Shaun Whynacht shows how to set up PlusThis Email Validator with Keap to automatically clean your contact list. The integration uses custom tags to flag invalid, disposable, or risky emails, and a 90-day waiting period prevents re-validating the same contacts too often. Add the trigger tag to any funnel or campaign to keep your list deliverable.
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Hey guys, you know, keeping your email list is as important as brushing your teeth. You've got emails on your list, I guarantee it right now, that are causing issues with your deliverability because they're, they're invalid, they are unresponsive, they're bouncing and all that kind of stuff. But how do you clean that up? Doing it manually is extremely hard and time-consuming, and in reality, who's got time for that? I want to show you two tools here. You Keep being the CRM email marketing system that we use, but also PlusThis, which is an add-on. They have a lot of great tools, but one of the ones that they've most recently released is called Email Validator. And I'm going to show you how simple it is to set up, what it can report on, and then I'm going to flip over to Keep and show you a basic automated campaign that will essentially run this and keep it manageable for you. So let's hop right into it. Right now in the, the application for PlusThis, as you see here, I have the tool in its edit mode. Now I already went ahead and set it up and I created all these tags. Really quite easy. All I did was I had PlusThis open on one screen and then my Keepa app on the other one. I created tags and for each of the different steps here. So email validation results, uh, things like there's no email address on the record. Okay, that's obviously pretty clear. There's nothing in the field. So what tags do you want to apply for each of these? So I created these tags, I put them in a category called Plus This just to keep it clean in my Keep account. And I did one for no email, deliverable, undeliverable, do not send, unknown address. Then the email risk based off of their email risk score that it's finding online— low, medium, high. Then correctly formatted, possible typo. Now they have an option here to put in what a recommended correct email address is. I'm okay with just looking at the ones that are tagged with possible typos and figuring it out. Most cases it's just somebody missed, uh, you know, an M to an N, or, you know, they picked a different letter instead of Gmail. So you can figure out 99% of them. I'm pretty sure you're a smart cookie. Uh, email box is valid. Is it a catch-all address? Is it disposable, free email, role email, mailing box? Like, these are all different categories of emails that could be hurting your reputation and your deliverability. So once we've got these all mapped out, we save them. Um, and then what it does, I'll show you right here. Oh, I'll show you one more step. Come back here at the very end. At the very end, it says, which tag do you want to apply when it's completed? You can say do nothing, but I did one called validation completed. And I'll tell you that once we get into the campaign. So once we got that saved, we get this webhook here that we can post into Keep. Now let's hop over here and take a look at what I've done. Very simple campaign. I have a trigger tag here that I'm calling trigger plus this email validation, and that will apply anytime anybody comes into any of our funnels, any new purchases, that tag will apply. Okay. And then we've got some branch logic that's happening here. Already validated. What we're looking here is that completed validation tag. So if the contact doesn't contain that completed validation, run the validation. If they have it, say already validated. We don't want to keep running it if they've already been validated. So they don't have the tag, they come in here, they run the validation. Very simple. There's that webhook that gets put in there. It's the only thing you need to put in there to run the automation. And then here's where I think the magic kind of happens here. The first thing we want to do is we want to remove that trigger tag in case we do have to reapply it. But what I have come up with in my own process here is that I'm saying 90 days is a good gestation period for a validated email. So if for some reason somebody takes another action within 90 days of the first one, that completed validation tag will still be on the record and it won't revalidate them. But after 90 days, we want to remove that validation completed tag because now it's fair game. Something could happen. Now you can shorten this window to 30, to 60, or whatever you want, or you can expand it out. It's up to you. I just put ours here at 90 days because I think that's a good period for that. Once that's happening, the only thing that you will need to have, obviously publishing this to run it, is update any of the other automations that you have to apply that trigger email validation as one of the first steps, whether it's a purchase, um, an opt-in or anything like that. If you've got other automated campaigns, that tag needs to fire. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and I'm going to take my list of contacts and run them all through this. By doing a batch update and applying that tag and run them through this just to kind of set that line in the sand and see where everybody falls. So that is the email validation setup that I chose to use with PlusThis and Keep. You can build it out any way you want, but I just wanted to show this to you 'cause steal it, use it, whatever you want. Just keep your list clean and have a great day growing your business.
