A M e l i s s a D a t a W h i t e P a p e r. Lead Verification: 3 Ways to Optimize Lead Quality

Transcription

1 A M e l i s s a D a t a W h i t e P a p e r Lead Verification: 3 Ways to Optimize Lead Quality

2 2 Lead Verification: 3 Ways to Optimize Lead Quality Introduction Lead capture pages are a critical component for robust and effective e-commerce and Internet marketing programs. Companies can create optimized landing pages and Web forms that capture not only prospects attention, but also contact information and valuable marketing data, by allowing visitors to sign up for a product, service, or subscription. A/B split tests and multi-variance testing can help improve lead capture percentage, but the ability to quickly identify and follow up with quality leads is the key to generating profits. But what if those leads are marred with invalid street numbers, misspelled addresses, phony names, or even made-up phone numbers? There is a world of difference between just any contact data and quality data. Real-time verification can dramatically improve point-of-entry lead handling, helping to: Increase sales Working qualified leads first improves closing ratios and ROI. Save time and money Qualifying leads up front improves efficiency and removes unqualified leads from your workflow. Improve ROI Qualified leads convert to sales faster and working them in near real-time gets your sales center involved immediately. Increase share of wallet Quickly following up on your best prospect leads will result in higher average sales. Simply put, optimizing lead quality is the key to significantly improving all aspects of your business operation and more importantly, your company s bottom line. Here s an easy 3-step process to convert your leads into profitable ones.

3 3 Optimizing Lead Quality: 1, 2, 3 1. Verify your data. Verifying your data is the most important, cost-effective step to optimizing lead quality. Real-time data verification not only prevents bad data from entering your database, it can also standardize spelling, punctuation, abbreviations, etc. The most robust data verification solutions can perform: Address Verification Verifying, correcting, and standardizing addresses ensures bills, mail and shipments reach their destinations. Not only does this save time and money otherwise wasted on undeliverable mail (postage and production costs), but it also helps improve response rates for direct marketing campaigns. Some verification solutions can also identify the address type as a residence or business. Most shipping companies charge a higher rate for delivery to a residence. Knowing whether the address is a residence can help you select the most cost-effective carrier when preparing an outbound order reducing costly surcharges and helping improve overall shipping operations. Verification Verifying addresses and domain names helps you maintain contact with your prospects and customers with a valid you can update them immediately on new products and offers. The verification solution should also be able to correct common typos, for instance changing! or.cm to com, helping improve your universe of valid, active s. Phone Verification Verifying telephone numbers will help you improve profitability by focusing telemarketing efforts on active numbers. A phone verification solution should also be able to instantly provide line type identification to help in creating new channels to your prospects. Line type identification can tell whether the number is mobile, landline or VOIP, and whether the number is residential, business or SoHo (home office). 2. Filter Bogus/Fictitious and Invalid Names Real-time verification can also help with those fictitious form submissions that plague every site offering free downloads of company literature, coupons, etc. Visitors who intentionally enter fictional information on Web forms (i.e. MickeyMouse@disney.com), or invalid addresses (i.e. abby!cox.cm) do so to prevent follow-up contact. Who wants to have a CRM system a main lead generator mechanism muddled with false prospect contact information? Implementing a data verification routine that includes name parsing will help identify bogus and vulgar names. By adding verification to the mix, you will have a complete solution to prevent privacyconscious visitors from spoofing your forms with bogus information.

4 4 3. Add Missing Data for a More Comprehensive View Verifying the accuracy of your data is just the first step in optimizing lead quality. But you can go beyond that. Filling in the blanks or adding missing information to your data will yield more insight into your prospects/customers giving you the ability to make more strategic business decisions, enhance your communications, improve deliverability, and cut operational costs. For a more complete, accurate view of your customers, you can enhance your prospect data with these types of valuable information: Geographic Latitude and longitude coordinates, county name. This will help you better target your advertising and/or offers via ZIP codes, or closest store location, for instance. IP Location Latitude, longitude coordinates of your visitors IP addresses. This information can help you deliver customized content based on their location, often called geo-targeting. Census Household and community information. Demographic Income, marital status, number of children. For an increased share of wallet, adding consumer demographics will shed greater insight for larger sales conversion. Psychographic Hobbies, special interests, lifestyle. These nuggets of information will allow you to segment your leads and gain deeper understanding into your prospects behavior so you can market more effectively. Firmagraphic Company s revenue, number of employees, age, business type and function. Another option you can parse and genderize your contact data for more targeted, personalized mailings. Or you can append addresses and phone numbers to your contact records to convert single-channel prospects into valuable multi-channel customers. The end result is a cleaner, more accurate database of new customers and prospects one that will fuel better response rates, enhance customer database analysis, improve customer satisfaction, and ensure more efficient delivery of your company s products and services. Conclusion Fraudulent information, lack of standardization, and even keystroke errors stand between your company and reliable, complete and accurate prospect information. More than 25 percent of data quality problems are caused by data entry errors from customers, a contributing factor to poor data quality costing U.S. businesses more than $600 billion each year, according to The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI). Optimizing your leads by verifying your data, filtering out fraudulent names, and appending valuable information to your data should help improve lead quality, empower your sales team, and ultimately, increase your bottom line.

5 5 About Melissa Data Corp. Melissa Data is a provider of data quality, data integration and data enrichment solutions. Melissa Data is an active DMA member, and the DMA s List & Database Council. For over 26 years, Melissa Data has been a leading provider of data quality solutions with emphasis on U.S., Canadian, and international address and phone verification, and postal software. Free trial software is available by visiting or by calling MELISSA ( ).