ZeroBounce’s Dan Cotet on the 3 Top Trends in Email Validation 

ZeroBounce’s Chief Product Officer Dan Cotet talks about his approach to product development, the most prevalent trends in email validation – and his role in shaping them.

With a unique blend of technical expertise and a deep commitment to human connection, Cotet ensures that products don’t just function but truly help you get better email results. 

In this exclusive interview, the affable Dan shares insights on product innovation, ZeroBounce’s customer-driven development, and the fast-changing world of email marketing.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• Dan Cotet’s approach to developing email optimization tools
• How ZeroBounce is improving email deliverability — now and in the future
• The three key trends shaping email marketing today and in the years ahead

For the full experience, watch the video interview of ZeroBounce’s Dan Cotet.

Dan, tell us a little bit about yourself.

I’m the Chief Product Officer at ZeroBounce. I’m originally from Romania, but I live in the UK with my family, with my wife and three daughters. 

We’ve got a four-year-old girl and we’ve got two girls, twins, who were born about a month ago, so as you can imagine, our home life is pretty intense at the moment.

When I have time, I keep active. I used to practice taekwondo professionally, and that athlete’s mindset of discipline and focus is something that still drives me in my workouts but also in my work. For example, when I have a challenging situation.

My background is technical. I’ve studied software engineering because I love technology and the value that it can create. But early in my career, I also realized that I like the human aspect of it. I love interacting with people, discussing, finding a solution together, and working in teams. So I transitioned into project management. And after working several years as a project manager, I transitioned into product leadership.

Now, it’s great that that brings me to ZeroBounce. At ZeroBounce, I get to blend these worlds of technology and human focus.

As a CPO, I’m deeply involved in the technological aspects of our products. But also, my job really involves discussing, planning, and working together with our internal teams, as well as being aware of customer needs and making sure that we deliver the best value for them — essentially, what they need from an email deliverability perspective.

As the Chief Product Officer, you’re deeply involved in the building of ZeroBounce’s tools. How do you step out of the mindset and truly see ZeroBounce from the customer’s perspective? What strategies help you to bridge that gap?

Indeed, my work is mostly internal. We focus on the features of the product, and I work a lot with our development teams on the technical aspects. But customers don’t necessarily care about the technical complexities behind the scenes — nor should they. They care that their email arrives in the inbox every time.

What helped me is that early in my career, I spent a lot of time in customer-facing situations. I spent time on what we call “on-site,” dealing directly with the customer, and answering their questions. I also spent several years doing on-call escalation support. So if there was an urgent situation during the night, I would be troubleshooting a problem directly with the customers on the phone.

And that really helped me naturally develop a customer focus: understanding needs from a customer’s perspective. So I try to bring that into ZeroBounce, putting myself in the customer’s shoes, thinking about what they would need, and getting feedback from our teams.

From our internal support teams, from our sales, from our marketing team — whenever we plan our features, we discuss with all the teams that deal directly with customers to make sure we’re delivering the best value for them.

What more people should know about email  

What do you wish more people who are involved in email marketing knew about email?

It’s not just a case of whether an email is valid or not. It’s also about the engagement with that email and how much value you can provide. It’s not a simple black-and-white issue, especially in an ever-changing industry like email marketing, where filters change all the time. I’m referring to spam filters, but also engagement rules.

So I think it’s important that email marketers focus on the value of their email — the value of their content — not just whether it arrives in the inbox.

AI, security, speed: email marketing and validation trends

The cleaning of email lists is such a crucial part of email marketing and deliverability. How do you see this technology evolving in the next few years? Is there anything you can tell us about what you all are working on?

Email marketing is an ever-changing industry, and I see a few key elements that will be very big in the next few years:

• AI adoption will continue to increase. 
• The focus on security and privacy is another key element. 
• And then there’s speed: delivering real-time results and a seamless experience that customers expect.

We focus on all three of these areas. We are integrating AI within our products, while continuing to focus on security. We have a very strong security position, our team is doing a great job. 

If you compare ZeroBounce to our competitors, I think we have by far the best security posture — not just based on the number of certifications we hold, but also in how we’ve set up our infrastructure and systems from a cybersecurity perspective.

The AI tools we’re working on do not send any data to external parties. Everything is developed in-house, and all customer data is kept internally. We have plans to enhance, for example, our scoring controls and integrate them with AI tools.

When it comes to speed, we’re making various improvements. We’re preparing for the next five to ten years in terms of growth and expected volumes. Our goal is to make the entire experience as seamless as possible for the customer — from logging into the platform and setting up their account to submitting a list for validation. We want the process to be fast, accurate, and easy.

I can’t give too many details on specific projects, but speed, AI, and security and privacy are our three key areas of focus at the moment.

ZeroBounce has a security-first approach

Well, you just ended there on security and privacy. How would you describe ZeroBounce’s attitude towards security and privacy?

Well, it says right on our website and in our philosophy: we have a security-first approach. Protecting customer data is our top priority. Everything we do — from our infrastructure to the way we develop features — reflects that commitment. 

Our entire system is built on internal servers, and every new feature we develop undergoes a security assessment.

I’d say ZeroBounce is one of the most security-focused companies I’ve ever worked with.

Well, yes. Especially in an industry that deals with customers’ emails and data. We take customers’ personal data very seriously.

Why sales pros need email validation

So many people in sales are using email validation these days. Why is it important for a person who is in sales to be using email deliverability tools?

I think it comes down to the fact that you’re not just sending emails, you’re sending good value emails. And especially in today’s age, where you can send a million emails very quickly, but how many of those will convert? 

So I think we see a lot of salespeople using email validation because it is important that they send good quality emails to their leads. And part of sending a good quality email is verifying your list. You have to make sure that you send it to the right people.

Now, speaking of that, a little bit of a teaser: we’re working on a tool that will provide more value to sales. We’ll provide insights on particular email addresses and what they’re used for. 

So here, we’re talking about the sales profile of a particular customer. But I’ll leave you with just that. And yeah, it’s for our customers to find out in the future about this feature.

Favorite ZeroBounce tools

ZeroBounce is not just an email validation service. My personal favorite tool, the one that I find myself using so much, is the email finder. Would you say that you have a favorite product at ZeroBounce?

Yes: it’s a product that we put a lot of effort into, and it’s really coming together now. It’s becoming a great product, and I think it will be very popular once customers start to use it more and know about it more. That is our email warm-up product.

So this is essentially warming up your domain and reputation. For example, let’s say you’re just starting out and you want to send a lot of emails. Well, you cannot just do that from a new domain that you’ve just set up. You need to prepare it — essentially, to prepare your reputation.

Or, for some reason, you haven’t validated lists in the past or you haven’t validated them correctly, and you’ve sent a lot of emails that have ended up in spam or have been flagged by customers. So, you have a very bad reputation for your domain. That’s where you could come and use our warm-up product to improve your reputation.

It helps you raise the level of your domain’s reputation, and in turn, increasing the deliverability of your emails.

Balancing new features and innovation

As the Chief Product Officer, how do you balance improving the existing features with the need to develop new ones, especially in an industry that’s constantly changing?

This is one of the main challenges of my role. On one hand, customers expect seamless validation. They expect email validation to be highly accurate and work well. So, we need to ensure that our core features are reliable and deliver the feedback that customers expect and are accustomed to.

On the other hand, you have to keep innovating. You have to keep evolving with the times to stay relevant and competitive, especially in an industry like email marketing that’s constantly changing.

Our approach is to ensure the quality of our core features, while ruthlessly prioritizing the new features we introduce for the platform. We do that by using a customer-centric approach. We gather feedback from customers, support teams, sales, marketing, and so on, and then we prioritize accordingly in terms of what features will provide the best value to the customer.

We also take an iterative approach. It’s important to stay nimble and remain highly adaptable. We deliver features and iterations in small chunks rather than in rare, large releases. By using this approach, we make better progress and can adapt quicker as the industry changes.

That being said, we also have a big-picture approach. We’re preparing ourselves for the next five to ten years. We have plans for the growth we expect, and we’re preparing all our systems for that as well.

What can anybody out there do today to make today better?

Oh, that’s interesting. I think in our day and age, you can be caught up in the fast-moving pace of everything, being always connected, especially in an industry like ours, where things are moving fast. 

I’d say to take a moment to be present. And what I mean by that is just to be mindful, to observe, to essentially be grateful for having this moment, for being alive. 

We can forget about appreciating the small day-to-day moments, especially when we’re caught up in the rush of things.