ZapBounce and Drip
Drip is built for ecommerce automation, and its workflows branch on subscriber fields. That gives verification a natural home: the verdict becomes a branch condition rather than a cleanup task.
The alternative, cleaning after the fact, means the workflow has already sent before anyone knew the address was dead.
Workflows send before anyone checks
A Drip workflow triggered by a purchase or a signup starts immediately. There is no pause where a human looks at the address, which is the right design and the reason verification has to be upstream.
Ecommerce data makes it worse in one specific way. Checkout typos produce addresses that are one letter wrong, so the order confirmation bounces and the post-purchase workflow sends to nobody for weeks.
Drip tracks bounces and will stop sending to an address after a hard bounce, which limits ongoing damage and does nothing about the customer who never received their receipt.
How the data moves
Verify at the point of subscription
Before the subscriber is created through the API, so the record exists with a verdict from the start.
Store the verdict as a custom field
Drip custom fields are available in workflow conditions, so a catch-all subscriber can take a different path rather than the default one.
Branch rather than block
A decision step on the verdict lets catch-all and unknown subscribers into a slower sequence instead of the main one. That is better than excluding them, because plenty are real customers.
Bulk-verify the existing list once
Export subscribers, verify the file, and import the verdicts back as a custom field before adding the branch conditions.
Setting it up
- Create custom fields in Drip for the verdict and the check date.
- Export existing subscribers as CSV and verify the file.
- Import the results, matching on email so existing subscribers update.
- Add a verification call in front of wherever new subscribers are created through the Drip API.
- Add a decision step to your main workflows branching on the verdict field.
- Unsubscribe the invalid addresses, keeping order history intact.
Drip: common questions
Where should the verification call go?
In front of subscriber creation, not after. Once the subscriber exists, the workflow has already started.
Should catch-all subscribers be excluded from workflows?
No, branched. Many are real customers at companies running accept-all servers, and excluding them costs real revenue.
Does Drip verify addresses?
It stops sending after a hard bounce. There is no pre-send check on subscriber creation.
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