How Often Should I Verify My Email List?

Verifying your email list at least once per quarter or every three months is recommended. Cleaning your list at this frequency is enough to help most businesses combat email decay while keeping up with their email list growth.

However, you may wish to verify your email list more frequently if you’re a larger business that regularly sees a high volume of new email leads.

3 signs to verify your email list

In addition to these suggested time frames, reviewing key email marketing metrics is recommended regularly. Identifying and understanding problems in these areas can also indicate a need to clean your email list.

Your email bounce rateⓘ is higher than 2%

Internet and email service providers look for senders to maintain a 2-5% bounce rate. However, you must keep it at 2% or lower to protect your sender reputation.

Bounced emails are a telltale sign that some contacts on your email list are invalid. Verifying your email list will identify those outdated email addresses so that you can remove them from your list.

Your spam complaint rate is higher than 0.1%

When someone reports your emails as spam or abuse, it increases your spam complaint rate. Internet service providers have a low tolerance for spam complaints and suggest that you keep it below 0.1% (1 in 1,000 emails sent).

If you notice a rise in spam complaints, it’s time to verify your email list. You’ll be able to identify problematic contacts on your email list, which we call abuse emails. These contacts are chronic complainers that misuse the report abuse function to your detriment.

Verifying your email list will help you spot them so you can purge them from your list.

You don’t verify new emails in real time

Using an email verification APIⓘ is recommended to clean new email addresses at the time of registration. If you get a high volume of new email signups and are not using an API on your registration forms, you should clean those new emails in batches.

Alternatively, you can install the real-time email verification APIⓘ to your website, landing pages, and wherever you collect new email addresses.

Check the API docs

To gain even more insight into clean email, along with when and how to verify your email list, - check out the Marketer’s Guide to Clean Email.

Email validation and account information

Changing your password

Disabling password-protected downloads

Can I verify my emails in real time as they’re collected?

How Often Should I Verify My Email List?

However, you may wish to verify your email list more frequently if you’re a larger business that regularly sees a high volume of new email leads.

3 signs to verify your email list

Your email bounce rateⓘ is higher than 2%

Internet and email service providers look for senders to maintain a 2-5% bounce rate. However, you must keep it at 2% or lower to protect your sender reputation.