main benefits.

• Reduction of bounce rate: If there are too many bounce emails, the sender company's reputation can suffer massively. In the worst case, used email domains end up on a blacklist. Email verification software helps to greatly reduce the bounce rate by eliminating invalid addresses. Some software providers claim more than 90 percent.

• More precise analyses: After an email verifier has cleaned up a mailing list, you have an overview of the valid addresses. Email campaigns that now specifically target these contacts can be analyzed more reliably. There are no losses – the measures can be evaluated very precisely as successful or not successful.

• Money savings: The storage of email addresses and the sending of emails is not free. It costs money to maintain a database and to send emails via specialized software. An email checker tool can potentially exclude a large number of invalid email addresses. So, you can save quite a bit on the costs for technology (database size, marketing automation tool rate, etc.).

• Reduction of spam complaints: Spam complaints can be far more negative for companies than bounces. If many such reports occur, there is a significantly increased risk of being blocked by your own and other email providers. Ideally, the number of spam complaints should be less than five per 5,000 sent emails. Email verification tools can identify email accounts of users who frequently classify emails as spam. The verifier flags such email accounts so you can clearly filter them out and subsequently exclude them from the mail delivery. Alternatively, you have the opportunity to address such contacts (if they fundamentally have potential for the respective operation) with special email content, which reduces the risk of rapid spam classification.

• Increasing the engagement and conversion rate: If you meticulously check the email addresses in your list, you can get rid of those that are unlikely to benefit you in any way. As a result, the list becomes smaller, but the engagement rate almost always increases. You benefit from significantly higher efficiency. Desired engagements and eventually conversions are achieved more frequently with less effort in relation.

• Avoid sending to risky email accounts: Particularly during lead generation, email addresses are often included that do not belong to a real person. Various fraudulent intentions may be hiding behind this. It's important to steer clear of these email accounts. On the one hand, you can become a victim of criminal machinations if they write to you. On the other hand, it is also possible that you end up on a blacklist if too many emails go to known fraud addresses. A good email verification tool reliably filters out such contacts.

• Discover temporary accounts: Temporary email addresses are increasingly being used to activate software trial versions or to gain access to gated content for lead generation. More serious scams are also possible with corresponding accounts. These delete themselves after a certain period of time and are of course of no use for email campaigns. With an email checker, you can identify such contacts in a list and remove them.

• Efficiently protect sender reputation: When companies send emails, they build a reputation with email and internet service providers over time. This reputation is known as the sender reputation and is based on several factors. As long as emails are only rarely marked as spam and mostly arrive correctly, everything is fine. With email lists that are verified through an email verification service, you effectively and efficiently protect your sender reputation. Just consider what effort it would mean to manually check even a small email list for its spam and bounce susceptibility.

• Comply with GDPR: It's very annoying if email campaigns receive numerous bounces or spam reports. As a result, severe restrictions may be the worst-case scenario. However, this becomes even more serious when (among other things due to spam classifications) there is a suspicion of non-compliance with data protection. In severe cases, heavy penalties may follow. Once again, an email verification tool helps to prevent this. With such software, you can categorize email addresses differently. Including according to specific GDPR standards.

• Building a reliable, conceptually supportive database: The accuracy and reliability of mailing lists are very important, as sales or marketing can otherwise hardly draw benefits from the information. Outreach campaigns, if the emails in a list are not verified, never bring the desired results. The metrics will also not be meaningful. Furthermore, it may happen that campaigns are aligned based on an unverified list or its names and domains that only reach a few relevant people because many addresses are incorrect. If the database is securely verified, such information significantly supports the strategic and conceptual work on email campaigns.

Clearly, these are many tangible benefits. Nevertheless, specific disadvantages or challenges can also arise when using email verification tools. Below is a summary of the most common email verification software problems.

• Incorrect handling of the verified lists: If you are very sure through the use of an email validation service that you are really addressing relevant individuals with your email campaigns, this actually also poses a certain risk. This can lead to excessively aggressive mailing practices which, sooner or later, will lead to a negative reaction from the recipients. As a result, despite (or because of) the email validator tool, spam and newsletter unsubscribe rates may increase. Therefore, you should also handle validated email lists prudently and in line with GDPR.

• Validation for problematic lists can be critical: If you use email checker tools to optimize problematic lists, this can pose a certain risk. Situations are particularly tricky with contact lists containing addresses that may not have been collected fully GDPR-compliant due to their age. Email validation tools do not guarantee that all addresses that can bring negative influences are filtered out. Therefore, penalties may occur. Such solutions are rather intended to polish up quality lists.

• Costs: High-quality list validation services are not free and can become quite expensive with a larger range of functions. In addition to the actual costs for the email validation, you also have to factor in the time spent selecting a provider and the actual validation of their lists. In the worst case, an email verify service can significantly reduce the ROI of email campaigns!

Finding the best Email Verifier: How to choose a suitable Email Verification Tool?

The current market actually offers many different email verification softwares. They primarily differ in their delivery format and the orientation or the depth of the verification. Accordingly, these are two of the most important points that those interested should carefully consider when choosing such a solution. What this means exactly and what else should be considered in order to ultimately find the best email verifier for one's own purposes will be explained below.

• Delivery format: Today, most email validation tools are offered as online programs. Such a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is the best option for most businesses. The applications are affordable, do not require internal operating or maintenance resources, and can be used with any internet-capable device from anywhere.

• Scalability: The considered tool should be able to manage flexible different sizes of email lists. Growing companies have growing contact databases. These must be verified securely also in the long term. Therefore, choose a tool that secures your increasing needs and can ideally keep up in real time.

• Filters for business and private emails: The email verification tool should verify or sort business and private email addresses. Almost always, both types of addresses are found in the email lists. Being able to differentiate between them is important for effective and individual targeting of business contacts and private individuals in an email campaign.

• Verification mechanisms: The email checker tool's verification mechanisms should not follow just one approach. For meaningful results, at least a domain check, a syntax check, and an email server ping should be integrated.

• Integration: Usually, an email verification service is part of a larger email marketing or email sales process. Various programs are used in these processes. Therefore, those interested should make sure that the chosen email validation software can be optimally integrated into the established software architecture. Typical helpers are lead generation tools, marketing automation software, and outreach tools.

What is the cost of Email Verify Tools?

Top email verification services come at a price. Businesses in this respect should make sure that they don't whittle away too much of the fundamentally very good ROI of their email campaign through additional costs for a validation tool. An expensive product doesn't always mean the best solution - this is also true for email testing programs.

A precise budget consideration is possible with most providers without stack. After all, many providers of corresponding software have packages for different requirements in the program. Costs are then normally based on the number of email addresses that can be checked within a certain period of time, on the depth of the verification or on the scope of the additional information that the tool can find out, and generally on the breadth of the integrated functions.

Some providers offer to test up to 100 email addresses per month for free. 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 or even more contacts incur costs ranging from around 30 Euros to more than 500 Euros per month.