Protect Your Email Reputation: The Ultimate Guide to List Validation | Secure Your Email Reputation

Did you know that when you're sending an email, you're actually sending your reputation? I once had my emails blacklisted and it put my business out of service and nearly put my business out of service for a couple of weeks. Brian Minnick is the Chief Operating Officer at a company called Zero Bounce. He's based in Boca Raton in Florida, and he's going to help us to understand some of the pitfalls that there are if we don't validate not only our own email, but also if we're buying any lists or we're sending emails to people where we've acquired those contact details. Brian's going to help us to understand what we can do to ensure that we've always got a sound reputation. And at the end, he's going to help you by offering you 2,000 validations. So stick around, that's going to be worth having. Brian, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jim. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Well, thank you, because we're in a tech area with email that I haven't touched on before, partly because it seems quite techie. But you've got over 300,000 customers, so plainly this is a niche that's a mile wide. Explain, please, for me and my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs, what is this sort of email validation? How does it work and why do we need it?

Yeah, absolutely. So email validation is really important. Basically what it is, is the— if you want to think about it as the hygiene or kind of removing some of the bad or risky data, and I'll talk a little bit more about some of the riskier types of data. But why it's important is because exactly what you were saying you had is if you're not paying attention to this, you will run into some issues where the mail servers no longer like you. And that can be for many different reasons. But some of the earliest and quickest indicators for these mail servers not to like you is due to poor quality of the data that you're sending to. So recipients that do not exist, recipients that mark you as spam, and a few other types of things. And these really, really impact your ability to get into the inbox, which is the holy grail of email marketing. If you're in the spam folder, it is a giant waste of time. And so our goal and our mission is to provide a service to help you clean up that data and provide you some tools that also let you kind of monitor, understand, and repair even some of your reputation issues that you might be having. And many people are not even aware that they have these issues.

You know, it's really interesting that you talk about getting sort of blacklisted by the recipient. So what's interesting that you said, there are many things, but one is that some people that receive the email might mark you as spam. But what you're saying is there's almost like some, some kind of bogus emails in these lists that if you're sending to them, they're kind of— it's almost like an entrapment. Is that what you mean, Brian? So we could be completely unaware that we're sending out emails to lists that are sort of disabling our program. Is that right?

Yes, absolutely. So there's a few different ways to think about this, and one of them could be You've had this data for 10 years and we have done industry research around this. Business data is churning at an alarming 33% year over year. So email data, these are contacts moving, moving companies, businesses closing down. So those are invalid recipients that people are still just hoarding. And so we can kind of help clean that up. And then also there's emails that are literally created by the companies like Yahoo, Gmail, Minecast, all of these kind of spam filters that people use to filter their mail. And if you're sending to them, they will automatically throw your entire campaign into the spam folder and everything that you do moving forward into the spam folder because they have quote unquote trapped you. You have sent an email to a non-opted-in, never-subscribed, scraped email that came off the web. which probably came from a purchased list, or some of these providers that sell leads and data and they tell you it's great. Um, they're not always so transparent on how they got that.

So reading what you're saying there, Brian, it's not only that I've bought data, but also I've got legacy data. I mean, I've had my company for 25 years, so I have data in there that Hands up, I haven't cleansed. I'm still sending a weekly newsletter, uh, which I've been doing for years. And you're saying actually that in itself is putting me at jeopardy. It's not even that I've gone out proactively to buy a list. Even just really a lack of good housekeeping on my side could throw me in jeopardy.

Yes, absolutely. And even something that's, uh, maybe just to bring awareness to this because it happened just February 2024, Yahoo and Google, so Gmail and Yahoo accounts, they have been purging emails and they're purging the inactive accounts that have been created for many years. And the concept here is they're running out of the ability for people to create meaningful names on their email accounts because everyone has just used these things. Many of those are abandoned. And so now they're deactivating those. And that's another red flag as a sender. If you are now sending to these inactive, deactivated accounts, they would start to question why, because they've never logged in in 4 years. They've never replied to an email. They've never clicked an email, but yet all these people keep sending to them. So very important. Once again, this can get really gritty as to, you know, where we can identify all these different types of things, but they come with a lot of risk. And that's the part that I think is important for people to understand.

I think that's what it's played. Now it's explained to me probably why I got you know, blacklisted all those years ago without thinking I'd done anything wrong. Actually, I just hadn't done anything right in terms of sanitizing my list. Brian, what about this issue where, uh, one has to change, for example, your, uh, DKIM and your SPF? You know, and I know it's a bit technical. I'm not a technical person, but I've had to go in and fix on GoDaddy because My email provider Zoho was saying I— my emails were not going to go through because I hadn't done this. Because the reason this is important is because it really doesn't— it's not up to us to just say, well, I don't have enough of those emails. Actually, the senders are also starting to demand this, aren't they? How, how do you help with zero bounce for people like me who maybe don't know how to do that, don't know if we're at risk? Do you, do you help with that as well?

Yeah, absolutely. And really important here to understand that you don't have to be technical to get help. What you need is to identify the issues. And so one of the most common things that I see is people and small business owners or even large business owners with segmented departments, right? Marketing's not talking to sales, sales isn't talking to tech. This is very common and it really doesn't matter the size of the company. But let's say marketing decides they're going to move from Mailchimp to Zoho one day and they don't talk to tech about that. There's a lot of things that didn't happen that needed to happen in order to now send through a different platform. So that's very common if you're moving platforms and you've not done any technical changes. I don't want to scare anyone with the word technical change. It is literally a copy and paste and hit the button save, but they are technical in a manner of how the mail servers look at you now as a sender. And so it's again super important. SPF is basically identifying these are the platforms that I send from. So you would list Zoho as a sender, as a sending platform. And if you don't, basically what the whole world sees is that they think someone else is trying to use your domain to send mail. And now they're saying, no, no, no, no, no, this is phishing. This is spoofing. And they'll want to throw you in the spam folder. And so you can send us a test email from your platform and we'll run an analysis in 10 minutes and tell you exactly the problems that you have. We can help guide fix it as well.

Oh, well, and people would go to zerobounce.net to do that. I really recommend people try that. Brian's actually got a very nice offer to listeners of 2,000 validations for email addresses. At the end of the show, he's going to show you how to get to that. So do Stay around this and that. So, what's really interesting is almost if I could, can I draw the parallel with if you run a restaurant but you don't keep cleaning underneath all the furniture, you just sort of assume that you're just wiping the countertops, it's enough. Would that be a simplistic view?

This is exactly the concept, right? So, people clean their house, we don't think about it, right? We just clean. We clean our cars. And if we don't, what happens? Things get ugly. People don't look at the car and think it's so beautiful anymore. This is, it's maintenance. This is maintenance in your data. This is hygiene. And this is imperative to your business regardless how much email you send, by the way. I wanna actually also make sure that's clear. You might say, I don't send very much mail. Well, if you send a welcome email for everyone who signs up on your website, and then you wanna send an offer, which is where the ROI of email marketing comes in, is the offers. If none of those emails are being received, Of course, your ROI is low and zero. Email marketing is the cheapest form of marketing there is. And so if you're not making money on email marketing, I hate to say this, but I want to put the light bulb in your head. Something's wrong and you've got to look into that and understand why. Because again, there's no better way to put a message and think about the push notifications, right? Boom. Here's an email from Jim and it's now a preview. Okay, let's read it. These things are super important to make sure they're in the inbox.

Brian, thank you for flagging this, because until now I thought that— I guess like everybody— that once I've got those emails in my account and I'm sending through Zoho Campaigns once a month, you know, for years, I know I'm getting some that are coming back moved. But what I haven't also known how to do is to cleanse that data without manually going through thousands of records, you know, download them to Excel, sort them by date. Does Zero Bounce help with that? Because that task itself of cleansing the data can be frankly time-consuming and a little bit overwhelming. How do you help with just the practical side of getting the rubbish out of the apartment?

Yeah, so we do it in a couple ways. Obviously, we have the manual route, but Let's move right past the manual route. That's an obvious one. On the automated side, depending upon which platform you store that data in, we probably have an integration. And what's key about the integrations is 2 things. Number one, you can set a kind of auto-repeat where every 30 days, let's run through the whole dataset again and clean it up. Or, and really, Anytime a new contact is in there, let's clean it immediately and kind of figure out what to do with it from there. So it is the— what's important is to be proactive as well as reactive. So people usually come to us. We have 2 types of like major clients. So people that know they're gonna have a problem because they've been educated and the people that have a problem and don't know what to do. And it always starts with the data, the quality of their data. The other one, which is more technical but still very easy if you use sites like WordPress and other stuff there where you collect the data is we have plugins that actually will validate in real time on the website. So what we're doing there, which is critical, is catching typos. We're catching people just smashing the keyboard to get to your coupon code or whatever your popup is there for. We can catch all of that and suggest the typo fixes in real time while the user is still on the website. This is super critical, especially if you're a big mobile— Uh, platform.

Oh yeah, and I was going to say, so this is working across all platforms, uh, of course, right?

Including iOS. Yeah, and, and Android. We have lots of people that use this on the registrations on their mobile apps. Uh, if you're collecting email addresses, you want to understand the quality of that data coming in.

Brian, it's worth just sharing the affordability of Zero Bounce as well with people so that they understand that how accessible This is, and that the ROI is there. Do you want to just take us through the pricing just so that people can understand, or we can all understand that you're explaining some quite, some very sophisticated technology, but it's very affordable, isn't it?

Yes, absolutely. So the way that we kind of think about it is you pay for a validation and we give everyone 100 per month for free. So if you're a startup, you're collecting 30, 40 a month, that's totally free and that's not watered down. That is full version, nothing watered down, nothing hidden from you. As we start to get into larger quantities, anywhere from 2,000 to— we have people purchasing, quite honestly, about a billion validations all the time. There's— so there's nobody too big, there's nobody too small. 2,000 validations would cost you $18 to clean up.

Okay.

100,000, which may be a little bit more in a realm of relatable, It's gonna cost you $390 to clean up. And the turnaround time on all that, by the way, is about 45 minutes. So you send us the data, you go out to lunch, you come back, all the data's cleaned up, and you've saved money most likely in the platforms you're storing the data because you're paying to store those invalid, bad contacts that you don't wanna send to. You're storing those in many systems. Generally speaking, you get ROI on day zero as a result of all that. We'll be back after a quick break.

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Brian, I love that. And as you say, no, no customer too small, too big. And if you go to zerobounce.net, uh, they even have a very nice calculator so you can input the number of emails that you've got and it'll give you the price. And if you're looking at this on YouTube, you can see I'm doing a screen share for that as well. So I really love the transparency and the self-serve nature there, Brian, as well. You've mentioned that the company, you know, started in 2017, went live 2018, I understand. And you've managed to acquire over 300 customers. I think you mentioned you're getting about 400 new customers per day. So most people would— their minds would boggle at that. So there's operational issues, I'm sure, but from a marketing point of view, if we can talk to that, how have you managed to scale Zero Bounce?

Yes.

So every— I would say this, when we did start the business, everything did have some sort of scale in mind. Now, was it ready for it? Not necessarily. But did we have an idea and a concept how we wanted to think about it? So for example, self-service was built in from day one. We knew in order to get to levels of, you know, where we are today, it cannot be manual work. It cannot be people doing the work every day. It has to be self-service, let the customer do what they need to do, and obviously provide amazing support as a result of that. So that's been kind of one thing that we've definitely done, but scale has come And it has been challenging, to be very honest. We have failed many times in different things.

As we all do. That's part of the entrepreneurial journey, though, isn't it?

I think you have to fail. If you're not failing, then you're not— someone's not telling you good feedback or something. Something's wrong because you have to fail and you have to try. And you have to also be okay with knowing that you tried and you failed and you moved on. We don't harp on it. We don't belittle each other on an executive team saying, why'd you try that? We have done many things that we didn't think would work and were shocked that it actually did. And vice versa, things that seemed obvious that we thought would work, for example, partnerships with really large brands. Well, it didn't work because they didn't want to be in bed with just one vendor, for example. So we went and set that route. We go after them. We have the meetings. We have the discussions. We put everything together. You go through legal contract. And all of this stuff. And then ROI, zero. And so sounds great, perfect. It's complementary business to us. We could both market each other. And again, there's nothing wrong with this, but we tried it, it didn't work. We tried it again to make sure we didn't just fail on one and we moved on and it's okay. We just now also know what not to do in the future and where to find the good channels. So it's important.

Yeah, it is. So I love that you've got an R&D, and I guess that'll sort of fail fast and but fail frequently to get to the, to get to the future forward. What about getting the brand awareness? Zero Bounce now very well established. What are some of the activities that you tried that did work, Brian, to start to get the direct customers? Of course, that's the most profitable way of doing it, isn't it, if you can get the customers Organically without sharing the margin with any partners anyway. So what did you do as a team to build the brand?

So a few things. Well, number one, we had a mission to be and to make sure that we were absolutely everywhere. That was just a general concept that we had. And so what does that mean, you might say? Well, we were doing press releases, we were doing ads on every marketing platform, we were doing a ton of retargeting, meaning we're showing our logo to people who visited the site or were researching searching on the industry. What we also did and really doubled down on was a lot of getting customer reviews. So we were very focused on that. We made sure that we got— everyone would tell us they love the service, right? And a lot of people will just leave it right there. And what's important is to get those people to try to share that information on another publicly self-service available platform that they can read that and feel unbiased reviews. And we're very proud of those. Those are definitely a key and it's not easy to get, by the way. We have over 1,000 5-star reviews.

Which platform did you use for that?

We used Trustpilot and we did that because we were able to kind of automate some emails to paying customers and saying like, hey, if you really like the service, could you leave us some feedback? And another thing that we did, which is super critical, especially in the beginning, Is we listened to customer feedback, we adapted when we thought it made sense, and we also did not listen when it was clearly an outlier for one customer who was just raising hell.

Mm-hmm.

And so that in the beginning is very challenging to decipher what is that person that's actually giving you feedback that is impactful for the entire platform and people would love, and then who's the guy who's screaming But in reality, you're doing just something for him or her.

And how did you decide, Brian? Because you can have one very loud, influential client that really is an outlier and maybe some smaller ones that are telling the truth but have got less loud voices. How would you decide that?

So we would do a few things. We would constantly ask for customer feedback. And when we did get the feedback, we would also then send that feedback out to the customer base saying, hey, If we were to introduce the ability for you to automatically validate all of your data in your CRM, you know, with the press of one button, would you do that? And that came from a customer request saying, hey, like, I don't want to go in here and have to hit the button every time. And I'm like, okay, I mean, that makes sense, right? I understand that. Now, what has been more custom and what we didn't do, just maybe for an example on the other side, is someone saying, hey, I need the reporting of Every user that's ever touched the platform and did this XYZ, and I want a log and I want that in a PDF. And by the way, I'm not paying you to do this type of work. This should be included in the service. And, you know, and let me know if you can kind of have that in the next 15 days. Right. That was kind of with experience and repetition, you start to kind of understand who's asking for the one-offs and who is really kind of saying something that's impactful for the whole ecosystem. And so you can fail there too, but again, super important to just understand where and when you're failing and take that back into the team, digest it, don't get hung up. I think that's the most critical part. Don't get hung up, don't get emotional, just take the learnings and move on and keep marching.

And have you marched globally, Brian? I mean, is Zero Bounce Geography independent? Are the customers coming from around the world? Because that would mean you need to be multilingual as well. Just love to hear your sort of approach and availability as well, because my listeners are literally all over the world, over 200 countries.

Yes. So we operate in every single country of the world. Well, other than Russia and Belarus at the moment due to some US sanctions. But other than that, we are operating in every single country of the world. We are supporting multi-currency, which is another thing that was important for our business. So we are accepting basically every single local currency and we allow those customers to pay in those currencies. Multilingual is definitely part of the approach. However, to be fair, we haven't seen as much traction with that as what might seem apparent. And so that was another little learning lesson, right? Yeah. It just seems like US or sorry, English in general, people just seem to browsers are translated automatically. A lot of this stuff didn't end up being needle movers, but the currency conversions did. People want to pay in the currency that they're familiar with, not USD, for example. And so that was definitely big. And then the 24/7/365. So I have real people who are supporting our our clients 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days with no exceptions. We have not missed a day since 2018. Or an hour without a representative being available for the customer in real time. And that has been challenging, to be very honest.

Yeah.

Running a 24/7 operation with, you know, of course you have everyone from every country. So now we're translating sometimes the communication, the chatting and whatnot, but we've gotten through it. We've gotten the procedures in place. You live, you learn, and you get better. You improve.

Well, it sounds like if you've got over 300,000 customers, you've improved in the right direction. But Brian, you know, I do ask that question. If there's one thing that hasn't gone quite according to plan, what would that be? If there's a—

Yeah. So, what hasn't gone to plan and in the beginning seemed like the obvious thing to do was we started hiring marketing agencies to do our To do our pay-per-click, our— actually, it's crazy to say this— our email marketing and other things because simply we didn't have the people, right? It wasn't a matter of we didn't want to do it. We obviously wanted to do it. What we didn't have was the bandwidth and resources to accomplish it. You know, we're a bootstrapped company. We didn't have outside funding. We still don't have outside funding. And so obviously every dollar matters. So it seemed logical to go towards an agency who has done this. They know what to do, set it up. And run with it. And it was one of the biggest kind of eye-openers in the beginning because what you learn, at least what we learned, was that no one will work as hard for you as your own employees. Because number two, we treat our employees with incredibly great packages and great pay. We're very competitive. We're above average on everything. And quite honestly, I would say cutting edge on a lot. But the contractors and the agencies, I'm sorry not to knock you, but do a better job here. You're not acting like employees. You're acting like contractors who don't have the passion, the blood, the sweat, the tears of the business owners doing the work who started this. And so, you know, what we kept hearing was, oh, we got to give it another 90 days, another 90 days, another 90 days. And, you know, you're 6 months, 9 months, a year into something and no results. If that's an employee, You change, you do something about that.

Yeah.

And so that was just kind of something that we took away and we brought all that in-house. We paid, we bit the bullet, we paid the people and paid them right. And there's nothing better. I mean, when something happens, they're right there. They want to do things. They know it's their performance and they can see their own outcomes. And, you know, employee versus contractor is always very different.

Interesting, interesting observation. Of course, you've got to get to that stage when you're crossing the chasm where you've got enough volume, enough budget to bring that in, because then it will be cheaper than an agency, but you've got the fixed cost in instead of the variable cost. Brian, what about a number one tip? You've mentioned, you know, trying and failing and succeeding, but could you give us one tip for success in getting noticed that you think really stands out and that Zero Bounce has used most?

Yes. So one of the biggest things, and it's just at this point deeply rooted into me as a person as well, is a lot of people think that there's this magic bullet, that there's this one thing that if I just do this one thing, my business is going to explode or it's going to go to the next level as a result of that. And I would challenge people to stop thinking like that. And what we did and what worked, and I'm just coming from experience and proven record of this, Is that we didn't think about one thing. We thought about the sum of lots of little things that then compound into the big thing, right? And so people are, a lot of people want to go like, oh no, we need to, we need to do AI and we have to do it and we have to do it right. And it's going to take 2 years and we're going to go all in on it. But they did nothing else. We didn't think that way. We said, let's do 10 things.

Yeah.

Let's do all of them as fast as possible. Let's get results as quick as possible, whether good or bad. And what we did was we extrapolated all the good things. And then what we did was found little 1 percenters, right? 1 percenter, 2 percenter, maybe we got a 5 percenter. But now when you start compounding that on all the new things, these 5 percenters turn to 20 percenters 3 years later. And everything is building, building, building. And so that's kind of the— think of the sum of all the little things versus the result of potentially one thing.

Brian Minnick, that— I love that, that idea that lots of small changes collectively will add up. And I guess that's part of that Atomic Habits, uh, theory as well, isn't it? If we make small incremental changes, it's much less daunting in a way, isn't it? And we're not betting everything on one hero solution, but just making incremental changes. Brian, I will ask you for something that you listen to that helps you to get incremental changes or maybe quantum changes for you as a manager, as a COO there at Zero Bounce, and also a father of 2 young daughters like me?

Yes. Well, I love listening to the Joe Rogan podcast, but I wouldn't say that's helping me on a professional side. But on a professional side, I've attended a course and a continued education at Harvard Business School and other courses that really are just eye-opening. Even if they sound like you already know what you're talking about, I can promise you, you don't. And you will always learn. And so never stop learning. Keep going to different things, push yourself, and stop being a know-it-all. Go listen to some people who actually do know a focused subject. So that's what I did.

Oh, cool. And that's why I've come to you, Brian, to find out about emails and email sanity and also about sending reputation. Brian, you kindly have an offer For my listeners and community, what would that be before we leave?

Yeah, so we want to give everybody 2,000 validations for free. Obviously, you would still get that 100 per month for free at any time. Any user can get that at any time. And then in addition, some of those extra tools I spoke about, which I didn't even go into big detail, but sending us an email to evaluate the technical specs, a blacklist monitor. So you put your domain on it to see if anything pops up, we'll alert you. Inbox testers, you can send emails to us to see if they went to inbox or spam before you send your campaign. All of those you can get for free every month as well. We have a free toolkit there. And so I just wanna encourage everyone to take advantage of free tools, not, again, not watered down on any level and just available for you to take advantage of.

Great. What code do people need to go to a particular domain name and give a code to get the 2,000 or?

You can reach out to me or our support team and just say that you came from, you know, the podcast and The Unnoticed Entrepreneur and We'll go ahead and add them to you directly.

Brian Minnick, if people want to reach out to you directly, where can they find you?

Yeah, LinkedIn's a great one. I try to stay active there. I'm not so active on the posting, but I'm very active on people who engage with me and want to understand or have a technical question. By the way, my background's very technical, but I'd love to transform that into more of layman's terms. And so happy if you have, if you think you have a problem, you probably do. And I'm happy to also kind of help and consult a little bit.

Brian Minnick, that's wonderful. Just so that, uh, you know, it's M-I-N-N-I-C-K, uh, for Brian's surname. Brian, we've gone over my normal time because you've just kept this conversation so, so rich in terms of information, and I think it's just such a valuable and frankly unexplored part of marketing. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you, I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

Well, it's been illuminating, and I feel also a little bit guilty, to be honest, that I haven't swept under the bed of my email database for a long, long time. And I know I'm going to be using that 2,000 before, before the week is out. So thanks for joining me and Brian Minnick on this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. I really hope that you found it as informative as I have. Take action because you are going to be sending your reputation, and you do not want to get blacklisted. I hope I haven't made myself unpopular with you and you're not going to blacklist this show. Hopefully you're following me and you are going to share this episode with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.