Sending an email to your subscribers can be an exciting experience.
You carefully select the subject line, brainstorm the content, and work hard to make your call to action more appealing.
But then, the numbers roll in, and… it’s not what you expected.
To make sure that doesn’t happen, we’re going to show you:
- how to scrub your email list and why you should do it in the first place,
- how to remove invalid and hard bounce email addresses from your database
- how to prevent the most common lousy email list practices and
- How can you transform your email broadcasts from adventurous to boring? You’ll be hitting the mark every time.
Excited? So are we.
First off, why clean your email list?
Among many reasons your emails can fail, an email list that needs cleaning is a big one.
Email lists naturally decline with time. Some studies show that in just 28 days, 4.5% of your subscribers can become unresponsive. You can imagine how this can quickly snowball and turn a profitable email list into one that even Neil Patel couldn’t resurrect.
Your list may also have spam traps (stale emails become ones), fake emails generated by bots, etc.
The big issue with email is always going to be deliverability. It’s a complex topic with many components, such as the sender’s reputation and domain reputation. A full guide to email deliverability can be found here.
As you may know, every domain has its reputation.
When you send an email from your domain, your recipient’s inbox (their ISP) acts as a bouncer.
It has one job and one job only: to let in the excellent emails and throw out those stirring trouble.
If your domain’s reputation is good, you get in. Otherwise, you stay out.
What is an ISP?
An ISP (Internet Service Provider) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. There are many different kinds, but you should know about email service providers like Google, Yahoo, or Outlook. People who use them want one straightforward thing: ZERO spam emails. So, these companies need to let no spam email slip through their filters – and they’re very good at it.
This can be good or bad, depending on your current reputation. But this really means that your domain reputation needs to be fixed. It is an ever-changing number based on various factors.
How many subscribers open your emails, click on your links, save your emails… and how many emails never get delivered, are labeled as spam, or are deleted (ouch, that hurts)?
You want to maximize the first part and minimize the second. But how?
While there are many ways to improve your email marketing, cleaning your email list should be priority number one if you already have an established one – especially if you’ve never done so.
As good as best email marketing practices are, great subject lines mean little if your emails end up in spam. Clean email list first!
When should you clean your email list?
Right now. We’re not joking.
As we will explain in the rest of this article, it is simple to do and easy to set up.
But as a general rule, you should clean your email list regularly AND if you notice a sudden drop in your open rates.
While many factors can cause a drop in response, your email list quality is easy to rule out with a simple check.
How often should you scrub your email list?
The more subscribers you are getting, the more often you should check. But even if your list is relatively stable, you should do it at least a few times per year—we recommend doing it four times, once per quarter. We find that it’s easy to schedule and that it works for most people.
However, if you’re getting a ton of new subscribers, a monthly check would be more appropriate.
How to clean your email list of wrong subscribers
There are two steps to cleaning your list:
- You should unsubscribe (not delete or remove) inactive customers so they don’t spoil your overall metrics, including deliverability, and burn your email credits. This can be done by creating a segment and unsubscribing it.
- You should use an email hygiene tool for detecting spam traps and fake emails.
These steps are essential when cleaning your email list. Don’t worry; you won’t need to spend much on this. Email list cleaning services are cheap and provide excellent accuracy. In the next section of this article, we’ll look at a few available on the market.
Tools for email list cleaning
So, you don’t want to waste time. Let’s get to the point.
There are a large number of online services providing email cleaning or email scrubbing.
However, not all of them come with the features you might want.
For example, some don’t clean your email list of wrong subscribers – they only point them out. You still need to do the manual work of actually removing them.
Instead, we’ll look at a few one-stop-shop services that we have found helpful.
4 best email list cleaning services
After comparing dozens of list scrubbing services, five appeared repeatedly. These are the best tools for email list cleaning we’ve found. We will compare them and see how they stack up against one another.
Mailgun
Mailgun is a very sophisticated email tool with a wide range of features. This platform applies artificial intelligence, which constantly learns how to validate email addresses. It has custom grammar checks for Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail emails, quick response time, and many other features.
This tool is the most comprehensive and with the best value for money.
Xverify
Xverify is a trusted solution for checking emails. It offers built-in fraud protection, boasts a 98% success rate, and is fully mobile-friendly. It also has a handy built-in auto-correction feature, which can recognize and correct common spelling mistakes on the fly.
It is especially recommended to European users, as it is fully GDPR compliant and has intelligent email verification explicitly built for Europe.
Xverify offers “pay-as-you-go” rates that go down with the number of emails on your list.
Overall, Xverify is a good service that can give you a clean email list.
DataValidation
DataValidation is an email verification service trusted by companies such as Netgear, IEEE, and Orange.
It offers several features, among them:
- Email list monitoring service
- Email verification API
- Native integrations
- Free list archiving
They also offer an AutoPilot service, which constantly monitors your email list. They say: “Monitor the quality of your email lists periodically. Determine when to verify your email list and always keep it fresh and clean.”
This can be done for free monthly for up to 100,000 emails.
It also boasts one of the most impressive deliverability rates in the industry: it guarantees 99% deliverability, which is fantastic.
ZeroBounce
ZeroBounce promotes itself as an award-winning email cleaning service.
It is worth taking a look at. Not just a service but a system, it includes services such as:
- Removal of Invalid Email Addresses
- Spam Trap and Abuse Email Verifier
- A.I. Email Scoring and Catch-All Validation System
- Real-time Email Validation API
They offer three payment modules: freemium, pay-as-you-go, and subscription. These cater to many different needs, from a small email list of a few hundred to megalists with millions of subscribers. This last group also gets additional benefits with their enterprise option.
This tool supports 46 API integrations, among which most of you should find the ones you need.
Email list cleaning services comparison
Here’s a quick overview and comparison to help you decide which service you want to use.
| Mailgun | Xverify | Data Validation | ZeroBounce | |
| Price (per 10,000 emails) | $35 | $72 | $50 | $65 |
| Freemium | Yes (5000 emails for free for 3 months) | No | Yes (up to 500 emails) | Yes (100 free email validation credits) |
| Accuracy | 99.99% | 98% | 99% | 98% |
| API integration | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
In our opinion, Mailgun is the best email list cleaning service for most users, but it does have strong competitors. Just because it is the best for the average user doesn’t mean it will be the best for you, so check them against your specific needs.
Wrap Up
Once your list is free of unwanted intruders, you can again focus on improving communication with your audience.
Consider starting to apply email segmentation and marketing automation more actively.
Did you find this article helpful? In the comments below, please share your experiences with email list cleaning services.
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Our friends initially published this article at Omnisend.
