The average list carries ~10% dead weight. Every invalid address you send to wastes spend, inflates your bounce rate, and drags down your sender reputation. See the annual number for your own list in 30 seconds.
Default is the real 30-day benchmark from 500K verifications.
Emails bounced / yr
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Wasted send cost / yr
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Lost revenue / yr
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You pay for every send - ESP fees, infrastructure, content production. A 10% bounce rate means 1 in 10 of those costs vanish into a dead mailbox. There is no upside to sending to an invalid address.
Every email that bounces is a potential customer that never engages. At 10% invalidity on a 50K/month list, that is ~60K potentially-deliverable emails lost per year before you even measure revenue.
Mailbox providers watch your bounce rate. Above ~2% your reputation drops; above 5% you risk blacklisting. The damage is to every future send, not just the bounced one - which is why the cheapest fix is to never send to invalid addresses in the first place.
Our analysis of 500,000 real verifications in the last 30 days found 10.3% invalid and 30% "unknown" (needing a re-check). Lists that skew to Hotmail or Yahoo run far higher. The number on your dashboard is probably understating it.
See the full benchmark →Verify before every send. 100 free credits, no card - and you will see the savings on your first campaign.
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