How to Clean Your Email List Effectively Using ZeroBounce
ZeroBounce provides everything you need for comprehensive email list cleaning, including bulk email verification for your current list and a real-time verification API for new signups.
To help you clean your email list effectively using ZeroBounce, follow these step-by-step tips below.
Step 1 - Use bulk email verificationⓘ
If you've never cleaned your email list or haven't done so for a while, uploading your database for bulk email list cleaningⓘ is the best place to start.
You can upload your entire email list for bulk email verification or clean a few emails at a time
There's no limit on how many contacts you can upload for bulk email verification. Just ensure that you have enough credits to verify each email address on the list.
It's recommended to use bulk email verification once every three months (at least). This process helps you keep up with natural email list decay, keeps your list up-to-date with valid email contacts, and boosts your email deliverability.
Step 2 - Review your email verification results
After the bulk email verificationⓘ process is completed, you can download your results.
This encrypted file will contain multiple CSV files categorizing the processed email addresses by type. You'll find CSV files titled "Valid," "Invalid," "Catch-all," etc.
With your files, do the following:
- Add the "Valid" emails back into your primary email list. All of these email addresses are in use by real people, and you can expect to deliver your messages to them successfully.
- Remove all of the "Invalid" emails from your list. The simplest way to do this is to upload your "Valid" file to your CRM or email service provider and replace your existing list there.
- Remove critical high-risk emails, such as spam traps and disposable emails, from your email list.
Abuse emails also often fall under this category. These accounts are known to report content as spam, which can cause your spam complaint rate to rise. However, these emails are valid.
If you're familiar with the contacts on your email list, you may use your best judgment as to whether it's worth the risk of continuing to email this abuse email contact. If you have any suspicion that they aren't reading your contact and reporting you as spam, it's best to remove them. - Review your catch-all email addresses. Catch-all may or may not be in use by a company to collect all incoming emails sent to an otherwise invalid address on that domain. In many cases, a catch-all or role-based catch-all email will result in a bounce, but they can also be valid leads. There are a few recommended ways to manage these emails. First, if you’re not comfortable with the risk, you can opt to remove them from your email list. You’ll have the security of knowing that your sender reputation and email deliverability will be safe. However, if you feel that some of these catch-alls may be viable leads, it’s recommended to segment them into a new list. This way, you can test emails to these accounts without interfering with your primary mailing list campaigns. If those emails bounce, eliminate the catch-alls from your list. Finally - ZeroBounce offers an email scoring service, which is an excellent way to analyze your catch-all emails. You can leverage this artificial intelligence to learn about the account’s activity and engagement levels to determine the likelihood that it’s in use. It’s recommended to score your catch-alls, segment those that score well, and see how they perform.
See also: Email verification status codes >
Step 3 - Clean new email lists before merging them with your database
Similar to the first step, ZeroBounce recommends cleaning any new email lists you obtain before adding them to your previously cleaned list. If you're sponsoring or attending events or running new campaigns and promotions, you're likely to gather many new email addresses that you're eager to email.
You can also verify small batches of emails (up to 25) with the single email validationⓘ tool*
Before you do that, upload those new, smaller lists for verification. Then, repeat step two to filter out your high-quality leads from the invalid ones.
Step 4 - Manage new emails with real-time email verification
While bulk email verification is used to manage your existing email list, you need a way to filter out the bad leads automatically.
The ZeroBounce real-time email verification API allows you to do this by adding the email verifier to your website, landing pages, and anywhere else you obtain new emails. When a user enters their name and email, the email verifier API verifies the email and rejects any invalid or high-risk addresses.
The real-time email verifier automatically spots invalid emails*
The real-time email verification API will also help you boost legitimate signups and conversions by advising users to correct mistakes with their addresses, such as typos or misspellings.
ZeroBounce's email service API is available in more than a dozen programming languages with complete documentation on how to use it.
If you're not familiar with or comfortable with using the API, there are still solutions for you. ZeroBounce offers more than 60 integrations and plugins with popular CRMs, marketing platforms, and email service providers. In many cases, you can leverage the ZeroBounce API just by connecting your two accounts with an API key.
With a combination of bulk and real-time email verification, you can clean your email list effectively using ZeroBounce - and keep it clean.
If you have any questions about the ZeroBounce email verification service, the team is available 24/7 via email and live chat. Reach out to ZeroBounce today at support@zerobounce.net for more details.
Related Articles
Generating HAR files in various browsers