I recently took over the marketing for a small business. They have a medium sized opt in e-mail list that is about 3 years old. In previous years, they have only been e-mail marketing to this list about twice a year. Anyone know of a reputable company that either cleans e-mail lists or runs double opt-in mailings to confirm list validity? Thanks for your time. BJ
You could do this yourself using either phplist or Mailman. Both offer bounce control that will remove addresses from the list after a few tries.
Madk - Thanks. What I'm really looking for in this scenario is a third party company that will do a double opt-in mailing to bring the list current and valid. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks BJ
Hi BJ, the two services you are looking for are basically separate ones and you'd likely want to do each of them. Let me explain a little about this: There are a handful of 3rd party companies that do email list cleaning. This is where essentially emails are checked to make sure they are deliverable without sending an actual email to recipients. Pretty reliable results can be obtained from this but actual reliability depends on how the list was compiled to begin with (ie a list that was never cleaned before and was not double optin will result in more false positives because of typing mistakes) and the age of the list (older lists run into issues where a domain may have a new owner and that new email address would still be a valid one although it would not be the originally intended recipient). There IS software to do this yourself however the problem is that the results you get with this will likely be spotty unless you have a lot of patience and know a good deal about mail servers. The primary issue with DIY that most isps/organizations will start to return false/no results if you try and open too many connections. (I realize you said you want to use a 3rd party service but I'm mentioning this for the benefit of others that may read this post.) The second part of what you are referring to is commonly referred to as "reconfirming a list". This service is rarely done as a one-shot deal by service providers but rather it is part and parcel of providing ongoing email list management services. Not all email list management services will handle reconfirmation. Those that do will often prescreen a list before hand to ensure that it is in good condition to begin with. Depending on the provider you use, if you have an older list with a lot of undeliverable addresses your opt-in confirmation email may end up in their spam folder or not get delivered at all. So it's probably a good idea to clean your list prior to doing a reconfirmation. Some services that will do reconfirmation will do it for a flat fee, others include it as part of their normal service while still others will charge a fee based on the size of the list. I am not aware of any reliable companies that will perform reconfirmation as a standalone service nevermind doing it at a reasonable price. One of my own services is http://www.emaillistcleaning.com. You can find others by searching on Google. Hope this helps. Sharon
Hi BJ, now a days email marketing is going good but we dont use 3 years back email lists, bcs every year 40 million people are changing theire email addess in us s we need email lists cleaning serives. many companies are giving email lists cleaning services. try for better email cleaning services company..
We use Email Answers to do our email list cleaning. They also validate the email to tell us if they are deliverable or not. I would highly recommend their service. I hope this helps
In my case, I always start my email lists cleanse by using a FREE open source that allows me verify emails in bulk. Again, it is free as it seems sponsored by big advertisers. You can access this tool/service at their website URL www.FreeEmailVerifier.com. It works for me; Now I use them regularly as the first stage of my long process scrubbing my database. Hope this helps