In the fast-paced world of financial services, maintaining a clean email list is essential for protecting your sender reputation and optimizing marketing spend. Discover the top email verification tools that can help you validate your contacts efficiently and effectively.
In the financial services sector, the accuracy of your email list can make or break your marketing efforts. A clean email list ensures that your communications reach the intended audience, thereby maximizing engagement and ROI. Moreover, it protects your sender reputation, reducing the risk of being flagged as spam, which could severely impact your ability to reach clients in the future.
Invalid email addresses can clog your system, leading to higher bounce rates and lower deliverability. This not only wastes marketing resources but also risks your IP address being blacklisted. Email verification tools help mitigate these risks by identifying invalid, disposable, and spam-trap emails before they can cause damage.
The initial step in the email verification process is exporting your prospect list from Pardot. Utilize Pardot’s Export Prospects feature to download a CSV file of all 43,000 contacts. Ensure that you include critical fields such as Email, Created Date, Last Engaged Date, and custom fields for segmentation like Lead Source and Campaign.
By exporting the list, you isolate the data, ensuring that the verification process occurs outside of Pardot. This avoids unintended automation triggers and data corruption, allowing for a cleaner and more controlled validation process.
Choosing the right email verification tool is crucial for bulk validation. Here are some top options:
NeverBounce: Known for its high-speed bulk validation, NeverBounce allows you to validate 43,000 emails in minutes via CSV upload. It categorizes results into Valid, Invalid, Catch-All, and Disposable emails and integrates with Pardot via Workload.co for automated list updates.
ZeroBounce: Offers high accuracy with the ability to process over 100,000 emails per hour. It provides detailed insights, including validity likelihood and spam trap risk. ZeroBounce integrates with Pardot through Zapier, which can auto-update the 'Do Not Email' field based on validation results.
SendGrid Bulk Validation: This asynchronous API can validate up to 1 million emails, returning detailed scores such as validity likelihood and spam trap risk. Note that this option is available for Pro/Premier accounts only.
Email Validator for MCAE: Available on Salesforce AppExchange, this tool offers native Pardot integration and validates emails in real-time using services like ZeroBounce, SendGrid, or Abstract API.
Once the bulk validation is complete, the next step is to update your Pardot records. For invalid emails, flag them with a custom field such as ‘Validation Status = Invalid’ and add them to a suppression list or set ‘Do Not Email = True’.
For catch-all and disposable emails, segment them into a low-priority list for re-engagement campaigns. Valid emails can be enriched with additional data like ‘Email Score’ from ZeroBounce.
Automation tools like Zapier or Workload can be used to auto-update Pardot records post-validation. For example, a Zapier workflow can trigger an update in Pardot once the validation process in NeverBounce is complete.
Maintaining a clean email list is an ongoing process. Implement real-time validation by adding tools like NeverBounce’s JavaScript widget to your Pardot forms. This ensures that any new emails entering your system are validated at the point of entry.
Schedule regular re-validation checks, such as quarterly bulk validations for unengaged prospects who have shown no activity for six months. Use dynamic lists in Pardot to isolate inactive prospects for targeted re-validation campaigns.
Lastly, monitor deliverability metrics post-cleanup to track performance. Aim for a bounce rate of less than 2%, anticipate a 5-15% increase in open rates, and ensure spam complaints remain below 0.1%. Tools like Google Postmaster and Microsoft SNDS can provide insights into your IP and domain reputation.