How to Verify Salesforce Lead Email Addresses

Imagine spending thousands of $$ on paid ads for lead generation. Only for these leads to submit inaccurate contact information (intentionally or unintentionally). 

You’ll end up wasting even more money by rolling out emails to inaccurate email addresses. And also, end up hurting your email reputation, KPIs, and sales forecasting.

Verifying a Salesforce lead's email address used to be a heavy task before. But now, you can verify millions of leads coming from Salesforce or Hubspot in a few clicks using Gigasheet. 

We’ll show you how to validate your Salesforce leads in this quick guide. 

Why is lead verification important

Lead verification is a process you can’t skip, especially if you want to: 

• Protect your resources. CRMs and email marketing tools often have a contact limitation. Adding unverified emails to your lists means you’re paying for slots that won’t have any return. Plus, your sales team will waste time reaching out to non-existent people.
• Have realistic sales forecasts. You can’t predict how many deals you’ll close if you use an unrealistic database. Once you verify your leads you’ll be able to forecast future sales more effectively.
• View accurate KPIs. Let’s use an example for this one. Imagine you got 10,000 new leads last month and 10% of those emails are invalid. If 5,000 open your campaign, you’ll see a 50% open rate and a 12% bounce rate. However, once you clean your data, you’ll realize that actually, your open rate is 55% and a 2% bounce rate — assuming the other factors that can cause emails to bounce.
• Protect your email reputation. A high bounce rate and spam flags can damage your email authority and reputation. This makes it easier for your communication to fall into verified people’s spam folders. 

Some people skip lead verification because they think it’s hard and time-consuming, so they let the email marketing tool flag those emails for them. Or, they build a quick formula in Excel to see if the email addresses follow a specific format. 

However, verifying emails is different from pure data validation. When you verify email accounts, you’re actually checking whether or not the email exists and works. 

Doing this using Gigasheet is a breeze. You can verify up to a billion rows for free on Gigasheet within minutes and without having to write any formulas. Here’s how.

How to verify leads in bulk

Follow these steps to verify your Salesforce leads:

1. Create a Gigasheet account

Sign up or log into your Gigasheet account. You can do this with your professional or personal email, or sign up directly using your Gmail, Microsoft, or Apple account.  

2. Bring your leads data into Gigasheet

The easiest way to import your data is by uploading a spreadsheet. But you can also integrate Gigasheet directly with Salesforce, Hubspot, Asana, or most big data databases.

To import your Salesforce data in a .CSV file, click on “New,” and then on “File Upload.” Look for your file and open it. 

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To connect your Gigasheet account to Salesforce, hit “Data Connectors,” and select “Salesforce Object” or “Salesforce Report”, depending on whether you need the raw data or a specific report. 

You can even schedule a Salesforce report to automatically run on a weekly basis, or however frequently you need to perform lead verification.

Here’s a full tutorial on how to integrate Gigasheet with Salesforce.

3. Launch the spreadsheet on Gigasheet 

Once your data is fully loaded, open the file you want to work on by double-clicking on it. Make sure to open the most updated version of your report. 

4. Look for enrichments

Once you’re inside the Gigasheet file, go to “Insert” and then, hit the “Enrichments” option. We’ll cover the EmailValidation enrichment throughout this guide, but make sure to explore everything that Gigasheet can do for your databases. 

In the enrichments tab, use the search bar on the left and look for “LeadMagic”. Click on “Email Validation.”

After opening the email validation enrichment, select the column you want to validate (the one with the emails) and hit “Test”.

5. Wait a few minutes

Depending on the size of your data, it can take up to a few minutes for the enrichment to process all of the data. Why not use this time to make yourself a cup of tea?

You’ll see the progress on the little bar above the “Sheet Assistant”. For reference, this spreadsheet had 100 rows and took less than two minutes. 

6. Check the “email status” column

Once it finishes processing your data, a new column named “Email Status” will appear. There, you’ll be able to see all valid or invalid emails.

7. Clean your data 

Use the filter option to remove all invalid, unknown, or catch_all emails from your list. You can do this in a few easy steps: 

• Go to “Filters”
• Enter the column information and filtering criteria 
• Select the options you want to sort
• Hit “Apply” 
• Select all of the values
• Click on your mouse’s right button and hit “Delete rows”

Then, remove all filters and you’ll have a clean database. 

Save your clean database under “File”. Then, click on “Download” and “Export .CSV”. Take your .CSV file to your email marketing tool or CRM. 

You can also share your Gigasheet spreadsheet using the “Share” option. You’ll get a URL to import it directly into Salesforce. 

What are catch-all emails?

Catch-all email addresses are the ones that receive all emails that are redirected from a certain domain. This includes invalid or temporary accounts.

These email addresses represent the same issues as invalid ones. The person reading your communication might be different from the one who signed up — resulting in unsubscriptions or bounces. Or, the temporary email account expires before you reach out, also resulting in a hard bounce. 

Catch-all email verification is a great Gigasheet feature because it flags emails that exist but aren’t fully valid. 

Reach the right people (and save money)

Stop putting your email domain’s reputation on the line and avoid paying for unreachable contacts with Gigasheet. 

If you thought this was easy, sign up for Gigasheet to discover how else you can benefit from having clean databases.