What is a bulk email verification service and why do I need it?

Imagine:

You are a marketer and you just ran a successful poll on your business Facebook page requiring respondents to enter their email address to register their vote and receive an incentive (discount code). The promotion is a success and you collect no less than 10.000 email addresses.

Excited by the prospect of all the leads you just generated, you immediately send the e-mail campaign that was right to those 10.000 new addresses. But instead of a big sales boost, something unexpected happens ...

Your sender score or deliverability plummets and your IP address for his email address is blacklisted. Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and other email providers now consider you a spammer. This causes serious damage to your carefully constructed email marketing activities.

What happened?

Of the 10.000 people who signed up, 3.000 just clicked through and wanted to see the results of the poll and receive the discount code, so they used fake email addresses or disposable email addresses like Mailinator. Another 1.000 respondents mistyped their email addresses (often happens). A large part of your new email list consisted of addresses that do not exist and that causes a considerable damage to your deliverability score.

If you want to use such aggressive tactics, it is wise to use a bulk email verification service. This checks the value of email addresses and prevents blacklisting.

Many of these types of providers also offer a real-time API so that you can even build the verification into your website so that you can prevent people from registering with incorrect or fake email addresses.

Bulk email address verification validates a large list of email addresses very quickly so that bad addresses can be removed before campaigns are sent. 

How a bulk email verification service works

A bulk email verification tool performs a checklist of the addresses in your list to make sure they are genuine. You want your messages to go to real recipients and the job of the email verification tool is to increase the chances of that.

A bulk email checker identifies the following:

• Duplicate emails (which can be deleted)
• DNS records (this checks for invalid domains)
• Address syntax (there are again those typos in e-mail addresses)
• Tracing disposable email addresses ("junk collectors")
• Spam traps
• Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) authentication (send pings to mailboxes)

Once the verification is complete, you will get a segmented copy of your list. This way you can see which email addresses to delete, which to keep and which addresses are questionable. 

Using bulk email verification has several benefits for your email marketing activities. Your sender reputation will be protected, the deliverability of your campaigns will improve, your conversion and click-through rates will increase and you will get a better overall ROI on email activities.