Who has never dreamed of having an up-to-date, complete and clean database?
For this, several solutions are available to you... We show you how to take your prospecting to the next level by optimizing your database.
Reasons why you should check your email addresses
On average, between 25 and 30% of your contact database becomes obsolete every year.
This is due to turnover, job changes, new company names, etc. These are enough reasons to make it essential to check the validity of the addresses in your database.
Discover why Dropcontact advises you to check the email addresses you want to shoot before starting your Cold Emails campaign.
Check the email addresses to avoid bounces
You have probably already been confronted with the "bounce" when sending emails. But why?
First of all, you need to know that there are different types of bounce that occur for different reasons:
- Soft Bounce is a temporary error that can be solved quite easily. For example, if your correspondent's inbox is full, if your email is too heavy because of its attachments or if your recipient's reception server is temporarily unavailable. All you have to do is wait until the address is usable again and try again later.
- Hard Bounce which means the invalidity of the email. An email can for example be incorrect (spelling mistake in the email) or definitely obsolete if your contact has changed email. In this case, it is imperative to delete the email from your database.
- Bounce by rejection which translates into identification of your email as unsolicited, it will therefore arrive only with great difficulty.
We reveal everything you need to know about bounces and how to avoid them
Note that a high rate of Hard Bounce (over 20%) will have a considerable impact on the reputation of your sender domain and can have significant consequences on the deliverability of your future campaigns.
You will have understood, it is common to face emails that bounce, however, rest assured, they have very little impact on Cold-Email, unlike mass emailing. But it is always preferable to succeed in reaching the recipient on the first try, so having an email address that does not bounce is much more beneficial!
Keep your database up to date to send effective Cold Emails
For obvious reasons, it is preferable for your company and for your Sales/Marketing teams to have usable and above all UPDATED data.
In concrete terms, up-to-date data ensures:
- A higher response rate
- A significant opening rate
- Saving time (by contacting the prospect via a single email address)
- And therefore... More chances of converting
Check the email addresses to optimize their deliverability
By contacting only prospects whose email is up to date, you limit the probability that your email server will consider your domain as fraudulent or even as spam.
It is therefore necessary to adapt your strategy to avoid your domain being rejected and blacklisted.
Now it's up to you to make sure that your emails are always valid!
To do this, we show you how to check your email addresses...
How to check the email addresses in your database?
Check the IP address of the recipient
The first possibility to check the email addresses in your database is to manually analyze the IP address of your recipient.
A tool like MX Tool Box allows you to do this by simply filling in the email to be checked. The tool will then show you all the IPs associated with the email address that you will have to check later with a solution like What Is My IP Address. The tool will give you all the information related to the email address including the location of the contact. If the data seems consistent, the email address is (probably) valid.
However, you can't be 100% sure that it is still in use, or that it won't bounce, so this method remains unreliable, and especially time-consuming because it must be done manually for each of your contacts.
Use an Email Checker
The Email Checker remains the easiest alternative for checking emails. Indeed, a multitude of tools proposes to insert its lists of contacts in excel or csv format to analyze the contents and determine the validity of these addresses.
The advantage? The speed of these tools!
In addition, these tools are often inexpensive and different packages are offered depending on the number of email addresses to verify.
For example, Captain Verify, Neverbounce, or Zerobounce to validate your emails.
And if you want to use a tool that includes more features, we have the solution for you...
The ultimate alternative to check your emails: integrate Dropcontact directly into your CRM
Dropcontact : much more than an Email Checker
Dropcontact is a tool that verifies, enriches, validates and updates your database thanks to proprietary algorithms that generate for you the information of your contacts.
From the contact form already present in your CRM, Dropcontact verifies the validity of your contacts' email addresses.
In case of invalidity, Dropcontact's algorithms generate and update your record with the new email address and information about the company of your prospect.
Same for duplicates which are detected and merged automatically in your CRM. Enough to take your prospecting to the next level 🚀
Moreover, Dropcontact does not store any database, which makes it a 100% GDPR compliant solution 💚
Native integration in your CRM to check the validity of your emails
Dropcontact is directly integrated with Pipedrive, HubSpot and Salesforce to verify, update, validate contacts in your database or detect and merge duplicates.
Moreover, Dropcontact detects your contact's company change and directly updates their record with their new company and legal information 💡And all this directly in your CRM 😉
By simply connecting Dropcontact to one of these 3 CRMs, the enrichment of your database is done in real time, continuously, and with each addition of contacts 🪄
Integrate Dropcontact in my CRM
And if you don't have a CRM, it's still possible to proceed with the verification of your emails with Dropcontact thanks to the Drag&Drop of your excel and csv files!
Dropcontact integration via automated workflows to automatically check emails
The second option is to integrate Dropcontact into your Cold Email or CRM tools.
You can for example use an automation tool like Zapier, Make or n8n to create your own workflows.
The process is super simple and will save you precious hours of efficiency... You just have to select the tools you want to associate, define the interval between the different tasks, and a trigger.
For example, by associating Zoho CRM and Dropcontact in Zapier, you can create a workflow that will allow Dropcontact to enrich, update, and check the data in your Zoho CRM on a daily basis with the trigger 'adding a new contact'.
To create this workflow, check out our automated Zapier workflow with Zoho CRM x Dropcontact ✨
GDPR: some rules to respect
The General Data Protection Regulation requires you to respect certain rules during your B2B prospecting.
Before sending your Cold-Email you must make sure that:
- Your email contains an unsubscribe link (mandatory in all emails without opt-in.)
- Your prospect is related to your activity
- You have obtained the contact information of your prospects in a legal way. Indeed, the purchase of contact databases is prohibited by the GDPR. If you decide to do it anyway, we recommend that you verify the addresses beforehand in order to limit your bounce and flagging rate.
