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Showing posts from February, 2018

Scrub email list free or pay for it?

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Scrub email list free or pay for it shouldn’t be a question in your mind at all. Email list cleaning free, even though there are services for that out there, is a risk that will harm your inbox and deliverability scores. And not only that, if someone is actually offering to scrub your email list for free, then there must be something in the fine print because free isn’t free. This articles discusses the problems of using an email list cleaner free. They may use your data How important is your data to you? Or to your clients? A free scrubbing platform isn’t wasting server time and resources just because they are “good guys”. Read the fine print and see what they are going to be doing with your database. Most likely, they will be selling it, appending and emailing it. After you uploaded your data, consider it to be in the hands of 10 others in just a few short days. And those 10 others will most likely sell or trade the data as well. They may mail to your data A f

How to find an email verification tool that fits your needs

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Finding an email verification tool online or an application for your desktop takes a little work. Before you start googling to find solutions, there are several things you need to understand about your email marketing practices “first” before choosing the right one. We have written ‘many times over’ that validation and verification are two separate things and many still do not understand the significance – even hygiene companies! But, once again, we think it’s important to go over both of those words so you can get a good idea as to what they mean and get you ready to search for the right tool. Validation According to dictionary.com , validation is, “the action of checking or proving the validity or accuracy of something” or “the action of making or declaring something legally or officially acceptable” Verification According to dictionary.com, Verification is, “the process of establishing the truth, accuracy, or validity of something”. Unfortunately, both def

Email list cleaning keeps you from being a threat

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Email list cleaning is getting more popular as the years go by. The more email marketers share data, the larger the suppression lists of protestors, threats and litigators there are. Marketers call these threats, however, consumers find marketers the real threat. According to a survey by Fluent, out of 1,900 consumers age 18 and older who live in the United States, “…only 15% of Americans say the emails they receive from marketers are frequently or always useful. Some 7% of respondents say the marketing emails they receive are always useful, and 8% say they are frequently useful. In addition, 29% of respondents say marketing emails are sometimes useful, 33% say they are rarely useful, and 24% say they are never useful…” That means 85% of consumers find that email advertisements are worthless and will most likely ignore or report you. Many large email service providers consider a .01% complaint rate to be the threshold. This means 100 complaints out of 1 million records. Any

Email list cleaning format and sizes

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Email list cleaning needs to be robust and move mountains. When an email marketer cleans their list, they send to it immediately, so the timing is essential plus the size of the file needs to be just right for the correct conditions. Many email marketing systems use different formats so every email marketer should own parsers and appending software to manipulate their databases so there are not errors when it comes to sending mail. Delimiters Email cleaning companies and service providers use several different delimiters for their system. The average is comma with semicolon in second place. Some use pipe delimiters and colon but comma is what most email list validation service uses. Separating your data is so important. Many use a semi colon because some data uses comma only to separate data inside one cell. In example, some data has/have sentences with periods. In this case, using a comma to separate is a bad idea, therefore semi-colon is the right choice. Multiple

The right and wrong way to do email list verification

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We have explained the differences between validation and email list verification in previous posts. In short, validation does not remove bounces nor does it do an smtp handshake. Many validation companies do, however, mx checking where it checks certain steps if the mail exchange is setup properly. But they do not do smtp handshakes. In order to understand verification and to choose the right company, it’s important to look for clear signs of authentication as most verification companies miss many steps in order to save money. Social networks (the wrong way) Ask your email list cleaning company how they do verification. Get them to be specific. Ask them if they do email list cleaning free of social networks. For a while, email marketers requested that emails be patched against social media email accounts. For a year or two, this verification method worked well because emails that were used for social networking were authentic, however, bots and fake profiles started fi

Email verification services are a must for neglected optin lists

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  Email verification services are not crucial if your list is familiar with you. In order for you to email market without any incident, everyone in your list must know the domain name they signed up with. Email marketers must never let their lists sit more than 30 days without sending to them. According to an article in Time magazine, “people now generally lose concentration after eight seconds”. If you disconnect yourself from your audience for more than a few weeks, odds are they may not remember signing up to your service. Many things happen during a company’s lifespan. Ups and downs, neglect and slothfulness. We may sometimes ignore our email list for up to 4 weeks. This is a no no. Why, you ask? Well, there are several things. Your list is like a living entity. You know the old saying, “out of sight, out of mind?” This is means you soon forget things or people that are no longer present or visible. An email list needs weekly visitations if not bi-weekly. Neglect can c

Difference between an email verification tool and a service

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An email verification tool is an application hosted on your desktop whether mac, windows, free bsd or linux (operating system). Basically an application or software executable that you have full control over with features, bells and whistles. Some are plain and some are not. Most will purchase a desktop application so they can have full control over cleaning their own lists. This is fine and works well, however, you are only cleaning against your own suppressions. There are some desktop cleaning applications that offer suppressions and update them on a daily basis. The advantages of a desktop email list hygiene tool is that you are not sharing your data with anyone. Or are you? A desktop email list cleaning application can be misleading. The program itself can easily upload your data to their servers without you even knowing it. Most executables are not easily openable. You have to be a programmer to take it apart to see if they do not touch your data. If the email cle

Beware of free email verification companies

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An email validation service costs less than an email verification service. The reason is the algorithm does mostly matching and removing emails against large suppressions lists. This costs bandwidth and time. Many validation companies also check the mx records which doesn’t harm the IP or domain when requested. When a company offers free email validation, they probably will keep your list and resell it but the cost on their end is minute compared to verification. And here’s why: Free is never free. When a company offers to scrub your list for free, it’s obvious they do not value their own property. What value can you place on doing something and get nothing in return? That does not work in the business world. Even a good validation company with excellent suppression lists has worth and value. Verification has to have some intelligence behind it. It costs more to manufacturer intelligence in an algorithm. SMTP handshakes, social network comparing, appending to emails tha