Building an email list of real leads and buyers is one of the most difficult tasks of internet marketing. It has become increasingly difficult to stop fake leads because not only do you have to look out for bot signups, you also have to watch out for people who just want to see what you’re offering but don’t actually want to join your list and receive your followups.

Fortunately, there are a few ways to filter your signups so that you’re getting more real leads on your email list. Here are 5 steps to stop fake leads and make your list more profitable in the next 24 hours.

1. Get Rid of the Bots

Bot signups on your email list are fairly easy to detect. They sign up with a name that doesn’t match the email address. For example:

Name: John Smith

Email: racheladams@example.com

Clearly, John Smith is not going by the name Rachel Adams online so it’s basically a 99% guarantee that this is a bot sign up. So anytime you see mismatched email addresses like this on your list, just delete them straightaway.

Another way to get rid of the bot signups is to require a verification step on your landing page. Have the user complete a captcha or answer a challenge question before they can join your mail list.

Regarding double opt-in… Given the fact that your emails might land in the spam folder no matter how hard you work to keep them out of there, I no longer recommend using double opt-in to confirm that people really want to join your email list.

In the majority of cases, even if they really did want to sign up, the confirmation email will end up in their spam folder and you’ll never hear from them again.

2. Blacklist Temporary Email Domains

While temporary email addresses might be convenient for users that want to avoid receiving spam emails, as a marketer this simply means that you’ll subsequently send emails to someone who will never answer you again.

Temporary email addresses, or throwaway emails, are used by people who simply want to sign up to see what you’re offering. These people don’t actually want to join your email list and they most likely don’t even want to buy what you’re offering if it’s not free.

So blacklisting temporary emails from joining your email list is the fastest way to get rid of people who are freebie seekers.

All you need to do is add these domains to your autoresponder blacklist and these people won’t be able to join your email list if they are using an email address on one of these domains.

If you are using Getresponse, you will add the domain blacklist here (go to List hygiene > Blacklist):

If you are using Aweber, you will add the domain blacklist here (under your Active List go to Subscribers > Subscriber Tools > Block Subscribers):

If you use another autoresponder, simply look for instructions in your support area on how to Block Subscribers, Blacklist Subscribers, Blacklist Domains, Autoresponder Blacklist, etc.

It’s important to note that every company domain that is not a gmail.com, yahoo.com, etc is not automatically a temporary throwaway email address. So make sure that you don’t remove people from your list just because they don’t use the major email providers and prefer to instead use the email accounts on their own domains.

Now that you know that you should block temporary email address domains, I have a compiled a quick list of domains to copy and paste into your autoresponder so that you don’t have to find all of these domains yourself.

(Last updated: 10/20/2020)

This is not a comprehensive list by any means as there are always new domains being added to these services. But this list contains enough domains to help you start blocking the majority of incoming fake temporary email address leads.

3. Email Verification to Stop Fake Leads

Even if a person signs up on your email list genuinely, there’s also a need for you to continuously update your email list to make sure that those emails are actually still working over time. If you don’t, then your emails will start bouncing off of these invalid addresses.

High bounce rates and lower open rates due to invalid email addresses tips your email service provider off that you might be sending spam emails. As your sender reputation goes down, you might run the risk of getting your account blacklisted and you won’t be able to send your campaigns any longer.

Email list verification helps to ensure that your messages are deliverable and won’t be sent to spam. The best way to do is this by using a service that performs the following steps:

• Syntax and formatting check. Ensures that email addresses are properly formatted in order to be considered as a genuine email address with that service provider (for example, the email address is a valid Yahoo email because it does not start with a number)
• Server confirmation. This step checks the DNS records of the domain name of the email address to ensure that the server is actually able to accept emails and that it won’t bounce.
• Mailbox validation. This last step of the email verification process is done by contacting the SMTP server and understands whether the mailbox actually exists by pinging the email address and waiting for the email server to deliver a response.

A service like this will have the domain names for temporary email address services preloaded so that you don’t have to worry about compiling and using a list like the one above in Step 3. However, if you are just starting out, you may not have the budget to afford this type of service so I recommend just using that list to block the domains for free.

If you’re serious about email marketing, I recommend that you do invest in an email verification service to protect your autoresponder account.

Here are the top 2 email verification services I believe offer the best service:

Email List Verify

(no credit card required!)

ZeroBounce

4. Clean Your List

Email list verification services can only do something about the fake non-deliverable leads. But what about those who join your lists using throwaway emails that they created on Gmail and other email service providers?

These days people like to have email addresses that they send all of those pesky ads to that they don’t want to open without unsubscribing, just in case they’ll come back to read them later (Yeah, right!).

So to get rid of these folks, who are essentially no different than fake leads, you need to clean your list regularly.

Here are my criteria that I use:

Delete people who:

1. Haven’t opened any emails in the last 30 days
2. Haven’t clicked emails in the last 14 days
3. Have opened emails in the last 30 days but have not clicked in the last 14 days

By doing this on a near daily basis, you can get people off your list who are never going to take action.

If you have people on your list that continuously open your emails and click but never buy or interact with you, make sure to send them a few emails to try and get them to reply to you before you delete them for good.

5. Grab More Leads From Your Existing Traffic

Did you know that there a ton of pre-verified real leads that you’re probably already getting and never even knew about? It might sound like it’s too good to be true, but it’s real.

In fact, there are people who visit your landing pages every day who are interested in what you have to offer but just don’t end up signing up for whatever reason. Now you can capture these leads using a clever tool called GetEmails.

This service has been a gamechanger for me because of one thing: you can use it on pages where you run paid traffic!

You just install a simple piece of code on your landing page (copy-paste) before the </head> HTML tag and connect your autoresponder and you’re ready to start collecting leads!

In fact, I recently tested this out by running a solo ad to a landing page containing the GetEmails Collection Script code from the solo ad service Udimi. Just look at these results:

In the red circle above, you can see the difference in the GetEmails results while the solo ad was active. This was for a 250 click solo ad. The solo ad brought in around 40 leads and some sales on its own. Thanks to GetEmails, I was able to retrieve an additional 103 LEADS!

If you want to try this for yourself, just go here to make a free account now:

Out of all of the steps on this list, I can say that this one will make a significant difference in your results, especially since this service only delivers Tier 1 USA leads (other countries not supported currently)!

Next Steps

This article is designed to help you address the problem of fake leads. However, lead quality is just as important. You also add follow up emails to determine how interested people are in your list.

On occasion, send them emails that are designed to get them to reply rather than click. This will help you to weed out the spammers (those who joined to try and send YOU offers) and people that are just not a good fit for your business.

By taking all of these steps to care for your email list, you can increase the number of buyers and decrease the time it takes you to build a list of fully engaged subscribers!