If you’ve ever sent a bulk email campaign, then you likely know that your email list is a major tent-pole of the success of your email marketing efforts. Your campaigns can live and die by the quality of your email lists…which is why it’s so important to stay on top of their health and hygiene.
Sending to too many problematic addresses, such as old email addresses, bad or improperly entered data, or spam traps can have negative effects on your sender score and is liable to eventually land you on an email blacklist, which is something you want to avoid at all costs.
This is why it’s so important to run your list through a bulk email validator – especially for a cold email marketing campaign. Cleaning your email list ensures that your email content is only going out to real addresses and skips all the bad addresses that would be otherwise harmful to you.
What Exactly is On Your Email List?
Before we get into why you need a bulk email validator, it’s important to understand what harmful email addresses are, and how you can wind up with them on your email list.
No matter what type of email campaign you’re running, your email list is going to degrade over time. It just happens. You could have a 100% squeaky clean email list of a thousand people who signed up on a form with their totally accurate B2B contact information. Then, after a few weeks, a hundred of them have changed jobs. Suddenly, 10% of your email list is no longer valid.
People change jobs all the time, and when they do, their company email addresses are typically disabled. This will result in your email campaigns returning a hard bounce (a permanent delivery error) from these addresses. In some cases, these email addresses aren’t completely disabled, but are repurposed as spam traps, which do exactly what they sound like. They’re set up expressly to identify emails going to addresses that no longer exist to identify the sender as spam.
It’s also possible that the person who submitted their email address typed something incorrectly – either intentionally or unintentionally – in the form field and the result is that the email you received as a lead is a bad address. This will obviously return a hard bounce because the address given doesn’t exist. Sending to too many of any of these can result in your email address landing on a blacklist, which means that – at least until you’ve circumvented the issue – you’ll no longer be able to send mass email from that address.
With a smaller, inbound email campaign, you might be able to stay on top of your list quality yourself, but with a larger cold email campaign, a bulk email validator is essential.
Learn more about buying and using targeted B2B email lists.
What Does a Bulk Email Validator Do?
First of all, it’s imperative that you purchase your list from a reputable data provider. When starting out with cold email, it can be tempting to go for the cheapest list you can find, but those lists are going to contain far more in the way of problematic data.
Like we mentioned before, even the highest-quality lists degrade over time, which is why it’s important to always run your list through an email validator. Here’s how it works:
Any standard bulk email validator will perform the following series of checks on your email list.
- Removing duplicated 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 traps)
- SMTP verification (ping mailboxes)
Clickback not only performs these checks, but each contact on your list goes through about 20-30 checks on import to ensure that no bad data makes it through when it comes time to send your campaign.
While there are several services out there that offer list verification, few are as comprehensive a list cleaning tool as Clickback’s built in bulk email validator. Many alternatives also limit your list to a small amount of contacts, where Clickback will clean a list of over 150,000 contacts.
Learn more about why having a clean list matters.
Cleanliness is Godliness
The cleanliness of your list is vital to your cold email campaigns, as it will improve your deliverability. If you aren’t reaching the inboxes of your prospective clients, then you can’t rightly expect them to convert on your content. Making sure your list is clean increases your chances of hitting the inbox exponentially.
When you aren’t worried about whether you’ll actually land in the inbox, you can start to worry about what content is going to work once you do land in the inbox. In essence, having a clean email list can help with your conversion rates.
It’s also worth noting that sending to spam traps, bad email addresses, and old data will hurt your sender score. Even if you don’t land on a blacklist, a low sender score means that less and less of the active contacts on your list will see your emails.
If a spam filter notices that your emails are coming from an address with a low sender score, chances are, it will send you to the junk folder rather than your contacts’ inboxes. The hard truth is, you’ll hardly ever convert anyone from the junk folder, so keeping a high sender score is crucial.
Learn more about how to generate more leads with email marketing.
Use the Best Tool to Clean Your Email List
Clickback’s Email Lead Generation Software not only contains a powerful bulk email verifier capable of cleaning your email list, but it’s also a complete cold email sending that carries out your campaigns using its own IPs and domains to keep your sender score in pristine condition as well. It also has a live spam checker that will provide you with real-time updates on the deliverability of your campaigns so you can be sure that they’ll reach the inbox instead of being relegated to the spam folder.
Sign up for a free 1-on-1 demo today and see the difference a cold email campaign with a properly cleaned email list can make.
