What are the best tools and strategies for validating email addresses during signup and preventing undeliverable emails?
Summary
What email marketers say12Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Stack Overflow responds with a regular expression that validates emails that fits 99% of use cases and helps prevent bots from entering incorrect emails. This is a basic way to filter out obvious invalid inputs.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares their company, Kickbox, offers real-time validation services and offers free credits for testing.
Email marketer from NeverBounce Blog shares that real-time email verification during signup prevents invalid or disposable email addresses from entering your database. They suggests using an API to verify email addresses as they are entered, reducing bounce rates and improving data quality from the start.
Email marketer from ZeroBounce Blog shares that implementing a double opt-in process is an effective strategy for ensuring valid and engaged subscribers. Double opt-in requires users to confirm their email address by clicking a link in a confirmation email, verifying that the address is valid and the user wants to receive emails.
Email marketer from Email Hippo Blog explains that implementing typo correction and suggestion during signup can prevent users from accidentally entering incorrect email addresses. Providing suggestions for common typos (e.g., hotmail.con instead of hotmail.com) can improve the accuracy of collected email addresses.
Marketer from Email Geeks agrees with Steve and mentions filtering out bots during signup before using email validation tools.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares that Mailgun offers an API for email validation. They also suggests validating against common issues like typos using regex.
Email marketer from Lead411 shares that one should check email addresses, reduce bounce rate, increase email deliverability, improve email marketing efforts and get higher ROI with Email verification tools.
Email marketer from Clearout shares that it reduces bounce rate with 20+ checks including syntax check, disposable email check, spam trap detection, greylisting and more.
Email marketer from Hunter.io shares that you can verify the deliverability of any professional email address with Hunter’s Email Verifier. Improve your email marketing by checking your email lists, reducing bounce rate, and protecting your sender reputation.
Email marketer from MailerCheck Blog explains that Email list validation is essential to email marketing as it removes fake, inactive, and harmful email addresses, improving sender reputation, deliverability, and ROI. They suggest using real-time validation on signup forms and regularly cleaning email lists using validation tools to remove invalid or risky addresses.
Email marketer from Reddit shares that using disposable email address (DEA) detection helps prevent temporary or fake email addresses from signing up. Many services provide lists or APIs to identify and block DEAs, improving the quality of your email list.
What the experts say4Expert opinions
Expert from Spam Resource explains that a good strategy is to try and avoid spam traps. Many of these are old addresses so ensuring that addresses are valid can help you not send spam. The advice is to cleanse your list and ensure you remove any bad addresses.
Expert from Email Geeks recommends Kickbox based on their experience as a customer.
Expert from Word to the Wise responds with a comprehensive strategy on why email data quality is important for your campaigns. In short, good quality lists will get better results. Some suggested strategies are permission, consent, good validation and preference centres.
Expert from Email Geeks suggests that undeliverable addresses could indicate permission issues related to the acquisition strategy, and simply using a validation tool might not solve the core problem.
What the documentation says4Technical articles
Documentation from RFC 5322 explains that validating email addresses at signup can involve checking the syntax to ensure it conforms to the standard email format. However, syntax validation alone is not sufficient to guarantee deliverability as it does not confirm the existence of the mailbox.
Documentation from Kickbox explains that Email Verification identifies deliverable, undeliverable, and risky email addresses. Remove invalid email addresses and protect your sending reputation.
Documentation from AWS explains that Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) provides tools for identifying and suppressing bounces and complaints. By monitoring these metrics and implementing feedback loops, you can proactively remove problematic email addresses from your sending lists.
Documentation from Mailgun Documentation explains that address verification API identifies and flags risky email addresses before you send. Reduce bounces, improve deliverability, and protect your sender reputation with Mailgun’s powerful email verification API.