This is a sponsored article and was made possible by ZeroBounce. The actual contents and opinions are the sole views of the author who maintains editorial independence, even when a post is sponsored.
If you are running an online business, chances are you are already collecting the email addresses of your users and engaging in email marketing to get your subscribers to return for more. In your email database you probably have thousands, or even millions, of email addresses. The question is how many of them are valid? Online subscription forms are a magnet for spambot, and a lot of the time our email databases are full of spam addresses that we are not aware of. As it costs money and effort to send out an email campaign, the more spam or invalid email addresses you have, the more money you are wasting. This is where a service like ZeroBounce is useful.
ZeroBounce is an email validation service that allows you to validate an email address before you add it to your database. Some of its features include:
- Email Bounce Detection
- Email Abuse and Spam Trap Detection
- Email Data Append
Email Bounce Detection
For each email address, ZeroBounce will query the email server (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) to see if the email address is valid. It will then remove the invalid emails from your list to prevent email bounces from ruining your deliverability.
Email Abuse and Spam Trap Detection
ZeroBounce can identify domains that are known for abuse, spam, and bot-created emails. It can also identify emails that have a history of marking emails as spam. Last, but not least, it can also identify temporary email accounts used to mask real email addresses.
Email Data Append
Most of the time, we only capture the email addresses of our users and not their name and location. When validating your emails, ZeroBounce can also identify the first and last name, location and age of the email address, and append it to your list.
Testing It Out
It is free to sign up for a ZeroBounce account, and you are given 100 credits (1 credit for 1 email validation) to test out the system.
1. To get started, sign up for a free account at ZeroBounce.
2. Once you are logged in, you will be in the Bulk Email Validator section where you can upload a csv (or txt) file of the email addresses that you want to validate.
3. Once you have prepared your CSV file, upload it to ZeroBounce and change “Choose Separator” to “Comma.” Click the “Validate File” button to start the validation.
It will immediately bring you to the “Uploaded Files” section where you can check the status of the validation. Generally, it will take a minimum of thirty minutes to validate one-hundred email addresses.
4. Once the validation is completed, you will receive an email notification.
5. You can then download the updated file from ZeroBounce.
6. The following image is the full validation report. From a single column of email addresses, it now returns its status, first name, last name, gender etc. This is rather efficient and useful.
With this list you can now trim the invalid email addresses from your database.
Email Validation via API
It wouldn’t be very useful if you had to keep visiting the ZeroBounce website to validate an email address. Luckily, ZeroBounce provides an API service, so you can integrate the email validation into your app or even email collection forms.
1. To get started using the API, you can click on the “API Key” section to get your API key.
2. To integrate the API into your app, check out the “API – Validate Email” section for the integration guide.
Cost of Using ZeroBounce
The free account comes with 100 credits which you can use to validate 100 email addresses. If you need more, you can purchase 100,000 credits for $150, which is equivalent to $0.0015 per email address. If you have a big database of email addresses, you can get 1 million credits for $750, which is equivalent to $0.00075 per email address. Alternatively, there is a cheaper option for those with a small database – $10 for 5000 validations (about $0.002 per email address).
Depending on how you value the authenticity of your email subscribers, spending $0.0015 to validate an email address is really a good deal. Considering how expensive email marketing can be, you can save up to hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars every month by removing the invalid addresses and emailing only to valid addresses.
Conclusion
If you are serious about email marketing, then using ZeroBounce to valid your email addresses is a no-brainer. It will not only save you money, but also increase your engagement rate, which is what every email marketer wants.
