Sending better email isn’t just about creating pretty templates and sending them off into the unknown, you need to know who you’re sending to in the first place. By putting a proper email list cleaning protocol in place with an email checker, you can achieve greater deliverability and improve your email performance.
When it comes to building a robust email list, you want to think in terms of quality over quantity. That’s why email list cleaning tools are essential in ensuring that all of the email addresses on your list belong there, leaving you with pristine list hygiene. Whether it’s invalid email addresses, typos, duplicate email addresses, role-based addresses, hard bounces, or just poor list quality in general, you’re putting your email marketing campaigns and sender reputation on the line if you don’t use an email cleaning service for list hygiene.
A big part of maintaining your email marketing reputation is processing bounces properly so that you can have a clean list. When you send emails, Mailgun automatically processes bounce information in real-time. Once a hard bounce is discovered, we will not send emails to that email address again, and we won’t attempt future deliveries so your reputation can stay intact. In the case of soft bounces, those bad emails will be removed after multiple attempts.
Still, when you’re cleaning your list of email addresses via our bulk email verification API, these addresses that result in hard and soft bounces should be removed manually in order to reduce your bounce rate and improve your email deliverability. Regardless of the number of emails that bounce, it’s best to take all of those out.
The best times to run your email addresses through a validator is during the signup process on your web forms, or when you’re moving away from your old Email Service Provider(ESP) like Mailchimp or Sendgrid. When validating during the signup process, it helps catch invalid emails proactively with a real-time verification email checker so that you can build a clean email list from the start. That means no disposable emails or misspelled Gmail addresses on your list. Real-time email list verification is just one of Mailgun’s email cleaning tools, and you get a number of validations included every month with your plan.
If you find yourself moving over to a new ESP, it’s imperative to look into their email validation service offerings. Here at Mailgun, we provide a bulk email verification tool that allows senders to upload a csv or JSON file of emails and clean them up all in one go. Our catch-all suite of services allows you to clean up and send from one place, rather than jumping around applications like neverbounce, xverify before actually being able to send your messages.
Need something more user-friendly than a validation/verification API call? You can perform a bulk email verification via the control panel as well by drag and drop or simple file upload, making your verification process fast and easy. Simply remove the high risk, bad emails for a quality list of deliverable email addresses.
Although building a clean email list from scratch takes time and effort, it’s well worth it. That’s because companies with the best email marketing campaigns are those that send to recipients who actually want to read their messages.
Mailgun recommends using double opt-in, which means that all users must sign up through a form, receive an email with a link, and then click the link in order to verify their email address. Taking this extra step will help ensure a strong, clean email list, lower your bounce rate, and diminish the number of complainers who will mark you as spam for sending to them without their consent.
Plus, building your email list through a double opt-in method ensures that you’re compliant with GDPR, which requires that you gain explicit consent from your recipients before you send messages to them.
Mailgun makes it easier for developers and email marketers alike to manage millions of incoming and outgoing email messages, which goes hand in hand with maintaining a clean email list. That’s because each email that Mailgun posts to your app comes fully parsed and transcoded to UTF-8. In addition, you have the ability to segment your emails, create mailing lists using the Mailgun Mailing List API, and tag your email messages to categorize them more effectively. Tagging also helps you track each message and makes is easier to do A/B testing.
By working with email marketing services that can ensure you follow the best practices for your email campaign—including email verification services, email list cleaning, and email deliverability checks—you can protect the domain or IP address of your email server from being blacklisted and optimize your email marketing campaign performance.
Clean your email list with Mailgun. Email verifications are available starting on our Foundation plan for an additional cost.
Mailgun has a variety of features for companies in need of a free email list cleaner.
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