You probably know what omnichannel means, but a quick definition is always helpful. It refers to the various touch points by which a business/organization can reach a customer. The idea — and the ideal — is to get the offer in front of them at the time they’re most likely to be interested. Typically in the modern business ecosystem, omnichannel refers to:

• Website
• Brick and mortar locations
• Social media
• Other digital efforts
• How you come across on mobile
• Face-to-face interactions between customers and employees

There is more you could group under omnichannel, but that’s a good start. Unfortunately, in a few years from now, we may need a different approach entirely.

Why?

OMNICHANNEL AND THE RAPID SCALE OF BIG DATA 

Consider this: in 2020, it’s possible 1.7 megabytes of new data will be created for every person on the planet every second. If you do the full math on that, the total volume of data globally in 2020 might be around 44 zettabytes. A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. This is somewhat because of “The Internet of Things” — connected devices and sensors — which should have an economic value of $3 trillion by 2025. Internet of Things tech alone will be 3-6 zettabytes of that total.

Now we know the rapid scale of Big Data. It’s actually arriving in daily life maybe faster than even mobile did. What are the repercussions?

THE REPERCUSSIONS FOR OMNICHANNEL

As noted in this post on Information Age:

Companies hoped “omnichannel experiences” would enable them to anticipate customers’ needs to provide them with a personalised response, which meets or even exceeds their expectations. And this effort is based on the company’s ability to mobilise the necessary data to deliver.

But what happened?

Today, these same companies struggle to draw together all the information required to give them a unified view and appreciation of their customers’ needs. The result is a mixed bag of omnichannel initiatives, many of which result in failures. In the retail sector, for example, only 18% of retailers claim to have an engagement strategy, which covers all channels.

The sheer math looks like this: 44 zettabytes of generated data in 2020 is 10 times — yes, ten times — what we are generating now, three years earlier. Companies are already struggling to manage data properly towards better customer experience. What will happen when 10 times the data is available in 33 months or so?

WHAT’S THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE FOR OMNICHANNEL AND CX?

This is obviously hard to predict. In times of great complexity, though, sometimes sticking to the basics — i.e. The Five Customer Experience Competencies — isn’t a bad idea. A strong base almost always beats an all-over-the-place strategy.

In my mind, this is what needs to happen:

• Companies need a good handle on what really drives their business now and what could drive it in the future.
• This involves products/services but also types of customer and platform they use.
• Once that picture is mostly clear, senior leaders need to be on the same page about the importance of customer-driven growth.
• “Being on the same page” also involves, ideally, vocabulary and incentive structures.
• If the customer-driven plan/platforms and senior leadership alignment are there, now you need to make sure the work is prioritized.
• No one should be running around on low-value tasks when great opportunity is right there.
• Kill a stupid rule, etc. Basically move as many people as possible to higher-value work, especially if lower-value work can be more easily automated.
• It’s all been important so far, but let’s bold this: You don’t need to collect all the data. You need data that relates to your priorities and growth. 
• That data should be analyzed and condensed for executives. You may need “data translators,” yes.
• Decision-making should come from relevant information and customer interactions.

This flow is hard to arrive at for some companies, but essential.

Phrased another way: trying to be “omnichannel” in five years and looking at an Excel with trillions of touch points/data on it? That will just burn out employees and managers alike. You need a prioritized, aligned plan focused on customer-driven growth and well-articulated goals. That will get you there post-omnichannel.

Reprinted from LinkedIn with permission from the author. View original post here.

Author’s Bio: Jeanne Bliss, Founder & CEO, CustomerBliss

Jeanne Bliss pioneered the role of the Chief Customer Officer, holding the first-ever CCO role at Lands’ End, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker and Allstate Corporations. Reporting to each company’s CEO, she moved the customer to the strategic agenda, redirecting priorities to create transformational changes to each brands’ customer experience. Her latest book, “Chief Customer Officer 2.0” (Wiley) was published on June 15, 2015.

For most organizations, one of the most critical assets of their marketing operations is their email contact database. Email is still the lingua franca of business: according to the Radicati Group, over a quarter of a trillion email messages are sent every business day, and the number of email users is expected to top 4 billion by 2021 – roughly half of the world’s population. This article will explore current best practices for protecting the ROI and integrity of this asset, by validating its data quality.

The title of this article is not just a cute play on words – and it has nothing to do with Santa. Rather, it describes an important principle for your game plan for email data quality. By implementing a strong two-step email validation process, as we describe here, you will dramatically reduce deliverability problems, fraud and blacklisting from your email marketing and communications efforts.

The main reason we recommend checking emails in two stages revolves around the time these checks take: many checks can be performed live using a real-time API, particularly as email addresses are entered by users, but server validation in particular may require a longer processing time and interfere with user experience. Here are 3 of the most important checks that are part of the email validation process:

• Syntax (FAST): This check determines if an email address has the correct syntax and physical properties of an email address.

• DNS (FAST): We can quickly check the DNS record to ensure the validity of the email domain (MX record) for the email address. (There are some exceptions to this – for example, where the DNS record is with a shoddy or poor registry and the results take longer to come back.)

• Email Server (VARIABLE, and not within the email validation tool’s control): Although this check can take from milliseconds to minutes, it is one of the most important checks you can make – it ensures that you have a deliverable address. This response time is dependent on the email server provider (ESP) and can vary widely: large ESPs like Gmail or MSN normally respond quickly, while corporate or other domains may take longer.

There are many more checks in Service Objects’ Email Validation tool, including areas such as malicious activity, data integrity, and much more – over 50 verification tests in all! We auto-correct addresses for common spelling and syntax errors, flag bogus or vulgar address entries, and calculate an overall quality score you can use to accept or reject the email address. (For a deeper dive, take a look at this article to see many of the features of an advanced EV tool.)

Here are the two stages we recommend for your email validation process:

Stage 1: At point of entry. Here, you validate emails in real-time, as they are captured. This provides the opportunity for the user to correct mistakes in the moment such as typos or data entry errors. Here you can use our EV software to check for issues like syntax, DNS and the email server – however we recommend setting the API configuration settings to no more than a wait of a couple of seconds, for the sake of customer experience. At this stage either the user or validation software has a chance to update bad addresses.

Stage 2 – Before sending a campaign. Validate the emails in your database – using the API – after the email has been captured and the user is no longer available in real-time to make corrections. In this stage, you have more flexibility to wait for responses from the ESPs, providing more confidence in your list.

It is estimated that 10-15% of emails entered are not usable, for reasons ranging from data entry errors to fraud, and 30% of email addresses change each year. Together these two steps ensure that you are using clean and up-to-date email data every time – and the benefit to you will be fewer rejected addresses, a better sender reputation, and a greater overall ROI from your email contact data.

There has always been one eternal question in marketing: what is the shortest path between you and your next paying customer?

We already know the right answer to this question: “It depends.” But a better answer is that effective marketing is very context-dependent. So let’s look at the pros and cons of three of today’s key marketing approaches – phone, mail and email marketing.

Telemarketing has practically been with us ever since Alexander Graham Bell first solicited his assistant Watson from the next room in 1876. Its key advantage is that it is the only one of these three approaches that builds an interactive personal connection with a prospect – one that allows you to qualify him or her, ask questions, and respond to their needs. Big-ticket products and services, particularly in a business-to-business environment, are often sold as the result of a sales process that begins with a phone contact. Conversely, large scale telemarketing often is a key ingredient of selling consumer products and services in large volumes.

Telemarketing also has numerous drawbacks. It is labor-intensive, time-bound, and requires a good telecommunications infrastructure when used on more than a small scale. Perhaps most importantly, it requires the right business context. If you are selling an airliner or high-end financial services, those prospects may expect an initial phone call, while carpet-bombing consumers with telephone sales pitches at dinnertime may provoke mostly negative responses. Moreover, unsolicited calls to consumer wireless phones can lead to large fines under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).

Direct mail marketing gives businesses an opportunity they do not have with phone or email: the chance to deliver content-rich information in print or even multimedia form. (For example, anyone who belongs to Generation X or older remembers those ubiquitous AOL CDs that were a fixture of the 1990s.) Anyone with a valid mailing address is a potential prospect, it is a medium that lends itself well to A-B testing as well as demographic targeting, and there are few if any regulatory roadblocks to targeting consumers with a direct mail campaign.

Drawbacks of direct mail include its expense per prospect, in terms of time, content costs, and mailing costs. This is particularly a disadvantage for smaller businesses, given the economies of scale that reduce per-unit printing and mailing costs for those who can afford very large campaigns. Response rates are generally low and can vary widely, and the accuracy of your contact data is a critical factor in your costs and profitability.

Email marketing is, relatively speaking, the new kid on the block – even though it now has its own decades-long track record. It has one towering advantage over the other two approaches: a much lower cost per contact that only minimally scales with the size of your prospect base, once you have a list that opts in. Email also gives you the opportunity to include rich media content, or make “warm call” introductions to individual prospects as a precursor to telephone contact.

Disadvantages of email include being the easiest mode of contact for people to ignore – particularly as the inbox sizes of busy people continue to expand – as well as the need to have accurate contact information from people who have opted in to hear from you, to avoid consequences for spamming from your internet services provider.

A common thread through each of these marketing approaches is data quality. Inaccurate, incomplete or outdated contact information will cost you in time and marketing expenditure at the very least, and in the worst cases could subject your business to substantial penalties. And in a world where up to 25% of your contact data is bad, and up to 70% goes out of date each year, a data quality strategy is absolutely necessary for effective marketing.

The best marketing strategy? As we said earlier, it depends. But with the right approach to data quality, you can get the maximum ROI from any approach that fits your business.

Watch this video and hear Service Objects’ Application Engineer, Dylan, as he presents a 22 minute step-by-step tutorial on how to integrate an API using C#. In order to participate in this tutorial, you will need the following :

1. A basic knowledge of C# and object-oriented programming.
2. Visual Studio or some other IDE.

Any DOTS Validation Product Key. You can get free trial keys at www.serviceobjects.com.

In this tutorial, we have selected the DOTS Email Validation web service.  This service performs real-time checks on email addresses to determine if they are genuine, accurate and up-to-date. The service performs over 50 tests on an email address to determine whether or not it can receive email.  If you are interested in a different service, you can still follow along in this tutorial with your service of choice. The process will be the same, but the outputs, inputs, and objects that we’ll be dealing with in the integration video will be slightly modified.

Enjoy.

While Mother’s Day is all about the Moms in our lives, it’s an even bigger day for retailers. This year the National Retail Federation estimates Mother’s Day spending to reach an all-time high of $23.6 billion; roughly $10 billion higher than 2010. The traditional gifts of jewelry and flowers, along with personal services are predicted to contribute the most to this increase. Needless to say, with Mother’s Day only a few days away, businesses are experiencing a busy week, especially in ecommerce.

According to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey, conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, 30% of Mother’s Day shopping is to be done online this year. Most ecommerce sites have already experienced an influx of orders over the last few weeks. With an even bigger rush coming in now from typical procrastinators (like myself) who will take advantage of two-day delivery from retailers like Amazon. Online shopping has become even more convenient with the addition of mobile shopping. With thousands of easy to use mobile apps offering gift cards for anything from dinner to spa treatments, redeemable right on the recipient’s mobile device, digital sellers have definitely made Mother’s Day purchases easier than ever…even for the most ardent procrastinators.

Unknown to most, data quality solutions are quietly working behind the scenes contributing to a smooth and happy Mother’s Day for businesses and celebrants alike. Data quality solutions have made processing increased online holiday orders, restaurant reservations, and mobile app purchases more efficient and safer than ever. By leveraging tools like our Address, Phone and Email Validation services, our clients ensure that their customer contact information is complete and accurate while also identifying malicious fraud before transactions are completed. Our data quality tools give businesses more time to focus on providing memorable experiences for their customers and achieving their revenue goals on the busiest of holidays, including Mother’s Day.

Whether our clients are experiencing or still preparing for a busy Mother’s Day, our data quality solutions will be running smoothly in the background for them the entire time. If your business needs any assistance now or before the next major holiday contact us.

What are Honeypot Email Addresses?

A honeypot is a type of spamtrap. It is an email address that is created with the intention of identifying potential spammers. The email address is often hidden from human eyes and is generally only detectable to web crawlers. The address is never used to send out email and it is for the most part hidden, thus it should never receive any legitimate email. This means that any email it receives is unsolicited and is considered to be spam. Consequently, any user who continues to submit email to a honeypot will likely have their email, IP address and domain flagged as spam. It is highly recommended to never send email to a honeypot, otherwise you risk ruining your email sender reputation and you may end up on a blacklist.

Spamtraps typically show up in lists where the email addresses were gathered from web crawlers. In general, these types of lists cannot be trusted and should be avoided as they are often of low quality.

Service Objects participates in and uses several “White Hat” communities and services. Some of which are focused on identifying spamtraps. We use these resources to help identify known and active spamtraps. It is common practice for a spamtrap to be hidden from human eyes and only be visible in the page source where a bot would be able to scrape it, but it is important to note that not all emails from a page scrape are honeypot spamtraps. A false-positive could unfortunately lead to an unwarranted email rejection. Many legitimate emails are unfortunately exposed on business sites, job profiles, twitter, business listings and other random pages. So it is not uncommon to see a legitimate email get marked as a potential spamtrap by a competitor.

 

Not all Spamtraps are Honeypots

While the honeypot may be the most commonly known type of spamtrap, it is not the only type around. Some of you may not be old enough to remember, but there was a time when businesses would configure their mail servers to accept any email address, even if the mailbox did not exist, for fear that a message would be lost due to a typo or misspelling. Messages to non-existent email address would be delivered to a catch-all box as long as the domain was correctly spelled. However, it did not take long for these mailboxes to become flooded with spam. As a result, some mail server administrators started to use catch-alls as a way to identify potential spammers. A mail server admin could treat the sender of any mail that ended up in this folder as a spammer and block them. The reasoning being that only spammers and no legitimate senders would end up in the catch-all box. Thus making catch-alls one of the first spamtraps. The reasoning is flawed but still in practice today. Nowadays it is more common for admins use firewalls that will act as catch-alls to try and catch and prevent spammers.

Some spamtraps can be created and hidden in the source code of a website so that only a crawler would pick it up, some can be created from recycled email addresses or created specifically with the intention of planting them in mailing lists. Regardless of how a spamtrap is created it is clear that if you have one in your mailing list and you continue to send mail to it, that you will risk ruining your sender’s reputation.

Keeping Senders Honest

The reality is that not all honeypot spamtraps can be 100% identified. Doing so would highly diminish their value in keeping legitimate email senders honest.

It is very important that a sender or marketer follows their regional laws and best practices, such as tracking which emails are received, opened or bounced back. For example, some legitimate emails can still result in a hard or permanent bounce back. This may happen when an email is an alias or role that is connected to a group of users. In these cases, the email itself is not rejected but one of the emails within the group is. Which brings up another point. Role based email addresses are often not eligible for solicitation, since they are commonly tied to positions and not any one particular person who would have opted-in. That is why the DOTS Email Validation service also has a flag for identifying potential role based addresses.

Overall, it is up to the sender or marketer to ensure that they keep track of their mailing lists and that they always follow best practices. They should never purchase unqualified lists and they should only be soliciting to users who have opted-in. If an email address is bouncing back with a permanent rejection then they should remove it from the mailing list. If the email address that is being bounced back is not in your mailing list then it is likely connected to a role or group based email that should also be removed.

To stay on top of potential spamtraps marketers should also be keeping track of subscriber engagement. If a subscriber has never been engaged or is no longer engaged but email messages are not bouncing back, then it is possible that the email may be a spamtrap. If an email address was bouncing back before and not anymore, then it may have been recycled as a spamtrap.

Remember that by following the laws and best practices of your region you greatly reduce the risk of ruining your sender reputation, which will help ensure that your marketing campaigns reach the most amount of subscribers as possible.

Fueled by our desire to communicate with one another, no matter distance, the telephone has undergone extraordinary technological enhancements since the first test call on March 10, 1876. Today, the average wireless phone even functions as a portable computer offering a multitude of ways to communicate. Although phone technology dramatically changed over the last 141 years and continues to change, one aspect of placing a call remains vitally important: accurate contact data.

Originally, the telephone was sold in pairs of two with a single connection to each other. Since these early telephones were directly connected to each other, phone numbers were not yet required. However, with the invention of the switchboard in 1878, callers could connect with many other subscribers leading to the establishment of phone numbers consisting of a few digits. By 1910 the U.S. population grew to 92,228,496, over seven million of whom were phone subscribers. To accommodate so many users the length of the phone number increased.  For the majority of the 1900s, whether using a candlestick, rotary or push button phone, the telephone operator manually connected callers by switchboard and without accurate contact information to start with callers could not be properly connected. As the pool of subscribers grew further, alphanumeric numbers were introduced and used through the 1960s. This format consisted of two letters representative of location (name of the village, town or city) of the central office that the phone was connected to, followed by numbers.  Although fewer miscommunication between callers and operators occurred with the use of alphanumeric numbers, having accurate information to begin with was still imperative.

Jumping forward to today, various devices ranging from wireless phones, computers, tablets, and even televisions can be used to place calls. Somewhat reminiscent of telephone operators, virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa can even be used to connect to someone by dictation which is how a four year old boy recently contacted emergency services to save his mother’s life. Although a phone number is still required for most devices, platforms such as Skype and FaceTime also use email address as unique identifiers to connect callers. While new types of contact information like email are being used more commonly, once the information is entered into the calling device you don’t need to remember it again. With just a few taps on a screen or a simple phrase, “hey Siri, call mom,” the call is initiated.

Whether placing a call now or 141 years ago starting with genuine, correct and up to date contact data is essential for reaching each other by phone. As forms of contact data continue to evolve with technology, our validation tools will as well to ensure your business communications are as fast and easy as possible.

Have you ever been to gamil.com? Or gmial.com? Or gmali.com? Well, many of your prospects and customers have, without even knowing it. These are just a few of the misspellings of “Gmail” alone that pop up regularly when people enter their email addresses on your squeeze pages and signup forms – in fact, according to one direct marketer, Lucidchart.com, roughly three percent of their leads provided addresses that bounced. (Believe it or not, many people don’t even spell “.com” correctly!)

Unfortunately, losses like these can be just the tip of the iceberg. When you follow your human nature and ask potential leads to try and validate their own addresses by re-typing them – or worse, ask them to respond to a validation email – many people will simply throw up their hands and not bother, with no way of tracking these losses. According to Lucidchart’s Derrick Isaacson, the more bandwidth you add to your signup process, the less likely someone is to complete it. And the one lead you can never sell to is the one who doesn’t respond in the first place.

Then there are people who intentionally try to game the system. For example, you are offering a free gift to potential qualified prospects, and someone wants to get the goodie without receiving the sales pitch. So they enter a bogus address directed to nowhere, or perhaps to Spongebob Squarepants. Or worse, your next customer transaction is a scam artist trying to defraud your company.

Is there any way around this lose-lose scenario? Yes. And it is simpler and less expensive than you might think – particularly when held up against the cost of lost leads, data errors and fraud. The answer is real-time email validation. By using an API that plugs right into your email data entry process on the Web, you create a smoother experience for customers and prospects while gaining several built-in benefits:

Accurate address verification: A real-time email verification service can leverage numerous criteria to ensure the validity of a specific address. For example, Service Objects’ email validation API performs over 50 specific verification tests to determine email address authenticity, accuracy, and deliverability.

Auto-correction: The right interface not only catches typical spelling and syntax errors but can also suggest a corrected address.

Improved lead quality: The very best tools not only check email address validity but can calculate a composite quality score based on its assessment criteria, which in turn lets you accept or reject a specific address.

Less human intervention: The cost of processing an incorrect or fraudulent email address goes far beyond lost sales or revenue. The time you spend pursuing unattainable leads and processing bad data in your sales process add up to a real, tangible human cost that affects your profit margin.

Blacklist protection: Automated email validation protects your mail servers from being blacklisted by verifying authentic email addresses while filtering out spammers, vulgar or bogus email addresses, and erroneous data.

Real-world numbers bear out the value of using automated email validation. For example, Lucidchart.com’s Isaacson noted that an A-B test showed a 34% increase in product re-use and a 44% increase in paid customers among the automated validation group. On top of sales results like these, you can also add in the cost savings from reduced database maintenance, manual processing, and fraud when you deploy these tools across each of your prospect and customer touch points.

We now live in an e-commerce world that competes on making the prospect and customer’s experience as easy as possible. Automated email validation helps you compete better by reducing their bandwidth and your costs at the same time. It is a win-win situation for everyone, as well as your bottom line.

Many companies are worried about Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL). A new rule goes into effect next July, and the penalties are harsh. If you email Canadians who haven’t opted in, you could be on the hook for a lawsuit for sending CEMs without permission. Penalties can reach up to $10 million.

So, what is CASL? What are CEMs? And how can you comply?

Understanding CASL

CASL dates back to July 1, 2014, when it first went into effect. Section 6 of CASL covers all of the requirements and provisions of CASL. Several provisions were phased in over time, including the “private right of action” rule, which goes into effect July 1, 2017.

CASL applies to all electronic messages, such as emails and text messages, that are sent in relation to commercial activities. These messages are known as CEMs, or “commercial electronic messages”. Commercial electronic messages must be sent to an address, such as an email address or mobile phone number, in order to be subject to the terms of CASL. Thus, commercial blog posts or webpages are not considered CEMs.

CASL requires obtaining express consent, either in writing (electronic written consent is permitted) or orally, before sending CEMs. There are a few instances where implied consent is allowed, such as for existing business and non-business relationships or voluntary disclosure without indicating that the person does not want to receive messages.

If you send CEMs to people in Canada without prior consent, you could face serious consequences. Starting next July 1st, individuals and organizations can bring civil actions seeking redress in court from anyone in violation of CASL. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission can impose up to $10 million in penalties for the most serious violations.

Not only are US companies concerned about complying with this particular section of CASL, their legal departments don’t want to take chances. Thus, marketing departments are being told not to email anyone on the chance that a handful of contacts might be located in Canada — and it only takes one.

What does this mean to marketing and sales departments? They’re legitimately concerned that new leads will be cut off and wonder how they’ll be able to make up for such a shortfall.

But there are some important exceptions to Section 6. Using email validation tools such as DOTS Email Validation can be your key to keeping email – and the pipeline of leads – flowing.

Avoiding Running Afoul of CASL

First, it’s important to understand what section 6 of CASL applies to and what it doesn’t apply to.

Section 6 of CASL deals with CEMs sent to electronic addresses:

• Canadian enforcement against spammers operating in Canada is allowed.
• The Canadian Government is allowed to share information with other state governments that have substantially similar legislation (like the United States’ CAN-SPAM act) if the information is relevant to an investigation or proceeding involving similar prohibited conduct.

Section 6 of the Act does not apply to CEMs under some circumstances:

• The person sending, causing, or permitting the CEM to be sent (the sender) must reasonably believe that it will be accessed in a foreign state listed in Schedule 1.
• The CEM must be sent in compliance with the foreign law, which addresses conduct that is substantially similar to the conduct prohibited in section 6 of CASL.

In other words, CASL excludes emails if you’re sending them to someone you are reasonably sure lives in a foreign country that has its own spam laws and you are in compliance with those.

How to Continue Marketing Your Business After July 1st

You can’t blame your legal department for wanting to avoid lawsuits; it’s in your company’s best interest to comply with all applicable laws. However, the answer isn’t to shut down email marketing completely; it’s to become reasonably sure where your recipients live before sending CEMs.

Service Object’s DOTS Email Validation API can help you be reasonably sure where someone lives and which laws might apply. For example, the laws of the country where the person is located may be more liberal than Canada’s and would apply instead of CASL. The vast majority of nations (115 other countries ranging from all of Europe, Australia, Japan, S. Korea, China, Brazil and Russia) do have their own laws, such as the United States’ CAN-SPAM act or Canada’s CASL.

By using DOTS Email Validation software, you may be able to create an email marketing list that is safer-to-send to and will satisfy your legal department.

^Sources:

^{http://crtc.gc.ca/eng/com500/faq500.htm – Does section 6 of CASL apply to messages sent outside of Canada?
http://fightspam.gc.ca/eic/site/030.nsf/eng/00273.html SCHEDULE (Paragraph 3(f)) LIST OF FOREIGN STATES
Canada’s Castle (CASL) – Law on Spam and other Electronic Threats.
http://fightspam.gc.ca/eic/site/030.nsf/eng/home
http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/E-1.6/index.html – full copy of the law passed in December 2010}