Experian vs Record Validation for Salesforce – Email Validation Alternative Analysis

Email is the heartbeat of any digital marketing campaign. Having a reliable set of email records represents abundant opportunities to engage and connect with your customers. But when your contact information is uncertain and riddled with errors, doubt creeps into every move you make. Are your engagement rates low because your message is poor? Or are you wasting time by sending to a list of dead email addresses? If you find yourself in this situation, you’re not alone. Many companies around the world face this challenge and are looking for ways to address it.

The importance of a robust email validation and verification tool cannot be overemphasized. But, with the myriad of options available, how does one choose the right solution that meets all their needs? Today, we’re taking a step forward in understanding the options available as we examine Record Validation for Salesforce and Experian Data Validation, two contenders with distinct offerings. This article aims to dissect the core features, pros, cons, and pricing of these platforms, guiding you to a choice that could well be the linchpin of your marketing success.

Record Validation Overview

Record Validation is a Salesforce-centric tool designed to augment the deliverability of your email, phone, and postal campaigns. The focus of this article rests on email features, and RV stands as a top stand-alone solution in this regard. By validating and formatting your data right at the point of entry, it promises a significant reduction in bounce rates and a notable increase in delivery rates, ensuring your messages hit the mark every time​​.

Features

• Quick Entry: A feature that validates and formats email addresses upon the insertion or updating of a record, thereby improving efficiency and reducing data entry errors​​.
• Direct Validate: This feature shines by automatically validating records that enter your system through API insert or bulk upload, ensuring your data remains pristine and ready for successful engagements​​.
• Batch Validation: Assess and confirm the integrity of all current records within Salesforce. This is done via the user-friendly interface ensures a straightforward experience. 
• Reporting abilities: Accurate health checks and detailed reporting features at your fingertips with the power to share these reports with colleagues quickly and easily.  
• Spam-trap detection: Identify and remove spam-traps.  

Pros 

• Enhanced Deliverability: By eliminating inaccuracies, it boosts email delivery rates to an impressive 97.5% for opt-in lists, guaranteeing that your messages successfully reach their intended recipients.
• Pardot (Account Engagement): For those in the Salesforce-driven realm of business, the synchronization between Pardot and Salesforce enables Record Validation to perform the invaluable task of scrutinizing and affirming your data effortlessly.
• Holistic data hygiene approach: With features like Quick Entry and Direct Validate, RV provides a holistic approach to data quality, meaning data that enters your organization is clear, accurate and ready for action from the start.
• Unlimited seats Plauti guarantees on all its products: amplify the influence of RV throughout your entire organization, with an unlimited number of user seats. Extending the power of RV to all users further emphasizes the holistic approach to a data quality culture inside your organization.

Cons

Salesforce Centric: The primary downside is its focus on Salesforce, which might deter organizations using other CRM platforms.

Pricing

RV’s pricing is straightforward with a free trial offering 100 credits for email verification. For a more robust need, the Premium plan starts at $39 per month (billed annually), starting with 50,000 credits. Each email validation costs 1 credit, making it a cost-effective choice for small to medium-sized businesses​​.

Experian Email Validation Overview

Experian Email Validation is part of the Data Validation Suite offered by Experian. However, on their website it is not clear exactly how their products are packaged. For instance, under their “products” tab, “email verification” is broken into 5 sub-categories – are these separate products? It’s not very clear on the website. Anyway, Experian also covers validation of addresses and phone numbers, but we will leave that out of focus today and instead examine the product from their email validation features.

Features

• Real-Time Email Verification: Real time email verification, including single email verification.
• Email syntax check: Check for common errors with corrective suggestions in email domains.
• Disposable email domain check – Check if an email domain is a disposable domain such as tempmail.com etc.
• SMTP check – SMPT check to validate that an email address is alive and kicking, as well “unique proprietary method”.

Pros

• Good overall functionality: Disposable domain checks, SMTP checks and syntax checks are all useful to help to improve sender reputation.
• Great support - Experian boasts 24/7 customer support globally.

Cons

• Pricing Transparency: The pricing information for Experian Email Validation was not very clear. For example, the cost per validation is not documented, or allocation of credits is not clear. This lack of transparent pricing makes one wonder about the true costs involved with the solution.

Pricing

Standard pricing starts at $1,000 USD/company/year.

* Final price is determined by the type of contact data required and credit volumes.

Features comparison

Record Validation vs Experian: Email validation process

Experian Email Validation SMTP Pros:

• Accuracy: SMTP validation checks the actual existence of an email address by contacting the email server. This method provides accurate results, as it verifies if the mailbox is reachable.
• Real-time verification: SMTP validation can provide real-time results, making it suitable for immediate verification needs.
• Detailed information: It can provide information about the email server and response codes, helping to diagnose delivery issues.

Cons:

• Slower response: SMTP validation can be slower, especially for large email lists, as it involves connecting to email servers, which may have delays.
• Resource-intensive: Performing SMTP validation for a large number of email addresses can be resource-intensive and may not be practical for high-volume processing.

Record Validation DNS Pros:

• Speed: DNS-based verification is generally faster since it doesn't require establishing a connection to an email server. It relies on DNS queries, which are quick and efficient.
• Scalability: Plauti's DNS-based method is more scalable for processing large email lists without causing server overload or delays.
• Lower cost: DNS verification typically consumes fewer resources and can be a cost-effective solution for email list cleaning.
• Privacy: DNS validation doesn't involve contacting the recipient's email server, which may be considered a privacy advantage.

Cons:

• Less accurate: In some cases, DNS validation may not confirm the existence of an email address as reliably as SMTP validation, as it only checks the domain's DNS records.
• Limited information: It provides limited information about the email address or server, making it less suitable for diagnosing delivery issues.

Conclusion

Your choice between Plauti and Experian would hinge on your specific needs, the email marketing platform you use, and your potentially your budget. For an organization with many Salesforce users and Pardot (Account Engagement), Record Validation could be your go-to option. For starters, the product complexity of RV has been simplified into a single cohesive application geared for Salesforce. You won’t have to worry about complex integrations or learning a new system. The overall features of Record Validation provide a more comprehensive approach towards email validation and verification. For instance, the ‘quick entry’ feature ensures that emails are always entered into your records precisely – what makes this even more powerful is that you can anybody in your organization can access this feature!

Looking at Experian, it’s clear that they offer many different data solutions, from fraud identification to risk management. While that’s not inherently a bad thing, the focus on developing new features specifically for this side of the business might not always be in the spotlight. Plauti is geared towards solving a more niche area of data quality, and the development of new features from Plauti is constant.

In wrapping up, the comparative analysis of Record Validation and Experian reveals distinct features and benefits that cater to different organizational needs. By aligning your thinking about your CRM, budget, and the level of validation sophistication you require, you are better poised to make a decision about what features stand out the most to you. Always do your research carefully and asses each tool to get a look and feel for it, especially as many tools offer a free trial. Record Validation is easy to try out, a free trial is quick to install and access with no credit cards or string attached! Take the test drive today and take data quality to new heights!