Gone are the days when you could send cold emails with abandon, spraying and praying that something lands somewhere.

Good riddance, honestly.

Today, email outreach requires attention to detail to get your emails opened — and a personal touch to get your leads to respond. For now, let’s tackle the first part: making sure your emails land in the inbox.

How?

Simple: verify an email address without sending an email in the first place.

Why should I verify an email address before hitting ‘send’?

One word: deliverability.

Sending 500 emails to verified email addresses is much better than sending 1,000 outbound messages to unverified emails.

Chances are a good percentage of those 1,000 emails will bounce. The more your emails bounce, the more likely the messages coming from your inbox will be marked as spam. Not only will you waste time on bounced emails, but the emails you send to valid addresses won’t be delivered as successfully.

By taking the extra step to verify an email address before you send an email, you’ll improve your deliverability. With better deliverability, you’ll see a better open and response rate.

How do I verify an email address without sending an email?

We’re glad you asked.

You have a couple of different options for email verification.

1. Free email verifier tools: If you’re sending a low number of emails (or just need to verify an email address every now and then), a free tool will work great.
2. Email finder tools with built-in verification. If you’re scaling email campaigns and don’t want to risk bouncing, go with an email finder tool that will automatically find and verify any given email address.

Whether you need a handful of verified email addresses or a list of thousands of lead emails, verifying an email address without sending an email is pretty simple.

Here’s how.

2 Ways to Verify an Email Address Without Sending an Email

#1: Manually check each email address

Google ‘email checker’ or ‘email verifier’ and you’ll find a host of free options to verify an email address without sending an email.

Our favorite is aptly named email-checker.net. It’s free and doesn’t require any installation. The quick and easy email checker will tell you whether or not an email address is valid in a matter of milliseconds.

Here’s how it works:

• Head to email-checker.net
• Enter the email address you want to verify.
• Verified email addresses will say ‘OK’, invalid email addresses will say ‘Bad’

This approach to verifying an email address without sending an email will work fine if you’re sending a handful of emails at a time. It’s free and straightforward, after all.

But will this approach work at scale?

#2: Use an email finder tool with verification

Most email finder tools offer the ability to verify email addresses.  The key is to find a tool that automatically verifies your email address, rather than using up credits or charging you extra to take the verification step.

A couple of things to look for:

1. Ideally you want a tool that gives you the option to verify emails from a prospecting tool like Sales Nav or upload your list, depending on your workflow.
2. You need a tool that only charges you for verified, up-to-date email addresses.

You have a few different options that meet both these criteria.

• Hunter validates emails, but they are often outdated (meaning they won’t bounce, but they won’t get to who you’re trying to reach, either).
• ZoomInfo typically provides great data, but is often a budget buster for growing teams.
• Wiza finds and verifies email addresses, but is best used in conjunction with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Wiza verifies email addresses as you scrape lead data from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

You’ll need a Sales Nav account, but setting up your workflow ensures one thing: you’re getting up-to-date, verified email addresses for the people you’re trying to reach. Finally, you’ll only pay for verified email addresses.

Here’s how to verify an email address with Wiza:

• Upload your .csv with the people you want to find email addresses for
• Select ‘Process List’, then ‘Scrape and Find Emails’
• After the search ends, you’ll be able to download your verified email addresses (or port them to your CRM)

Email Verification: Free or Sustainable?

You have both free and paid tools to verify an email address without sending an email. The question is: which one should you use?

Sites like email-checker.net work well for verifying one email address at a time. If you just need a quick check on an email you’ve found somewhere else, or only send a few outbound emails each week, a free tool may work just fine.

In contrast, a paid option for email verification can make your outbound email efforts more sustainable. Instead of spending hours verifying email addresses before you ever send a single email, you can work automated verification into your workflow.

The question now becomes: what do you need?

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