“Free email verification” is an option that many marketers and business owners choose when they’re first starting with email deliverability. Unfortunately, these free options don’t provide quality, actionable results that will be critical to keeping your sender reputation clean and your click-through and conversion rates healthy.
Here are three reasons you should stay away from “free” email verification.
1. Free email verification services can’t keep up with business needs.
Free email verification services, like an email checker, are often designed for personal use, and that means they typically limit you to one-off email checks.
If you’re engaging in email marketing, you’re likely sending to hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of email addresses at a time. It’s not efficient nor practical to verify a single email address at a time. In the end, you’d end up overpaying for the free service in labor hours.
You need a verification service that will allow you to quickly verify your email addresses in bulk.
2. Free email verification only checks for syntax errors, not abuse.
You may have been tempted to use a free email verification service to validate emails. After all, they are free!
Unfortunately, these services do not work. They simply check the syntax of the email address and make sure that it follows the specifications of the RFC (Request for Comments) standard. This means that they check for things like an “at” symbol “@” in the email address or a “.com” at the end of it. It does not verify if an email address is valid and it certainly does not check for abuse.
Why is good email verification bundled with Email Hygiene so important?
Email verification and hygiene is vital because your email list health can affect deliverability and inbox placement. Email Verification + Email Hygiene will identify any typos or misspellings in your list as well as malicious, active email threats, like bots, disposable email addresses, or blocklisted email addresses. Once identified, you decide what to do with the potentially harmful email addresses to protect your sender reputation with ISPs (Internet Service Providers). Your sender reputation influences your deliverability rate and your chances of landing in spam folders as well.
The quality of your list will be reflected in your deliverability rates. So it’s essential to keep in mind that a clean list will help you improve both!
Download our Complete Guide to Email Hygiene
3. Free email verification services will not give you a high-quality result.
Email marketers are always looking for ways to save money, and there are a lot of “free” email verification services out there. It’s only natural to want to make the most of your resources, but you get what you pay for when it comes to email verification.
Free service providers skim the surface of your data, removing obvious trends in bad data (like typos), but they don’t go much further than that. They’re not going to provide you with a high-quality result because they simply don’t have the resources to do so. These companies offer free email verification as a loss leader, hoping to encourage customers to come back and pay for their premium services.
The problem is that these services can cause more harm than good. They may clean up your list enough to pass an ESP’s validation process. Still, if you send mail through those email servers without running it through a higher-level service like Webbula Email Hygiene and Verification, you’ll see your bounce rates climb and deliverability suffer as a result.
Free email verification will not protect your sender reputation and deliverability.
Using a free email verification tool will not protect your sender reputation and is simply not the most effective option available to today’s email marketers. There is no question that the pros of protecting your brand at scale far outweigh the costs of a professional authentication and classification provider. They may cost more, but you will be protected with a service focused on delivering the highest level of sender protection and message delivery success possible while keeping your budget in mind.
There are no clear alternatives to these services. If you are serious about ensuring that your emails are delivered successfully every time, investing in quality Email Verification and Email Hygiene services is essential.
Contact a Webbula Data Solutions Experts to inquire about our Email Hygiene Service.
Melissa McGaughey, Director of Marketing at Webbula
Melissa McGaughey is an SEO Strategist and Inbound Content Marketer with a decade of experience in B2B spaces, including retail, restaurant, manufacturing, and payments. With a background in Agile Scrum methodology, developing processes and systems to streamline workflows, enhance productivity, and drive ROI is her jam.
