Choosing Email List Verifier Software
Top 10 Questions You Should Ask Before Spending Your Hard Earned Dollars
Email marketing is one of the quickest and most cost effective ways to reach the target audience today. The more subscribers you have, the more you can profit from your list. But not only the list size does matter. To succeed in email marketing, you have to care about your list quality. You have to check the email addresses for validity and remove bad emails forever to avoid sending to invalid addresses, protect your email server domain from getting blacklisted and increase your email campaign performance.
There are many email verifier tools out there. How do you choose the best email list cleaner software? Follow these tips to avoid spending your hard earned money for a bad program.
Here Are My Top 10 Questions to Ask The Merchant Company So You Can Keep Your Email List Clean and Benefit from Email Marketing:
- Can I use your software if my ISP blocks the port 25? It has been our experience that many Internet service providers (ISP) block the port 25 for external connections and allow users send emails only through their SMTP server. But for the correct work an email verifier tool needs the access to the port 25 – it will use this port to connect to the recipient’s mail server and imitate email sending. So, if you know that your ISP blocks the port 25, ask the merchant company if their software provides a workaround. If their email list cleaner does not support any alternate connection method, for example, through a web script, it simply won’t work for you.
- How many email addresses can I verify with your software? If you have hundreds of thousands emails and your list is growing fast, you’ll just waste your money if the program cannot work with large lists. Good email verifier software should handle up to one million emails in one list.
- Can I import a multi-column file, verify the emails and export the results to a file of the same format? Good software should allow you feed in a file (for example, a csv file) containing email addresses, names, postal addresses, postcodes etc. and get out the same file with an extra column added containing the result. If it doesn’t do this, it will be a real pain for you to get the output file matching the original file and keep all the contact information in place.
- Can I verify emails from a database and write the verification results directly into my database? If you maintain a big email database with much contact information (for instance, MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle and other databases), you’ll have a headache to export and import the data every time you need to clean your database from bad email addresses. In a good email verifier program you should be able to create a direct link to your database, verify email addresses without export-import and write the verification results into the database. From our experience we’ve found that many users kept email addresses in an MS Excel file. So, we believe that a good email cleaner tool should allow you connect directly to your MS Excel file. Ask the software selling company about this feature. It will really make your life easier when you start using software.
- Will my IP be blacklisted if I verify an email address list and how to avoid it? Some unfair companies will assure you that it won’t. We think you should be aware of all possible risks. Yes, your IP may be blacklisted if you use the direct Internet connection mode on a local computer. To the users of our Advanced Email Verifier, we recommend to use the direct Internet connection mode (it is when the program connects directly from the local computer to the recipient’s mail server) only if they install the program on a Windows VPS or Windows server with proper PTR and FCrDNS records. Otherwise, the IP can be blacklisted or they can get a lot of connection refusals (“Unknown” results) because most SMTP servers refuse direct connections from personal/home computers. Our Advanced Email Verifier supports alternate connection modes that can be used if the program is installed on a local machine such as connection through the web script or BPSocks email validation API.
- Does your software give the 100% accuracy? You should be aware that email verifier tools can determine about 70-80% of invalid email addresses. Sometimes you can't verify whether the address is good or not. This is because some mail servers accept all messages for all users and you won't definitively know if the email is good or bad until you send a real message to that email address. With that said, choose email list cleaner software with a built-in bounce handler. This way you will be able to process bounce emails after your email campaign is complete and clean your list from invalid addresses with almost 100% accuracy.
- Does your email verifier check ‘greylisted’ emails? Nowadays some mail servers use the ‘greylist’ technology to prevent spam. The mail server rejects the first connection attempt and the user must re-try connection in 5-10 min. It is supposed that spammers never re-try the connection. So, ask the selling company how their email list verifier software deals with email addresses from domains that use the ‘greylist’ technology. Good email cleaner software provides the ability to check ‘greylisted’ emails in one session as an option. To speed up the verification, you may not verify ‘greylisted’ emails during one session. If you get some ‘Greylisted’ results after the verification is complete, you can run the program again and check ‘Greylisted’ addresses only.
- Will the users know that I verify their emails? Good email cleaner software must verify email addresses without notifying the email owners about it. Software must not send any real email messages to the users to determine if the email is good or bad. The verification process must be done secretly.
- Can I quickly save good and bad email addresses to different files? Email verifier software should allow you quickly get a file with good or bad email addresses without the need to filter the list. Then you could import good email addresses into your email sender program and send newsletters. Or, you could save bad emails to a file and then load them into the exclusion list in your email marketing software. Thus, a flexible save or export option is very helpful and saves you precious time.
- Is there an easy way to move software to a new computer without data loss? Best email list cleaner programs must support a quick backup-restore capability. If software does not have such an option, ask what files you need to backup in order you can restore your email lists and verification results quickly in the new program installation. It has been our experience that users often lose everything if their system suddenly crashes and they don’t have database backup.
You want email list cleaning software that ensures your success in email marketing. Make sure that software you choose is user friendly, reliable and fast, and that the support will guide you every step of the way. Follow these tips to ensure you get what you pay for! If not, you could be headed for failure.
With Advanced Email Verifier you can update and keep your contact lists "clean" on a proactive basis and focus on real prospects. Once you watch the training videos at http://www.glocksoft.com/email-verifier/aev-video-tutorials/ you can be started within minutes.