Melissa Data has released a new e-mail verification tool called Email Object.
Email Object checks e-mail addresses in databases, address books and spreadsheets and can also check addresses pulled from Web site forms. The tool offers three levels of verification: syntax check, local database lookup and MX-record lookup.
“In a way it is a big deal to people managing e-mail lists and sending out blasts because it’s just a pain to manage that information and keep it clean,” said Brent Leary, partner and co-founder of CRM Essentials. “When you’re trying to send out multiple e-mail campaigns, you really need clean data lists. E-mail is just the most effective way to reach people that you’ve already built a relationship with, so anything that makes it more effective is definitely worth it.”
Bud Walker, data quality tools product manager for Melissa, said the company developed Email Object partly to serve its own e-mail marketing needs.
“We have a pretty large e-mail campaign ourselves, and on a weekly basis we send out to several thousand customers,” he pointed out. “We noticed some of the problems in our own database, like common misspellings and syntax problems, so using our own domain knowledge and seeing the need for it, we just went ahead and developed our own tool for this.”
Walker predicts that Email Object will, like Melissa’s other products, be used across multiple verticals. Melissa clients across industries received e-mail blasts as part of a marketing effort for the product’s launch.
“In today’s addresses there’s always an e-mail address on every form, and knowing whether that is a valid domain is a comfort level that everyone requires,” Walker added.
Though competing products exist, Walker says the differentiating factor for Email Objects is that it was designed by an e-mail marketing company with its own list of valid domain names.
Email Object also features editable spelling lists, custom blacklisted and valid domains and a monthly-updated list of valid domains. Data cleansing can be done in batch or at point-of-entry.
Available for both Windows and UNIX, Email Object can be used alone or as a part of Melissa Data’s Data Quality Suite. The Data Quality Suite verifies full names, addresses and phone numbers.
