Hey there!
If you‘re involved in email marketing in any capacity, I wanted to provide some helpful insights about an important piece of the puzzle – email verification.
With 4.3 billion global email users and counting, email marketing represents an extremely effective digital channel for brands and businesses to engage audiences. But major obstacles like low deliverability, invalid addresses, and damaged sender reputation can derail your email efforts.
This is where leveraging email verification and validation APIs in your email collection workflows makes a big difference.
In this guide, I‘ll explain:
- Exactly what email verification is
- Why it‘s so important for your email success
- 12 excellent email verification APIs to consider
- Tips for integrating email verification best practices
My goal is to provide you with a complete email verification overview so you can make informed decisions on the best solutions to integrate into your email marketing technology stack.
Let‘s dive in!
What is Email Verification and Why Do You Need It?
When someone signs up for an email newsletter, creates an account on your website, or fills out a contact form, how confident are you that the email address they provided is legit?
Maybe they made a typo and the inbox doesn‘t even exist. Or perhaps they supplied a disposable address that will bounce or mark your mail as spam.
This is where email verification enters the picture.
Email Verification Checks Deliverability
Email verification is the process of confirming the accuracy and deliverability of a supplied email address.
Dedicated verification solutions automatically check that:
- The email is properly formatted – e.g. [email protected]
- A mailbox exists and is active on that domain
- The mail server will accept messages to that address
This real-time analysis prevents collecting addresses that will clearly bounce or fail ahead of sending any campaigns.
Why Is Email Verification Important?
So why go through the effort of adding email verification capabilities?
Here are 5 key benefits:
1. Reduce Bounce Rates
Nothing is worse than meticulously creating a targeted email campaign only to have 20% or more bounce back undelivered.
Some common causes are typos in submissions, deactivated accounts, or fake email addresses users supply to gain access.
Email verification lets you prune these bad apples early. This avoids wasted sends and improves overall deliverability rate.
2. Build Clean, Accurate Lists
The best email lists contain real people who are genuinely interested in your product or content.
Email verification supports this by instantly flagging and removing any clearly invalid or spammy email addresses collected.
You‘re left with an engaged subscriber base tailored to your communication goals.
3. Increase Sender Reputation
Too many bounces from a sender domain can cause providers like Gmail to start automatically flagging your emails as spam.
This damages your sender reputation and undermines email marketing success.
Email verification keeps your outbound reputation strong, allowing more messages to reliably land in subscriber inboxes and get opened.
4. Save Time and Resources
Creating content and sending emails costs time and money. Both are wasted when addresses bounce or go unread.
Email verification minimizes this by allowing you to focus resources on quality subscribers likely to actually receive and appreciate your broadcasts.
5. Enhance Deliverability
Combining email verification with practices like permission reminders and preference management leads to greater inbox placement and less incorrectly tagged emails.
This means subscribers reliably receive your messages without them being lost to spam folders or filters.
6. Prevent Spam Signups
Attackers often generate fake or temporary emails to get added to lists for spamming or scraping content.
Real-time email verification stops these malicious signups in their tracks to protect your domain‘s reputation.
As you can see, leveraging email verification is vital for building deliverable lists, maximizing campaign ROI, and sustaining strong sender reputation.
Next let‘s explore some of the top email verification APIs and solutions available to integrate today.
12 Leading Email Verification APIs for 2022
There are a wide variety of email verification APIs and services on the market. I‘ve summarized some of the best options below based on capabilities, accuracy, ease of use, and pricing.
1. Abstract Email Validation API
Abstract offers an enterprise-grade email verification API used by over 100,000 businesses worldwide.
It checks validity and deliverability by:
- Confirming address formatting/syntax
- Detecting typos and suggesting corrections
- Identifying role-based emails
- Catching disposable/temporary addresses
- Validating SMTP server connectivity
- Detecting catch-all inboxes
Abstract‘s API is capable of scanning millions of addresses per month, making it highly scalable.
It can be integrated into apps and workflows to:
- Clean marketing and sales contact data
- Stop spam during signups
- Segment professional vs. personal emails
- Reduce bounce rates which bolster sender reputation
Abstract stores no personal data, keeping it GDPR and CCPA compliant.
Pricing starts free for up to 500 monthly checks, then scales affordably based on usage.
2. Hunter Email Verification API
Hunter offers a robust email verification API capable of large-scale list processing.
It validates formatting, searches for typos, detects disposable email use, verifies SMTP connections, and compares addresses to its base of 230+ million corporate emails for context.
Advanced controls like partial address matching and custom blocking allow granular configuration per unique workflow.
Hunter is great for mass list cleaning and enrichment, flagging high-risk emails, and reducing bounces.
The free plan permits 50 checks monthly. Paid options start at $49/month for 5,000 verifications, adding priority support and more.
Bulk volume pricing and integration support are available for enterprise needs.
3. ZeroBounce Email Validation
ZeroBounce leverages artificial intelligence and predictive modeling to provide highly accurate bulk email verification services.
It validates formatting, syntax, catch-alls, domains, roles, disposable addresses, and more – providing granular status and risk codes beyond just valid/invalid.
An online dashboard makes it easy to monitor email address quality trends across campaigns. Verification debugging helps fine-tune accuracy.
Volume pricing starts at $99/month for up to 10,000 checks. Enterprise-tier packages are offered too.
4. Mailboxlayer Email Verification API
Mailboxlayer offers an affordable JSON-based API for email verification supporting bulk processing.
It checks formatting, disposable email use, domain validity, SMTP server connections, and inbox existence.
The API also detects common typos, providing an overall deliverability score from 0 to 1 and auto-correct suggestions.
Mailboxlayer is very developer-friendly. The starter plan provides 1,000 checks for just $9.95/month. Additional tiers are available.
5. DeBounce Email Verification API
DeBounce is an enterprise-focused email verification API designed for large customers and advanced use cases.
It validates syntax, spam probability, disposable domains, catch-alls, and both generic and role-based accounts.
Powerful deliverability reports provide actionable insights to optimize sender reputation and list quality over time.
DeBounce makes it easy to integrate verification across apps, CRMs, and workflows with SDKs for every major language.
Pricing starts at $7 for 1,000 checks. Volume discounts available along with add-ons like historical reports and sandbox environments.
6. Email Hippo Verification API
Email Hippo provides email verification powered by a proprietary machine learning engine.
It analyzes 70+ unique signals to detect catch-alls, inactive accounts, spam traps, syntax issues, and more.
Custom risk scoring provides an easy 1-100 deliverability grade for every address analyzed.
Robust segmentation reporting enables building effective campaigns based on user profiles, email types, and past engagement.
The API easily embeds in websites, apps, CRMs, and workflows to keep lists hygienic.
Volume plans start at 20,000 checks for $299/month. API calls are Tier 1 encrypted and compliant.
7. SendGrid Email Validation API
The SendGrid email verification API leverages machine learning trained on 60 billion monthly data points.
It checks formatting, disposable addresses, catch-alls, syntax errors, inactive accounts, spam traps, and more.
Smooth form and app integration combined with actionable corrections preemptively stop invalid email submissions.
This maximizes deliverability rates to engaged subscribers and sustains positive sender reputation.
Plans start free for up to 200 monthly checks, with volume tiers available based on usage needs.
8. Mailgun Validate API
Mailgun offers a three-step email verification system:
First, formatting and domain spelling is checked against assigned mailbox providers. Next, grammar and standards specific to those providers are validated. Finally, SMTP connections confirm active inboxes.
This layered analysis maximizes deliverability by detecting issues pre-send. It also improves placement rates and sender scores.
Plans start at $35/month for up to 10,000 verifications. Volume tiers accommodate increased usage, with pricing as low as $0.0010 per validation above certain levels.
9. NeverBounce Email Verification
NeverBounce is an industry leader having verified over 6 billion emails for 60,000+ companies to date.
Their API checks formatting, syntax, roles, disposable services, MX records, and more to maximize list accuracy.
It auto-corrects minor issues and tags emails with status like valid, invalid, risky, or catch-all for advanced segmentation.
The API offers 99.9% uptime on geo-redundant infrastructure. Plans scale based on usage, with volume discounts available.
10. Kickbox Email Verification API
Kickbox offers real-time and bulk email verification powered by adaptive machine learning algorithms.
The API checks deliverability, spam probability, webmail vs domain addresses, and more – returning granular status codes for each test.
Kickbox is easy to embed into sites, CRMs, apps, and workflows to keep email lists hygienic.
It starts free for up to 25 monthly checks. Volume plans are affordable too, starting at just $9 for 1,000 verifications including advanced capabilities.
11. TheChecker Email Verification API
TheChecker provides JSON-based email verification supporting both real-time and batch processing.
It validates formatting, spelling, mail server connectivity, and catch-all domains. TheChecker also detects role addresses and disposable services.
Plans are usage based, starting free for up to 300 checks/month. Unlimited requests are affordably priced at only $99/month.
Bulk processing, typo suggestions, uptime guarantees, webhooks, and whitelabeling provide added value.
12. VerifyBee Validation API
VerifyBee offers developer-friendly email verification capable of bulk and real-time processing.
It checks spelling, formatting, domain validity, server acceptance, and inbox existence, returning structured JSON responses.
Integrations are available for ESPs, CRMs, apps, and frameworks like Laravel and CodeIgniter.
Plans start free for up to 1,500 monthly checks. The Pro tier provides 50,000 verifications for only $9.99/month.
As you can see, there are many excellent email verification APIs and services available at a wide variety of price points and feature sets.
I suggest evaluating free tiers first, then exploring paid plans based on usage volume and supported integrations.
Next I‘ll share some tips on how to maximize value from email verification with best practices.
Email Verification API Best Practices
To get the most value from email verification tools, it‘s important to make them a core component of your overall email deliverability and security strategy.
Here are some tips to follow:
1. Verify Early in Workflows
Don‘t wait to clean lists right before launching campaigns. Verify as soon as new opt-ins are captured to identify bad addresses immediately.
Set up real-time triggers so that pings are sent to the API to validate each submission instantly on your website, landing pages, forms, etc.
This prevents collecting bad records in the first place rather than leaving cleanup until later.
2. Schedule Ongoing Scans
Don‘t verify just once. Set up jobs to run batch scans on a regular basis to detect any new role or disposable accounts added since the last cycle.
Monthly, weekly, or even daily list scans will help you stay on top of hygiene as contacts ebb and flow.
3. Segment by Validation Factors
Rather than just deleting outright, use verification status codes to segment contacts appropriately.
Place unverified addresses in a quarantine status. Pause sends to risky emails. Unsubscribe traps and spam entries.
This supports engagement with valid users while isolating rather than permanently losing potentially relevant contacts as situations change.
4. Monitor and Optimize Over Time
Regularly review validation metrics captured in tool dashboards and reports to spot trends around data quality and identify process weak points.
Are certain campaigns or channels yielding more invalid signups? Are traps increasing? Adjust collection flows accordingly.
Let the data guide your optimization focus over time.
5. Verify Senders and Complainers
Verification isn‘t just for subscribers. Also check email addresses in bounce reports and abuse complaints to identify potentially malicious accounts tied to your infrastructure.
Verify senders before allowing use of your domains to prevent abuse by spammers.
6. Isolate Testing Activity
When testing campaigns, create separate test contact lists so mock emails don‘t tarnish your domain‘s sender reputation.
Also verify test accounts are configured properly and function as expected before relying on their metrics.
7. Double Check Dormant Subscribers
If re-engaging dormant subscribers who haven‘t heard from you in a while, take the extra step of re-verifying their addresses first.
Situations change, and this avoids wasting resources emailing accounts that have since gone stale.
Key Takeaways and Next Steps
The bottom line is that taking advantage of email verification and validation APIs builds trust and maximizes marketing ROI by ensuring you‘re engaging real, deliverable addresses.
Here are some key takeaways:
-
Email verification automatically checks for deliverability issues like bad formatting, inactive accounts, and disposable addresses across your lists.
-
Reducing bounces and unsubscribes protects your sender reputation ensuring emails reliably reach the inbox.
-
Look for affordable providers that support bulk processing and integrate easily into your existing technology stack.
-
Follow best practices like early validation, ongoing scans, and isolation of test activity to maximize value.
I hope this guide has provided a helpful overview of the email verification landscape and how leading solutions can be leveraged to enhance your efforts.
If you‘re ready to clean your lists and optimize subscriber engagement, I recommend signing up for a free trial with one of the providers above.
Once integrated with a solution that fits your needs, you‘ll be well on your way to greater email marketing success.
Let me know if you have any other questions! I‘m always happy to chat more about maximizing deliverability.
