Gnanaprakash Rathinam, Clearout: “email is a cornerstone of any business and everyday work communication”

For email advertisements, correctly provided personal information is integral. But with that come the issues of protecting that said data.

With more businesses moving online, email advertisements are not a new phenomenon. For these ads to be efficient, they require accurate receiver information. But, with the growing numbers of bots, scams, and hacks, it is difficult for businesses to obtain valuable data. More importantly, the recipients are less willing to provide that information.

To discuss the topics of Email verification, identity, and online safety, Cybernews invited Gnanaprakash Rathinam (GP), the Founder of Clearout, for a quick chat.

Tell us how it all began. How did the idea of Clearout originate?

Much of my experience comes from early-stage startups. We would start from scratch, build and innovate while considering user needs and new methodologies.

Being a tech enthusiast, I knew I had to create a SaaS product to ease all-scale businesses and entrepreneurs' marketing and sales processes. When addressing sales and marketing challenges with technology, I found that the existing tools weren't efficient, user-friendly, or cost-effective. Hence, came the motivation to build a simple and valuable tool that would help in marketing and capturing leads. The aim was to help marketers, sales, and product owners confidently capture and send emails to their prospects and customers without worrying about email bounces or domain getting blacklisted.

The idea of Clearout came up to me after a few rough and stressful experiences.

The initial idea was to integrate all digital marketing channels into one to help intelligent decision-making. Soon enough, we dropped the idea. We realized that the tool-in-progress may not be valuable and affordable to all sections of marketers and sellers.

My team conducted further research and studies, concluding that our SaaS product would strengthen email marketing. Email is a cornerstone of any business and most people's everyday work communication. I also saw that the more effort and attention a company puts into email marketing, the better.

This is why I created Clearout Email Verification to help marketers and businesses take their email marketing campaigns towards success.

Can you introduce us to what you do? What does email verification look like?

Clearout works towards expanding a business’s reach, lowering hard bounces, and improving email deliverability rates. Our email verification and email finder service combined is a strong tool. It automates the lead generation process by finding and validating the emails of your leads.

Email Verification is making sure the email addresses are tied to an inbox. At Clearout, we perform multiple run-time checks to ensure all the emails are valid and get rid of any spam traps, gibberish & temporary emails that can hamper a typical email campaign performance.

What would you consider the most serious issues new online business owners face nowadays?

One of the biggest problems faced by any online business is poor quality data and invalid leads. When people collect invalid data in their organization’s database, which is the base of any marketing strategy, they will have no leads to reach out to, no prospects to offer their products and services, and no way to get conversions. This means poor data will lead to poor sales.

Also, don't forget the fraudsters and bots that register on different sites just to degrade the database quality and spoil your system. This calls for email validation and a phone validation service to fight against such odds at the point of capture. A setup to avoid these bad leads at the entry point can save a lot of efforts of the sales/marketing team by increasing the ratio of sales qualified leads and marketing qualified leads.

Have the recent global events altered your field of work in any way?

All the businesses have been affected by the pandemic. It initially slowed down our process as well. But soon enough, we found our way back and caught up the pace. We released many new features and our new email automation tool – Clearout Email Finder.

What email marketing mistakes do you notice new businesses make most often?

Some of the common email marketing mistakes businesses make are:

• Not focusing on segmentation and personalization

• Being inconsistent with the emails

• Not conducting thorough research on their target audience and their pain points.

• Sounding too sales like in their emails

• Lengthy and unattractive email copy

• Not including a clear CTA in their emails

• Missing out on building a high-quality email list that would actually bring conversions

• Lastly, not validating the email addresses before shooting out their email campaigns. That can take a toll on their campaign performance, sender reputation, and deliverability rate.

Besides email verification, what other marketing tools do you believe can greatly enhance one’s operations?

Being in the field of email marketing for a good number of months now, we understand that it's a very vast area. There are a lot of pain points that can be addressed. Email verification and Email finders are just the start of it. Followed by Email sending, Email Inboxing, Email Prospecting, email drip campaigns, and much more. We have the vision to offer a complete end-to-end email marketing suite of solutions to the users.

Talking about individual users, what security tools and practices everyone should have in place to protect their personal data online?

No one should compromise on their online data security. Some of the practices we all should follow include: thinking before clicking, using two-factor authentication, using secured login methods, looking out for phishing scams, and using strong passwords and biometric features.

What aspects of business operations do you hope to see automated or enhanced by technology in the next few years?

I can foresee that online outreach activities will be enhanced for all kinds of businesses with advanced technologies like blockchain, and AI-based personalization. Automation has just started in this space and there are a lot of scopes left that we can see in the near future.

What does the future hold for Clearout?

Currently, Clearout is among the top five email verification tools available in the market. Some renowned platforms ranked our bounce rate and accuracy as the best. Also, we have received an overwhelming response from our audience, which motivates us to keep improving.

We already have new features and ideas lined up. Like email prospecting tool, reverse lookup tool, etc., that would help businesses further enhance their sales and marketing activities. We launched new products ClearoutPhone & Clearout Email finder. Apart from them, we have also launched various features like a WordPress Plugin and a JavaScript widget for email validation, a Google Sheets Add-on to validate your list on the google sheet itself, WooCommerce Email Validation support, Email/domain whitelisting blacklisting, Anti-greylisting, and Advanced Catch-all Resolver are a few major feature updates. We look forward to achieving many more milestones and a brighter future.