Did you know that if 10% of the emails you collect are bad, that less than 44% are delivered?
Crazy, right?
That’s why you have to guard the quality of your email list with your life.
You have to make sure you don’t get any fake or disposable email addresses on it.
That’s why you have to validate email addresses that you capture in Messenger with your bot.
Luckily for you, I’ve figured out how you can do that in 4 easy steps.
The tool we’re going to use is called NeverBounce.
It’s free for 1.000 validations and after that it’s $0,008 or something.
They have a handy API that we can hook up to ManyChat.
Let me explain.
Step 1 – Create a free account
Create a free account at NeverBounce & verify your email address.
Go to “Apps” and create a new app.
Select the webhook type & click create.
This will give you your webhook URL.
Copy it & go over the ManyChat.
Step 2 – Create email capture
Setup a simple email capture in ManyChat.
Note that we’re saving the email address to a custom field called “Response”.
Only after the email address is validated, we’re going to store it in the “Email” custom field.
And automatically continue to an action step.
Step 3 – External request
Create an external request.
Paste your webhook URL & replace {email} with the Response variable.
Go to response mapping.
Use $.result to save the outcome of the request to the Multifield custom field.
(the multifield custom field is a field I’m using for all kinds of things that you need to store temporarily)
This will save the result of the validation.
There are 4 possible outcomes:
- Disposable: you have a lot of disposable email address services on the internet.
- Invalid: the email address doesn’t exist.
- Accept all: the email address is valid, but it’s a catch-all email address.
- Valid: hooray! It’s valid!
Now we have to send a message depending on these outcomes.
Step 4 – Confirmation message
To check the outcome, we’re going to use conditions to check the value of the custom field we’ve used earlier in the response mapping.
Automatically continue after the external request & setup conditions to check if it’s “disposable” or “invalid”.
We then add some actions to clear the Multifield & Response custom field.
(it’s good practise to keep your subscribers clean)
Do you notice how the last action is slightly different?
Because it’s not invalid or disposable, we know it’s valid.
That’s why we store the value of Response (which is the email address) in the Email custom field.
And then we create some confirmation messages for the subscriber.
If it’s invalid or disposable, we ask them to type another email address.
And if it’s valid, we tell them the download they requested is on its way.
That’s it!
You’ve now made sure only high-quality email addresses can join your email list.
I hope it’s helpful! 🙂
Great Content! Thanks Max!
You’re welcome! Happy to hear it’s helpful 😄🙌
You are AMAZING!
Hi, from Ukraine!
Thanks! 😄
This is cool stuff, we use the same techniques in all our of email capture lead flows. We use Clearout.io instead of Neverbounce.com since they are high in accuracy, fast in the API response
Clearout.io looks great too! Maybe I’ll give that a try in the future 😄
Hi Max, because Manychat updated the email became a system field rather than a custom email user input… So we can’t delete the system field based on the example you show.
Is there another method to workaround?
Thank you, appreciate your help!
Hey JC! You’re correct!
The implementation of this is now slightly different;
1) Store the email address into a user field called “Response”
2) Check if the email inside the Response field is valid
3) If yes, store that email address into the email system field. And this is where it gets tricky, as there is no standard action for this (yet). The only option I’ve found is to use the ManyChat API to update the contact.
4) Delete the value of the Response user field.
I hope that helps!
I’ll add this to my task list to update this article 🙂
Hi. ManyChat can also check if a customer email address is already registered on a specific mailchimp list?
My goal is: when is starting a manychat automation (from dm or story reaction), check if this user is already registered on mailchimp list and check if is already a follower.
Thanks!
Hey Mattia! It’s possible, but it might be tricky to find that subscriber if you don’t have their full name in MailChimp.
If you do have their full name, you could use a tool like Make to search if there is a subscriber in MailChimp with that exact name.