Email deliverability is still a challenge for many businesses looking to improve their email marketing results. With large segments of email lists becoming obsolete every quarter, maintaining data quality is key.
Liviu Tanase, founder and CEO of ZeroBounce, explains how email validation helps preserve a good sending reputation and boosts deliverability. The entrepreneur also talks about:
- the indicators of a messy database
- the simple things marketers can do to land their emails in the inbox
- and some of the ZeroBounce features customers love the most.
Founder and CEO of ZeroBounce
How does email validation help businesses?
Virtually all businesses rely on email to communicate with customers and prospects. Since the start of the pandemic, email has become even more important in business and marketing communication.
Whether you send a transactional or a marketing email, you need to know that email reaches your subscribers. This is where email validation becomes critical. B2B email lists, especially, tend to acquire a lot of bad data. An average of 22% of a list degrades in just one year.
An email validation service ensures your data is up-to-date and that you have higher chances of landing in people’s inboxes.
How exactly does having a valid list improve your inbox placement?
It all comes down to your sender reputation. Everything you do as an email sender builds – or taints – your reputation. Internet service providers (ISPs) use this metric to decide where your emails should go: the inbox, the junk folder, or nowhere at all.
A messy email list reflects poor email marketing practices. Getting spam complaints and bounces, and emailing spam traps and abandoned email addresses are signs that:
- your list may not be permission-based, meaning you may have added people without their consent
- the content you send is irrelevant or comes across as spammy
- you’re not being proactive enough about building good, long-term rapport with your subscribers.
ISPs pay attention to these aspects when deciding where to direct your emails. Using a valid list indicates you send emails in a thoughtful, transparent and meaningful way, and that translates into higher deliverability.
When does one know that an email list needs cleaning?
A good rule of thumb is to scrub your list at least once per quarter. If it grows quickly, we suggest our customers validate it even more often – and especially before a critical campaign.
Otherwise, some clear indicators are:
- a high bounce rate: that means higher than 2 percent, the accepted industry standard
- frequent spam complaints: you shouldn’t get more than one spam complaint for every 1,000 emails
- overall low engagement metrics, such as poor open and click rates
What is the easiest way marketers and business owners can verify their lists?
The easiest and fastest way is to run it through an email verification system.
You upload the list on the platform and get it back in better shape – sometimes within minutes. ZeroBounce, for instance, takes an average of 45 minutes to validate 100,000 contacts.
If you’ve just cleaned your list and you want the results to last longer, you could also add an email validation API to your website.
Once you connect it to your registration and signup forms, the API starts checking every email in real time. Whenever someone tries to subscribe to your list, their address has to pass this filter first to confirm its validity.
It’s convenient and safe – the API runs in the background, so it won’t affect user experience in any way.
What are some other things companies can do to ensure their emails land in the inbox?
Email deliverability can sometimes seem like a complicated goal to achieve. Indeed, there are a lot of things that contribute to your inbox placement, but most of them are just common sense.
If you have a clean, opt-in list and use a reputable email service provider, you’re already on a good path.
Next, learn as much as you can about your audience. Who are the people on your list? What challenges are they looking to overcome? And how can your service help them?
It’s worth taking the time to answer these questions, so you can create the most relevant and useful content. Try to avoid:
- spammy-looking words – especially in your subject lines
- sending too much promotional content – instead, focus on educational emails to create engagement
- using link shorteners in your emails – they can easily be mistaken for spam
- including too many calls-to-action in one email – they distract your subscribers and dilute your message
What are some of the ZeroBounce features your customers love?
Most of them tell us they’re confident about cleaning their lists with us because of the way we protect their data. ZeroBounce uses military-grade mechanisms to keep all data safe during the email verification process.
Also, many customers give us feedback on how accurately we clean their lists and how much we’ve reduced their bounce rates. Our guaranteed accuracy is 98%.
Finally, if you look through our reviews, one thing that comes up again and again is the quality of our customer support. Our support team is available 24/7, 365 days a year to answer any questions. It’s something we offered from the very beginning and it’s helped us stand out in the market.
How do you see ZeroBounce evolving in the next year?
When it comes to business and marketing communication, we believe email will remain the most prevalent channel. As the competition gets tougher, companies can’t afford to miss their customers’ inboxes.
Our goal has been to provide them with all the tools they need to enhance their deliverability. ZeroBounce is now more than an email verification platform. In time, we’ve added new features and tools to help our customers succeed.
Just recently, we introduced a blacklist monitoring tool. Paired with the other email testing tools, it helps ensure that campaigns reach their target and boost ROI.
We have other projects in the works – all designed to support inbox placement and email marketing performance. It’s a privilege for us to be the go-to email deliverability platform for more than 100,000 customers. We’ll continue to surprise them with exciting additions to our suite of services!
About ZeroBounce
ZeroBounce is an award-winning email verification and deliverability platform. The service removes email typos, nonexistent and abusive email accounts, spam traps and other risky email addresses.
With its diverse suite of tools, ZeroBounce supports the delivery of transactional and marketing emails and improves inbox placement.
ZeroBounce operates a military-grade security infrastructure, ensuring customer data is protected at the highest levels.
With more than 6 billion emails validated to date, the company serves 100,000+ businesses in 190+ countries and adds up to 150 new clients every day. Marketers using email lists validated by ZeroBounce report a 98%+ accuracy rate and maintain an excellent sending reputation.
In 2019, ZeroBounce took no. 851 on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. One year later, ZeroBounce rose to no. 40 on the list. In 2011, ZeroBounce was number 9 on the Inc. 5000 Regionals list of the fastest-growing companies in Florida.
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