Ciprian Vlad of ZeroBounce on What Every Email Marketer Should Know About Deliverability

Email deliverability remains a tricky concept for many marketers and business owners. In this interview, Ciprian Vlad, ZeroBounce’s Enterprise Success Manager, breaks down the essential steps to ensure your emails land where they belong — the inbox.

Email is a cost-effective channel for businesses like yours to build traction. But to make it work, you have to get your messages in front of your (ideal) customers. 

Billions of emails circulate between mailboxes every day, and between 16% and 20% of them never make it to the inbox, several reports show. So, what can you do to avoid being a part of that stat? 

How to improve your email deliverability – with Ciprian Vlad of ZeroBounce

While many factors play into your email deliverability, there’s so much you can do to boost your chances of arriving in the inbox. ZeroBounce Enterprise Manager Ciprian Vlad is here to share the key tactics every marketer needs to know. 

From email list validation to warming up your IP, this interview covers the steps that will help you reach your audience and improve your email marketing results.

Do you prefer to watch this interview? Just hit Play — or read the version below.

Can you tell us a little briefly about what ZeroBounce does and what part you play in that?

ZeroBounce is an email validation, deliverability, and email finding platform. It came to market seven years ago. And within a short time, ZeroBounce became the premier email validation company. 

We work with brands like Samsung, Amazon, Disney, Netflix, Intel, to name just a few of the companies that use our service. We help them to increase their email deliverability and land more emails into the inbox of their customers and recipients.

ZeroBounce has validated more than 30 billion emails so far. This is something that I wanted to share because it’s very important in terms of the expertise that we have on email validation and email deliverability. We serve more than 350,000 businesses across the world. 

I joined the company quite some time ago. It’s been five years since I’ve been with the team here.

I’d say that I’m more like a guide here because I can discuss and work directly with many teams and divisions from our customers. The main thing I’ve seen that’s very useful for our customers is to properly understand their use cases, identify the challenges, and help guide them with enough information and details. 

We do this so they can understand what the best tool or solution would be for them so they can effectively address their challenges. We put in place a plan and move on with it. 

I’d underline again that this is more like a job of helping the customers and providing them with knowledge and education, so they can better understand the industry, the challenges, and the best practices. This is the only way truly informed decisions can be made. 

Related: Explore all our email marketing resources

What do you wish people knew about email?

It seems that we’re at a point where we can all agree that email remains the cheapest and the most rewarding channel for communicating with customers, right? Email has the best ROI. It seems very clear. It produces results, but it’s a matter of doing the right things. 

I’d say it’s like a puzzle. If you put the right pieces into the right spots and places, then you’ll get the end results that you’re searching for. It’s kind of the same thing. Looking at it this way would help everyone when they tap into this email marketing field.

The first thing to do is gather some information and especially, ask questions. I believe the questions are the root of any kind of good decision. It makes you search, research, find information, and be better informed before taking action. 

And why do I say that? I’m now interacting every day with customers who are having different deliverability issues.

Deliverability questions you should ask

Some of the use cases are strictly related to the fact that those questions haven’t been answered. For example:

• Why should I validate my email lists regularly? 
• What’s a domain reputation? 
• What’s the spam rate? 
• Why should I warm up my IPs and domains before sending email campaigns? 

Without having an answer to these kinds of questions, I don’t believe you can have results with email. It’s one of the most important things that should be in the mind of any person who’s willing to either increase their results or start this kind of activity. 

Once you research and are well-prepared with information, you’ll understand the challenges in the industry. You’ll understand and will go into this with the best practices and some ways to reach those goals. 

You’ll actually be able to find the right tools, test them out, and see how they work for you. Those tools work for you, so you finally have a clear plan and a clear path toward your goals. That’s the most important thing that would make a difference for anyone starting with email marketing.

This is very valuable information. What do people who send lots and lots of emails sometimes forget?

I believe we can forget lots of things. With the speed and everything that’s happening around us in a social and economic landscape worldwide, we can forget many important things. 

But in the realm of email, what I strongly believe is very important is to be very aware of any kind of changes that are happening around you, at least in the email space. 

I’ll give you an example. In February 2024, there was an announcement made by Google and Yahoo. Those are competitors and giants. They decided to shake hands and implement some anti-spam rules, right? 

Related: Read about Google and Yahoo’s email sending rules

These kinds of changes are big. I mean, these guys typically don’t talk to each other. They’re competitors. But now, they want to work together and put in place strict rules to top spam activity.

This is something that you need to be careful about. Pay attention to those kinds of things. If you are aware of times of change, then you can prepare yourself, and a big part of that is doing the research. You understand what you need to do and what kind of tools you need. 

You’ll know what kind of tweaks you have to make, and then you’ll save valuable time and you spend less recovering any issues that you might have if you are not aware of those kinds of things and just move on with your plan. So awareness and flexibility are very important so you can adapt yourself.

Related: Did you know that Google is purging inactive accounts? Here’s how to avoid Gmail bounces.

Is email validation just a matter of going with the cheapest? When someone realizes they have this issue, won’t the cheapest one work?

Everyone is concerned with this: why should I pick a more expensive service? At the end of the day, it’s the same service, right? 

Well, it’s not like that. Typically, when you consider, for instance, buying a Coca-Cola, it doesn’t matter which store you buy it from, right? It will taste the same.

With email validation services, it’s a different scenario. There are so many services out there; they have their own ways, algorithms, and infrastructure. Depending on how robust and well-prepared they are, they can provide good or not-so-good results. 

How to pick a good email validation tool

So just think about this. There are services out there that check syntax and typos briefly, and then they will probably match their customers’ data with existing data that these services have. Then they provide some results. Now, it’s cheap to do something like that. 

Having a database, you validate it once yearly or every six months, and you just match your customer’s data with your data. But how accurate is that? It’s cheap, but the question is, how accurate is it? 

We know that email databases are decaying very fast these days. Year over year, we know that more than 25% of the data goes bad.

So that correlates with a bounce rate of 2%. Just do the math. Think about how much trouble and how quickly you’ll face it if you use a cheap service like that instead of using a service that is very robust and which is going to check syntax.

It will check for any kind of typos. It will also perform a real-time SMTP check, and shake hands with the email server. That’s one of the most important things that can be done. 

Try the ZeroBounce free email verifier

An effective email checking service will check MX records and A-type DNS records in real-time, and you’ll know from the server if that email address exists or not.

Furthermore, the system will identify any other, let’s say, risky email addresses—spam traps, abusers, toxic email addresses, and global suppression lists. All those email addresses pose a high risk for sending reputation even if they are valid.

At the end of the day, when you search for a service and you compare them, it’s good to see what the statement is but also to run a test, a real test with a list where you’ll have good and bad email addresses and run it with each of those potential vendors that you are looking at. And see what the results look like and understand the process behind them. 

Otherwise, you may assume that it doesn’t matter. It’s the same service, right? With that way of thinking, it’s about the price. Well, I believe it’s more about what you want to accomplish. 

If you want to succeed with your emails, understand that your email database is a very important asset. Your email list is something that, if you use it correctly, will return revenue for sure. 

But what if you’re being blocked? If you are being flagged? Or if your reputation is bad, and your emails are going to spam? If you are missing your recipients? Then, what’s the use? 

It doesn’t make sense and you won’t reach your potential.

What has been the most transformative result that you’ve seen from someone who’s using email validation? 

There are a few types of cases we get frequently. You can even categorize them because there are customers that are already using similar services. They’re reaching out to us because they are searching for a service that can help them to validate emails better. We’re also hearing complaints regarding unknown rates with other services.

So they have seen when their email list was validated with other services that they get more than 20% unknown results. Or they have issues with the APIs, their uptime, their regular limits, and those kinds of things. 

People and companies have trouble with notorious challenges in the industry, like the catch-all emails or the Yahoo and AOL email addresses. There are so many different use cases and typologies. 

“He decided to stay with us, and only with us.”

Here is one use that we recently closed. We had a discussion with a customer who was looking to have a secondary email validation service. And this is very interesting for us. I mean, having two services to cover the same kind of need is unusual, right? 

The customer contacted us and openly told us: “Look, I’m validating with this provider because they are very good with personal email addresses, but I would need a very good service to validate my business email addresses. 

And I said, “Okay, let’s see what issues you have there. What are the challenges? What are the issues there? And for the personal email addresses, he was having issues with Yahoo and AOL email addresses.

He was using a service that was a bit better, let’s say, in terms of identifying and segmenting those AOL addresses. It was a form of putting all those Yahoo and AOL email addresses under a riskier category of email addresses. But in the end, you would eliminate all of them from your list of valid emails. They were under a risky category.

The customer decided to run a test with us using personal and business email addresses. And in the meantime, we were working on the Verify + feature, which has been developed especially for those disabled Yahoo and AOL emails. It’s very helpful for all our customers and marketers that had previous issues with this aspect.

Related: See how ZeroBounce’s Verify+ feature helps your email deliverability

Then, the customer decided to validate all his business email addresses with us. He did that. Once Verify + became available, I reached out to him and told him: Look, this is how it goes. We have done this, this, and this. We’re working on a solution to deal with this type of email address. What do you say? Do you want to test it out? 

The customer tested it out, and he understood that it was indeed a different way of doing it. He understood the accuracy of the process behind our service and he decided to stay with us, and only with us. 

There are many use cases, but this is something that was interesting, especially because there were two services. So think about the budget, as I can tell you the other provider wasn’t cheap. In fact, it was a pretty expensive service. 

For him, it was very important to have both use cases because each category, personal and business email addresses, has its challenges.

So what can someone expect when they use ZeroBounce?

When someone starts to use our service, I believe that the most important thing that they should know is that they can count on our team’s availability, expertise, and guidance.

When it comes to keeping the bounce rate under control, restoring sending reputation, and helping to land more emails into the inbox, availability, support, and expertise are very important. A helping hand, especially when you are already in a delicate situation, having deliverability issues or just starting up this process, is very useful, so you can get through it. 

Also, everything has been designed to be very simple, and straightforward. And if you need help, there’s always someone who can hold your hand. It doesn’t matter whether you are a startup or a multinational company. 

On top of that, there are multiple ways of using the service. You have the dashboard at hand, and you can do everything very easily through it. 

You can validate your emails. You can also use our integrations or APIs to automate the process on your end and implement the validation process into your workflows. So basically, we are focused on being the best in this category for quality and performance.

Validate 100 contacts free with ZeroBounce

We stand behind the accuracy, and yeah, we take it very seriously here in terms of results, but also in terms of security. It’s very important, especially because of the level of the data that we’re handling here. It requires special attention, and that’s so important to us.

As you said, you’ve been with ZeroBounce for some time now. What would you like our customers to know about the ZeroBounce team?

I’ve been with other teams for good lengths of time. One of the most important things that I can say about our team is that they are definitely very passionate about email validation and email deliverability and in general. 

And I can say that for all the teams that are involved. From the customer support team to the deliverability team, and the tech teams handling the platform, APIs, and integrations. Then there’s the marketing and the management team. 

Everyone is involved. And basically, everyone’s effort converges towards the same end goal: providing good results for our customers and very good customer support. 

When we started this business, there were like ten people, maybe twelve. And currently, we have more than 85 people. And more than 50 people from the team are working on the tech side. 

Developers, they are on top of it. As I mentioned, this is a very dynamic environment. Things are changing, and we need to have the right infrastructure and the right human resources to be able to handle everything and maintain and provide good results and customer experience. 

There are so many things that are very, very important to recognize about the team. I have many examples of how customer feedback has been implemented quickly. Everything gets evaluated very quickly. We identify the solution and implement it fast. That’s valuable.

Related: Want to suggest a ZeroBounce feature? Get in touch and let our team know!

As long as you have that passion, because it gives you energy and you have the focus, I believe that those two things are very important. This is something that is very common for the team here.

Now, is there anything you would like to mention that I left out? Or anything that comes to your mind?

There are small details that every company, any business, and any marketer that goes down the path of email marketing needs to consider.

But most of all, smart email marketers should keep their eyes open, do research and stay up to date with anything happening in this realm. They are considering any tools, or features that are being developed. They are filling that puzzle with good efficient tools that can help them to navigate better in this space.

They should remain open to keeping an eye out for the results—good and bad—and prepared to make changes. Email marketers may need to adapt to everything, even start from scratch sometimes. 

I’ve seen companies that had issues because, at some point, the person handling the marketing part of the business left the company. Another person came in who wasn’t so aware of best practices and those kinds of things. They were very close to events like Black Friday, or you name it. 

Unfortunately, they just jumped into it and launched a campaign. And they were blacklisted, flagged, and so on. So they had to start over from scratch, which means new domains and new IPs, and then warming them up. But you need to get back on track and be prepared for those kinds of things.

There’s so much to learn about in this field of email. You can hardly know it all.

Yeah, but we have the advantage of interacting with customers and many good partners. We’re able to work with many platforms and services out there. We have integrations, and we have partnerships. 

Also, there’s so much value we provide through webinars, and all the content we help our customers with. For instance, there’s an email deliverability guide we put together. There are so many good resources that can tremendously help someone who is having an issue or is just starting with email.

Not sure if your email list needs a scrub? Read this article to figure out where you stand – and use this free email list evaluator to get an assessment right away.