When running an email marketing campaign, the most important thing is to pay attention to the emails on your list. Whether you have cultivated an email marketing list on your own or you have bought the list outright, email lists have to be validated. Removing invalid email addresses from that list will go a long way to making sure your email marketing is more successful. Email lists can be cleaned in a variety of ways, though we recommend avoiding using manual verification. This can be time-consuming and can create mistakes.
Instead, you should use an email verification service like ZeroBounce or NeverBounce. Both offer a user-friendly interface for editing your email marketing list. These email validation tools are great for removing invalid emails from your email lists. Clean email lists make it much easier to make sure you stay in the ‘good books’ of your email service providers. However, while these tools provide excellent assistance for email marketing, there is an important question regarding accuracy.
How Accurate Are Email Verification Tools Like NeverBounce and ZeroBounce?
Accuracy matters, as you want to avoid getting rid of email addresses that you could have otherwise used. Many lists become compromised by using free email verifiers, which remove email addresses that you should have been using. One of the key features of paid tools like ZeroBounce and NeverBounce, then, is the ability to provide real-time verification that is accurate.
Let’s take a look at the claimed accuracy levels for these email testing tools. Reviews from users are both very positive about these tools, but how accurate are they in reality?
NeverBounce: How Accurate Is NeverBounce?
Thanks to tools like its Clean and Verify systems, NeverBounce offers a very effective tool for checking and cleaning up an email list. Run your email list through NeverBounce and it can quickly tell you whether or not the email list needs to be cleaned up. NeverBounce claims to provide seamless integration with your email service providers, such as MailChimp, which can mean you can have your lists cleaned up in real time.
This then splits valid addresses and invalid addresses, avoiding the need to have to do this on your own. NeverBounce claims to provide accuracy as high as 99%. That is a pretty high level of accuracy. This can help you to quickly and easily verify emails on your list, and reduce the risk of seeing emails falling into the recipient’s spam folder.
It also plays a big role in helping you to keep a high sender reputation. Accurate rates of 99% are very good, making NeverBounce an elite email validator. When used correctly, this tool can be great for email marketers and startups who want to make email marketing a major part of their marketing campaigns.
Since this cleans up your email list nicely and quickly, you can look forward to a bounce rate that is in line with the expectations set out by your email service provider. With numerous options for email verification via their Sync, Clean, and Verify systems, NeverBounce can be invaluable for businesses and marketing staff alike.
ZeroBounce: How Accurate Is ZeroBounce?
Accuracy is a crucial aspect of any email marketing campaign. The more you can guarantee email validity, the less likely it is that your campaign starts on the wrong foot. ZeroBounce, then, is another popular email verification platform that claims to offer high levels of accuracy in the email verification process. How true is this?
ZeroBounce is a vote winner with users because it offers high levels of accuracy. According to their in-house marketing, they can offer a minimum of 96% accuracy for email addresses from big-name providers like Yahoo!, AOL, and Office 365. For other email providers, though, ZeroBounce claims to offer as much as 99% accuracy.
However, ZeroBounce does not offer real-time verification. However, a list of 100,000 emails can be checked and verified to the accuracy rates claimed above in around 45 minutes – they suggest in their detailed documentation that the platform can verify one email every three seconds. This speed and accuracy are one of the reasons why ZeroBounce is one of the most popular email verification solutions.
However, keep in mind that ZeroBounce is using AI email verification. This means that issues like false positives and false negatives can still take place, especially when it comes to certain forms of email marketing. As a bulk email verifier, though, ZeroBounce can be a quick, easy, and highly effective way to reduce email bounce rates and improve interaction with the audience that you market towards.
ZeroBounce seems to have a specific focus in that it is mostly marketed towards enterprise marketing. However, thanks to the level of support they offer, even the most popular email marketing platforms can benefit from the rapid verification that ZeroBounce provides. Accuracy in email validation matters and a minimum of 96% accuracy is worth paying for.
Can I Trust ZeroBounce and NeverBounce For Bulk Email Validation?
In terms of accuracy, then, both tools break the typical market average of 94%. This can be especially useful for any email marketer who has started using a new email server. Instead of having to create disposable emails and self-verify email addresses, you can run hundreds of thousands of emails through either tool and get a pretty fast level of response.
Disposable emails are time-consuming to create and usually need to be used on a server that is not part of your main marketing arm. That can be problematic for various reasons, not least the fact that it is an arduous task. Most popular email marketing platforms don’t have the time to self-verify, so tools that can boast an accuracy above 90% become very worthwhile. The speed at which both tools operate can be very useful overall, too.
Email list verification is something that matters, but the time involved in going through a list of emails manually is massive. Especially if you have bought an email list that you intend to use for cold marketing purposes, you want to quickly verify the information that is contained within that list. Tools like ZeroBounce and NeverBounce make that much easier. You no longer need to worry about validation being a slow-burning effort.
Instead, you can start marketing quickly with the confidence that either tool has removed most of the risky emails from your list. This leaves you with a cleaner list that is less likely to produce bounce rates and damage your sender’s reputation.
Removing risky email addresses is very important as an email list that is filled with risky email addresses could lead to severe damage to your reputation. This could see your email domains blacklisted, or you could see professional email addresses for your company relegated to the recipients’ spam folder due to the low reputation of your email account.
Why Bulk Email Verification Beats Manual Verification
So, as we have discussed, one of the main problems that an email marketer might have when using an email list is verifying email addresses. Especially if you have bought emails to be used in a cold marketing campaign, you want as much certainty as possible that the emails contained within are actual emails as opposed to invalid emails, disposable emails, or catch-all email addresses (more on this later).
You want to avoid having to contact every email address on your list with a disposable email address, though. Not only is this time-consuming, but it can become inconsistent in terms of the results. Since an email can take anything from 48-72 hours to bounce, too, you can be waiting around for a long time to find out what to do with that email address. This slows down your marketing campaign to a crawl.
Manual email verification is a process that is riven with issues, too, thanks to the nature of the sender’s reputation. If you start sending test emails from professional email addresses, you could soon have your entire domain blacklisted. This would mean more of your actual emails in a cold email campaign landing in the spam box. Therefore, it makes more sense to use a tool that quickly verifies for you.
Accurate email verification services like ZeroBounce and NeverBounce, then, are very effective tools. These tools help you to verify your list without having to risk the reputation of your email sender. These email verification solutions, then, are much quicker than manually verifying emails. As such, we highly recommend you use an email validator like ZeroBounce and NeverBounce over manual verification.
What About Email Validation Accuracy For Catch-All Email Addresses?
When building an email list, an interesting curio that you might come across is the catch-all email address. Sometimes known as accept-all email addresses, these are unique email addresses. If an email server has a catch-all email address, it means that ANY emails sent to that domain will be caught. Without a catch-all email address, the email address has to be 100% accurate.
What do we mean by that? Let’s imagine that you send an email to a supplier. Let us say that the email is jon@jonssupplies.com. Well, if you send an email to that address, it should land in their email inbox so long as your sender’s reputation is high enough. What happens, though, if you send it to joe@jonssupplies.com?
That single-letter typo means that the email is never received – unless the email server used by Jon’s Supplies has a catch-all email address set up.
In that case, the email does not bounce and instead, it lands in the catch-all email address. So long as Jon has someone to check this for him regularly, or checks himself, your email will not be lost. Nor will it bounce. OK, it might take some time for someone to read the email, but at least you know it has arrived. These email addresses are a very powerful tool from a marketing perspective.
They can be the email address that gets you an ‘in’ with a company where you only have their domain name, not the full email address. It could be the difference between being able to form a partnership with that company or never being able to get in contact with them. Email finder tools that build email lists for you, or places where you buy email addresses from, often include catch-all email addresses.
However, many of these are not valid email addresses. They will bounce if you send an email to them, perhaps because the catch-all feature was turned off or was never activated in the first place. For that reason, tools like ZeroBounce and NeverBounce can have some problems with catch-all emails.
This can impact your email deliverability, and reduce the effectiveness of your marketing campaign significantly.
What Should I Do With Catch-All Email Addresses?
The simple solution is first to run your email marketing list intended for a cold email campaign through ZeroBounce or NeverBounce. Once you have a cleaned-up list, you should then consider running the email address list through another platform called Scrubby.
While ZeroBounce and NeverBounce are elite at providing accurate email validation, they are not accurate email verification services for catch-all email addresses. This is probably their primary weak point, which is why tools like Scrubby are a perfect complement. Remember, you can use BOTH ZeroBounce and/or NeverBounce as well as Scrubby. By validating the list with one of the former tools and then sending that list to Scrubby, you can get a much better idea of the levels of accuracy in your list.
While ZeroBounce and NeverBounce are some of the fastest email verification tools, and in general one of the best tools for your email marketing efforts, they do not handle catch-all emails well. These individual emails, then, should be run through Scrubby which is a primary complement to ZeroBounce and NeverBounce. When used together, this gives you a much more comprehensive, clean email list.
This will have a huge impact on your email marketing strategies as you now know your list has been properly cleaned up. Scrubby is not as fast as ZeroBounce and NeverBounce because it waits 48 to 72 hours before producing results. Again, it can take catch-all emails around that time to bounce an email that has been sent. This lets you know with the utmost accuracy how valid/invalid the email is.
How Does Scrubby Verify Catch-All Emails Better Than ZeroBounce and NeverBounce?
The main reason is that Scrubby sends emails to determine email validity. They send a contact message as opposed to relying on AI scoring or similar. By using disposable email addresses that avoid disposable email detection as they come from a reputable source, too, you get a genuinely accurate response.
By self-sending these verifying emails, you run into the risk of being caught up in spam trap detection. Since Scrubby sends the email on your behalf, you can feel far more confident in the accuracy. Scrubby is a reputable, experienced platform. As such, disposable email addresses that they use are not going to be rejected by email servers.
Especially if you run an email marketing campaign, you want to avoid any potential spam complaints. This helps you to scrub invalid catch-all emails from your contact list without having to know whether your own disposable emails land. Now, you have a much clearer image of what emails in your address list can stay as part of your customer base. While Scrubby means waiting a few days for answers, it is accurate.
Accuracy is more important than jumping the gun. Marketing professionals know that it is better to wait a few extra days to begin a marketing campaign safe in the knowledge that the email list has been verified. Since emails are verified by sending a direct test message as opposed to relying upon advanced algorithms, too, you can be much more confident in the accuracy of the results that Scrubby can provide.
Summing Up
So, we have looked at both ZeroBounce and NeverBounce and discussed their accuracy which is in the high 90% margin. We have also taken a close look at how these tools work, what they offer, and how they verify emails. We have investigated the direct integration that tools like ZeroBounce and NeverBounce can offer, making it easier to automatically verify email addresses as your list grows.
However, we also have taken a closer look at how ZeroBounce and NeverBounce deal with catch-all email addresses. While both offer arguably unparalleled accuracy compared to other email marketing tools, they are not the best at dealing with catch-all emails. Scrubby, on the other hand, can do so. By cleaning up an email list with either (or both) ZeroBounce and NeverBounce, results improve.
By then running that cleaned-up email list into Scrubby, results improve even further. By no means are ZeroBounce and NeverBounce a bad email checker; they simply have some issues with catch-all email marketing. Diligent email marketers who are using cold email marketing should focus on using Scrubby in combination with ZeroBounce and NeverBounce. This will produce better, more consistent results.
Not only does this double-checking of your list improve email responsiveness, but it will make your campaigns more accurate. This results in a higher chance of each lead generated through your marketing to be fruitful.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much do ZeroBounce and NeverBounce cost to verify my emails?
The cost of both tools is in the region of $ 390-400 USD for verifying 100,000 emails. Keep this in mind when evaluating the cost of your email verification.
Can email list validators get rid of duplicates on my list?
Yes, most tools today offer deduplication – including ZeroBounce and NeverBounce. This will ensure that you can avoid contacting the same email address twice, reducing potential spam complaints.
Should I use Scrubby instead of ZeroBounce and NeverBounce?
As mentioned above, we recommend that you use both tools. They are complementary to one another as opposed to in competition. Scrubby primarily focuses on catch-all email addresses.
Are catch-all email addresses common?
Yes, most estimates suggest around 10% to 30% of email addresses today are a catch-all email address. Cleaning your list to verify catch-all emails is very important.
Should I validate catch-all email addresses myself?
We do not recommend going down this path. The self-verification process is time-consuming and requires you to use a professional email address to have the best chance of not being placed in the spam folder. This will naturally increase your bounce rate, hurting your sender’s reputation which has consequences.
