Halloween – which has its roots as an Irish celebration honoring the dead – is a night nowadays where children (and more than a few adults) dress in ghoulish costumes to scare people and get candy from...
As I write this article, it is now just over a month before the holiday shopping period that runs from Black Friday and Cyber Monday through the end of the year – a period that, for many retail and...
Contact records are one of your most valuable assets. According to Salesforce.com, 70% of your contact records will change in one way or another each year. Making sure that they are accurate and up-to date...
The roots of the term “compliance” were first used in the early 1600s when, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, complying meant being ceremonially courteous. Today, it involves much more than...
What can phone validation tools do for you? If you do any telephone or SMS-based marketing or customer contact, they can do plenty, including: Open up more valid telephone leads Protect your...
How big of a problem are bad leads? According to recent figures from various sources, bad data costs American businesses over $3 trillion dollars per year, and over 10% of revenues for many of them. But...
Every year, over 40 million people in the United States move and change their addresses with the US Postal Service. Keeping your contact data assets up-to-date with these changes can lead to substantial...
We all know that paying attention to email security can protect sensitive information from prying eyes. But if you do email marketing, did you know that it can also improve your open and response rates as...
Once upon a time, mail was delivered to residences, workplaces, or a Post Office (PO) box that are provided by the United States Postal Service. More recently, there is also a third option: private mail...
The United States Postal Service (USPS) has an acronym for almost everything and this leads to some pretty interesting conversations around the Service Objects' water cooler. You might overhear our...
A little bit of summertime fun with the Bard and data quality. "What’s in a NAPE? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” -William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet OK,...
Data quality is very important. But that doesn’t always mean it is clear to everyone. In this blog article, I’d like to offer some strategies for discussing it with all the less-technical people in...
Pricing is - by far - the most common question asked when we start talking with prospective customers. And of course, we understand that you need to know the costs as part of your decision-making process....
A phone number is more than just a way to contact someone: with the proper tools, it can be a gateway to a rich set of information that can power your marketing, customer service, fraud prevention, or...
Recently, we published a blog article discussing the growth of the “API Economy”: a term coined to describe the proliferation of API-based tools being incorporated into many software products and...
Blacklisting is the email equivalent of being put on Santa’s naughty list. Except the consequences can be much worse than not getting presents: it can keep your business’ emails from getting through to...
Many people don’t realize that when you send an email, its contents are often unencrypted – and in turn, vulnerable to being seen and intercepted by others. This may be fine if you are sending recipes...
Some terms sound similar but aren’t actually interchangeable – like sympathy versus empathy or good versus well. In the data quality business, two similar phrases with totally separate meanings are...
We have many mission-critical applications for our products. But every year in May, one of the most critical ones is keeping moms happy on Mother’s Day. After all, customer satisfaction is important in...
You’ve got questions? We’ve got answers! This is the first in a series of articles exploring common user questions about our products and how they can be used in business use cases, based on what...
If you sell products and services across state lines, are you liable for collecting sales taxes? The answer is more complicated than you think nowadays – and it rhymes with “Lexus.” The concept of...
Addresses in the United States used to be a simple matter of a street location, a city and state, and perhaps a city-specific postal zone. But by the 1960s, between massive increases in mail volume and the...
When Jimmy Buffett sang the title of this blog post years ago, he may not have realized that he was talking about things like geocoding and data mining. But in point of fact, he was. In this post I would...
The 2010s have been the decade of the fill-in-the-blank economy: for example, the gig economy (where people are increasingly contractors instead of employees), the sharing economy (where Uber and AirBnB...
It isn’t often that our data validation industry makes it into the mainstream media. But this week, it was rocked by a story in Wired Magazine, where two security researchers discovered that the email...
Your business is measuring how many leads you generate with your marketing efforts. You’re even scoring your leads’ likelihood to buy with a marketing automation tool or CRM. But can your marketing and...
If you are involved in e-commerce, you probably know the importance of credit card validation. And if you work with Service Objects, you may have at least a passing familiarity with our DOTS BIN Validation...
A quick Google search will turn up lists of the worst jobs in the United States, ranging from simply gross (like tasting pet food) to the most dangerous (logging, according to the Bureau of Labor...
Customer Service Excellence is one of Service Objects’ core values, which we support in a number of ways, including creating a variety of technical content. Our engineers regularly contribute to our blog...
The four-day Thanksgiving weekend is traditionally the start of the holiday shopping season, with Black Friday sales bolstering bottom lines and consumer spirits. Retailers, online and off, are expected to...
How do you know if an email address is valid? There is more than one way to find out. In this article, we will show you how something we do – known as “ping testing” – makes these results much more...
The holidays are fast approaching. Soon you’ll be celebrating the season and sending holiday gift baskets and cards to people you have enjoyed working with this year. So here at Service Objects, we’ve...
We have spoken often on these pages about the importance of validating your contact data, to make sure you have a valid address and a quality lead. Whether it is a mistyped ZIP code, a lead pretending to...
Most ecommerce merchants learn the hard way; orders and registrations from fraudulent sources cause financial, merchandise, and time losses. With the rise of mobile ecommerce and the proliferation of...
Most people think that they mail or ship things to addresses – and they would be wrong. And the reasons for this might be very important to your bottom line. First, let’s look at one actual address...
Labor Day is much more than the traditional end of summer in America: it pays tribute to the efforts of working people. It dates back well over a century, with one labor leader in the 1800s describing it...
If you live in the United States, you probably think that Independence Day is synonymous with the fourth of July. In reality, Independence Day holidays are celebrated around the world, commemorating...
Some things are just better together. Like milk and cookies. Or peanut butter and jelly. Or, if you do online sales and marketing, ecommerce platforms and data validation services. Integrating live,...
Knowing the geographical location of contact data records is crucial for compliance with the over 100 different Data Protection laws currently in force around the globe. While Europe’s General Data...
Just ahead of Earth Day and Arbor Day, Service Objects has joined forces with One Tree Planted, pledging to plant ten trees for each new customer as part of the company’s ongoing commitment to corporate...
If you do business with clients in the European Union, you have probably heard of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that takes effect in Spring 2018. This new EU regulation ushers in strict...
Once upon a time, life was simple. There was marketing, and there was IT. The former did creative work to drive the product creation and sales process, and the latter kept the computers, software and...
Do you have any friends named “info” or “customerservice”? If you do, our sympathies, because their parents were probably way over-invested in their careers. But in all likelihood, you probably...
If you were to make a list of the things people love to do, data cleanup would usually rank pretty low on the list. (Except for us here at Service Objects. We rather enjoy data cleanup. But then again,...
By the time October rolls around, the top Major League baseball teams in the country are locked in combat, in the playoffs and then the World Series. And as teams take the field and managers sit in the...
If you market to or serve people by mail, there are two acronyms you should get to know: CASS and DPV. Here is a quick summary of both of them: CASS stands for the Coding Accuracy Support System™....
All right, we are finally going to admit it: there are some bad mailing addresses out there that even Service Objects can’t fix. Of course, we’re talking about cases like illegible handwriting,...
A famous beer commercial had people debating whether it tasted great or was less filling. A similar debate is brewing among data quality professionals: do you validate your contact data when you first add...
Dating experts will tell you that people have more problems committing than ever before. And nowhere is this more evident than in your online shopping cart. According to Barriliance, a vendor of online...
Birds and data have one thing in common: migration is one of the biggest dangers they face. In the case of our feathered friends, their annual migration subjects them to risks ranging from exhaustion to...
Online commerce is huge nowadays – to the tune of over $400 billion dollars a year in the United States alone in 2017, at a growth rate up to three times that of retail in general. Barriers to entry are...
April 22 marks the annual celebration of Earth Day, a day of environmental awareness that is now approaching its first half century. Founded by US Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970 as a nationwide teach-in on...
Our professions don’t exempt us from real life. Doctors get sick, contractors have leaky roofs – and people who work at Service Objects receive misaddressed mail, just like the rest of us. But one...
There are two unavoidable consequences in life: death and taxes. And taxes are far and away the complex of the two, particularly if you are in ecommerce or a business making sales to others. Here are some...
Getting Your Mail Delivered In 2014, the United States Postal Service reported that 4.3% of all mail was ‘Undeliverable as Addressed’ (UAA). At first glance, this doesn’t seem too bad, BUT this...
As a marketer, one of your jobs is to ensure that your sales team has access to high-quality leads. So how do you go about screening your lead lists for accuracy? Believe it or not, most marketers are...
Lead scoring is a powerful sales feature offered in just about every marketing automation platform. Companies with a solid lead scoring methodology in place are better equipped to not only evaluate VOLUMES...
Savvy marketers know just how important it is to capitalize on every customer lead. And as technology advances and our customer lists expand, so does the need to streamline our marketing campaigns and...
The lead score simplified As it stands, you are the one who decides what and how your lead scores are determined, most likely through rules you set up in your marketing automation platform. Your main...
You found a Magikarp in your neighbor's swimming pool or met a few new friends collecting Pokémon characters at the local duck pond. It's all good fun until... ...Until you realize that your location,...
Marketing Automation and Your Contact Records: A Five Part Series That Every Marketer Can’t Miss (Part 5) Putting Your Contact Records to the Test! Now that you’ve read our series on how the quality...
Marketing Automation and Your Contact Records: A Five Part Series That Every Marketer Can’t Miss (Part 4) “Well-integrated and accurate customer data is one of the best assets marketers have at their...
Marketing Automation and Your Contact Records: A Five Part Series That Every Marketer Can’t Miss (Part 3) Welcome back! The fact that you’re interested in improving the data quality within your...
One benefit or problem, depending on your inclinations, of being in the marketing business is that you become acutely aware of the marketing that goes on around you. In many ways, that awareness is a great...
Marketing Automation and Your Contact Records: A Five Part Series That Every Marketer Can’t Miss (Part 2) Data integrity is beyond a doubt “the” cornerstone of your marketing campaigns. Think...
Marketing Automation and Your Contact Records: A Five Part Series That Every Marketer Can’t Miss (Part 1) Are you keeping up with the competition? If yes, then you’re likely using one of these...
A Quora discussion recently got us thinking about the status of email in our day and age. As a company, we know how important email is, since we verify hundreds of thousands of emails a day. It's clearly...
We talk a great deal about data quality, validating information, and the impact on our business. Do we ever stop and think where bad data comes from? It’s not like there is some bad part of town where...
Dish Network Corp., a company with a market capitalization of about $22 billion as of last month, could be fined $24 billion for making illegal telemarketing calls in violation of the Telephone Consumer...
Inbound marketing and marketing automation platforms promise to make your marketing more effective, and they have the potential to live up to that promise. However, reality often tells a different story --...
If you aren’t already familiar with “Voice over IP” telephone services, or VoIP for short, you should be. It has become a popular and inexpensive form of telephony – and also one of the most common...
According to a 2015 report from eMarketer, research conducted by Econsultancy found that 79% of global agencies indicated that email marketing was rated effective by more agency marketers than any other...
Are you moving to a new customer relationship management (CRM) solution? While you've likely included various IT costs and end-user training in your migration budget, have you considered cleaning your...
The real estate industry can gain a competitive edge with data validation Data-based marketing, outreach and lead generation isn’t only for cutting-edge B2B companies anymore. Data runs the world these...
Did you know that text messages are now considered phone calls, at least according to the FCC's ruling on the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA)? Earlier this year, the FCC issued a ruling clarifying...
You see address line 2 all the time. Your own web forms probably even have a field for it. However, did you know that address line 2 doesn't really exist -- at least in the U.S. Postal Service's eyes? Not...
The United States is finally catching up to its European neighbors in terms of adopting the more secure EMV chip credit and debit cards. EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, is considered...
If you're like most business owners, finding ways to save time and money is one of your top priorities. After all, a penny saved is a penny earned. One area you might not have paid too much attention to is...
We listened to our clients feedback and performed some fine tuning on our DOTS Order Validation service to better meet their needs.Our DOTS Order Validation service performs multi-function verifications...
In early July, a federal judge held Time Warner Cable accountable to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). The judge penalized Time Warner Cable a whopping $229,500 for placing 153 robocalls to a...
It happens all the time: customers accidentally provide incorrect addresses. Sometimes autocorrect on their phones or computers is to blame. Other times, it's an honest mistake. Whatever the reason, most...
As you likely know, telemarketing is subject to numerous laws and regulations, some of which can cost a company a lot of money if they don't comply. For instance, the largest Do Not Call settlement to date...
Service Objects' CEO Geoff Grow recently embarked on a data adventure during his fourth trip to Palau. Ever the data enthusiast, Geoff couldn't help but wonder if the PO box numbers in that country would...
In most cases, selling physical products in the United States also means calculating, collecting, reporting, and paying sales tax. If you have multiple stores, operate a delivery service, or ship products...
Remember when Amazon first came along? That was 20 years ago in 1995. That same year, eBay arrived -- and shopping as we formerly knew it was about to change dramatically. PayPal arrived in 2002,...
Though modern email first emerged in the early 1990s, electronic communication actually dates back to the 1970s. Yes, email is nearly half a century old! If you're interested in electronic communications,...
At first glance, address suggestion services seem like a great idea. After all, wouldn't your customers appreciate being able to quickly fill in their addresses when filling out forms on your website? As...
If you look up API on Wikipedia, you'll find a lengthy explanation filled with computer terms and examples. In fact, the Wikipedia entry on APIs is more than 4,000 words long. While we appreciate this...
