How do you validate your email recipients?

Will Sigsworth

Email validation ensures an address is accurate and can receive mail. 

There are three major reasons that you should validate email addresses:

1. You guarantee that emails arrive. Hard bounces occur when the email never reaches an email address (usually because it’s invalid). Validate your emails and you’ll have a much higher land rate.
2. You reduce the chance of spam complaints. Using best practices, your spam complaint rate should be no higher than 0.1% (less than one complaint per 1,000 emails).
3. You maintain your sender reputation. Sending emails to an unverified list doesn’t just return a high bounce rate. It also affects your sender reputation. Deliverability will drop alongside your reputation. The higher your hard bounce rate and the more your emails end up in the spam folder, the lower your reputation will slip. A validated email list proves to Internet service providers (ISPs) that you’re a reliable sender.

Click here for an in-depth look at five of the best online email lookup tools and some of the ways you can look up emails manually.

Stephen Aldridge

Your article recommends keeping emails verified but doesn't tell me how to feed that validation back into Pipedrive contact data.

I downloaded our contacts from Pipedrive and ran their email addresses through zerobounce to find out how many were old / invalid - quite a lot it seems. I now want to feed that info back into Pipedrive so we can see which emails are invalid and also to reduce the effort of cleaning the list in future. Am I able to use a csv file upload to pipedrive to tag all contacts that have invalid emails? Perhaps by adding a custom field "Old/InvalidEmail"?