DOTS Lead Validation is a service combining many of Service Objects’ key contact validation features: you could think of it as our “greatest hits.” It provides validation for name, address, email, phone, IP and optionally business information. Each of these items are validated, scored and cross-referenced with each other to build a 0-100 score that helps companies tell good leads from fraudulent or fake ones.

Its basic functionality provides a wide spectrum of detailed analysis on contact records. However, many users are not aware of the flexibility this service has, ranging from customizable scoring to completely customized solutions. DOTS Lead Validation is a highly configurable service that can be engineered to fit the needs of any client. Let’s explore how we do this.

The key to this flexibility is what we call a Test Type: a set of rules or instructions that DOTS Lead Validation uses to interface with clients to customize their own evaluation criteria. These Test Types tell the service which inputs the client has, how to weight these inputs, which tests they want to run, and how to score these tests. They can vary by client: for example, one client may require email addresses, another may not have email addresses at all, and still another may not care whether one is there or not. Lead Validation gives you the flexibility to account for any of these options.

Service Objects maintains a substantial library of over 50 Test Types for typical client situations. These cover many combinations of the main inputs: name, business name, email, IP address, phone number and street address. The most common ones are listed in the Lead Validation Developer Guide, but if you have needs that fall outside one of these, just ask us – we might have exactly what you need!

There are four main flavors of Test Type that these combinations are built on:

• The first are the “normal” types. These are for residential contact records, and give preference to consumer leads. If you want to score leads containing personal information, this is the one to use.
• Second, “business only” types are designed for handling strictly business leads, if you want to avoid consumer leads. Adding a personal phone number or address to a business only Test Type will lead to substantial penalties in the lead scoring.
• A third category is the “business” type, which is similar to the business only type but allows for home business leads. It values business data, but prioritizes matching data over the distinction of business versus personal contacts. For example, if someone lists their personal cell phone as their contact number, this will not be penalized if their contact name matches the original given name.
• Finally, “educational” types aim to be a bit more lenient on mobile students. A student is more likely to be a roommate rather than a homeowner, and more likely to have location data that doesn’t match up: for example, they live in Michigan but have a cell phone registered in Ohio.

While Service Objects’ own library of Test Types encompass tried and true scoring models that fit the vast majority of our clients, we are also willing to work with clients with specific needs. Depending on how unique these needs are, we can either create new types to add to our library, or work with a client to create custom test types for their exclusive use. For example:

• A client may want to see everything that’s wrong with an IP address, but not have these errors affect the overall score.
• Another client may want to remove a series of tests from being performed.
• Still another may ask to weight a component differently: for example, they may seek to bump up the influence of an email’s result to 50% of the overall score.

Finally, outside of the Test Type process, we can periodically customize Lead Validation to allow new tests to be integrated. Each of our components (name, email, phone, etcetera) has a Notes section that allows for the addition of true/false responses, while another section called Information Components allows us to add new data values dynamically to the service.  For example, one customer recently asked us to specifically identify non-profit companies in addition to validating their business leads. In this case we added a flag called “IsNonProfit” as an identifier to the Notes section for the lead, and added an identifier for the type of non-profit company in the Information Components section.

DOTS Lead Validation is much more than a powerful marketing validation service – it is also home to a complete infrastructure for effective validation of your unique prospect database. Take advantage of our built-in customization capabilities, or just tell us your special need and we might even be able to incorporate it into the service! Try it today, and see how we can help make your data-driven marketing even more successful.

Service Objects recently released the latest and greatest version of DOTS Lead Validation, our lead verification API that cross-validates five critical lead quality components: name, street address, phone number, email address and IP address. The new service includes a technology update to some of the latest frameworks, a new interface, more options for customization, enhanced reporting and new algorithms.  We explore these in more detail below.

The new operation – ValidateLead_V3 –  offers more options for connecting with Service Objects.  In addition to SOAP, GET or POST, users also have access to a RESTful interface and can now choose XML or JSON for their response.  Current users should expect about the same sub-second speed for a transaction despite the new behind the scenes engine.  While the new engine is faster, it is also doing more work.

Regardless of REST or SOAP preference, users also will have access to a cleaner more descriptive new interface in the new ValidateLead_V3 operation.  The new DOTS Lead Validation fully supports both Residential and Business leads, however, the older interface was designed with Residential leads in mind and the new version was designed for both.  Some newer optional inputs include things like Domain name and EIN (business tax identification number).  Service Objects is working to make their business offerings even stronger and will be rolling out new features month by month.  Other optional inputs include more options for names (pre-split names and salutations).

The biggest difference for Lead Validation will be on the response.  One of the most important new feature is the “Notes” sections.  Each component (name, address, email, IP, phone, etc.) as well as the overall general lead has its own independent Notes section detailing most of the interesting things we discovered about the component.  The previous version of Lead Validation was limited to the three biggest warnings to describe what was going on with a lead.  The new version includes a lot more granularity including items both good and bad.

Individual component Notes contain specific key pieces of information about the component itself that help give more details on why a high or low score might have happened.  Was the IP Address an anonymous proxy or was it known to have been used for malicious purposes?  Is an Address vacant, is it deliverable, or is it missing key information for validation?  Is the name too short to be real, does it contain vulgar words or does it match to a well-known celebrity?  Is the phone number a mobile number, does it belong to a business or it is a google voice number?  These things and many more give clearer insight to the components of a lead.

General Notes contain information about the lead as a whole, considering multiple components.  Did the name and email match up?  Did the phone, name and address match up?  Does the IP Address seem to match the Business name or domain?  General notes often give the best indication about why a lead received a really high score or a really low one.

Other new outputs include some additional component based location information. In the previous version much of that was tracked and scored behind the scenes, but in the new version all three of the main location based components (address, IP address and phone) attempt to return a locality, admin area and Country of origin.  These can help provide some insight when data points do not seem to match up.

See for yourself how DOTS Lead Validation can help your business gain immediate insight into the quality of your leads. Sign up for a free trial key and test up to 500 transactions.

If you are old enough to remember the disco era, one of its biggest hits was “Got to Be Real” by Cheryl Lynn. (And if you’re younger, it’s been sampled over 100 times since.) Decades later, if you work in marketing, this tune should become your new theme song.

The lifeblood of any marketing operation is its lead generation efforts. And sadly, many of these leads aren’t real – according to industry figures, as much as 25% of your contact data is bad from the start, and from there 70% of it goes bad every year as jobs, roles and contact information changes. This ranges from fake or fraudulent contact data, often entered to gain access to lead generation bonuses, all the way to fat-fingered data entry.

Unfortunately, when your contacts aren’t real, the costs involved are very real:

Marketing costs: Direct mail costs can easily total $2-3 or more per piece mailed, while outbound telemarketing costs can top $35 to $60 per lead. In both cases, there is direct cost in both time and resources to working with bad contacts. Nearly any lead conversion strategy has a scalable cost per prospect, and bad or fake leads directly eat into these costs.

Wasted human effort: Take the labor costs, taxes and benefits you pay for the direct employees on your sales and marketing teams. Add in the costs of the overhead and infrastructure they require to do their jobs. Now multiply that by the percentage of time these people spend mitigating bad leads, and this total probably adds up to a very real and tangible cost, as well as impacting sales conversion rates.

Inefficiency: Ultimately, every business must deal with the problem of bad contact data. But the real question is when you deal with it. In many businesses, where data quality is no one’s responsibility, it gets fixed the hard way when prospects don’t answer and direct mail pieces bounce back. We describe it as the 1-10-100 rule, where it may cost a penny to catch bad contacts as they are captured, 10 cents to cleanse them after capture, and a dollar to work with uncorrected data. In addition, bogus leads can bog down your CRM or Marketing Automation platform, driving up costs and negatively impacting marketing campaigns.

Customer service reputation: Your all-important first impression on a potential customer pivots around responding to their requests – and if you fail to respond due to bad or misdirected contact information, the damage is often permanent. For example, if a customer enters their email incorrectly but are waiting to receive information from customer service, causing dissatisfaction and frustration.

The good news is that each of these costs can easily be controlled by automating the data quality process for your contact lead data, using tools that range from address verification to filtering out fraudulent names. For marketing operations, you can also use bundled lead validation capabilities that check over 130 data points to yield a lead quality score from 0 to 100, as well as lead enhancement that appends phone and contact information to your existing lead data.

The key to success in marketing, according to Forbes Magazine, is to know your customer. Data quality – making sure every contact record in your database is as genuine, accurate and up-to-date as it can possibly be – represents an important and cost-saving first step for this. Or as Cheryl Lynn would say, they’ve got to be real.

“We all know that direct marketing can be tough when at least 30 percent of all leads generated online are bogus. Here is the problem: marketing departments are incentivized to bring in as many leads as they can. However, it is nearly impossible to know which leads have potential just by looking at them.” – Geoff Grow, Founder and CEO, Service Objects

Service Objects’ Founder and CEO Geoff Grow understands better than most people the importance of having quality leads, increasing conversion rates and lifetime customer value, while avoiding fraud and waste. This is why Service Objects offers real-time API data quality solutions and cloud-based connectors for leading CRM and Marketing Automation providers. These solutions are designed to improve your marketing efforts through data quality excellence.

This video will show you how you can instantly identify, verify, and qualify lead information at the point of entry. You will learn about tools that verify and correct your contact information, score leads from 0-100 using proven audience and conversion models, validate addresses against geographic IP locations, and append neighborhood-level demographic information to your leads to increase their value.

A recent study by Marketing Sherpa found that when filling out web forms less than 40% of those surveyed provided accurate phone number and custom information—such as address—all of the time. The reality is most people are reluctant to give up their precious contact information when doing research or filling out requests for information. More often than not, the data is inaccurate, incomplete or fraudulent.

Where does this leave marketers, sales managers and lead generators? It leaves them sifting through mountains of contact data with the hope of isolating the true and valid leads that will bring more revenue to the bottom line. According to the Direct Marketing Association, 93% of marketers cite contact data quality as one of their most important issues.

Implementing a lead validation or verification solution is one way marketers and business managers can improve lead quality in real-time and at the source, and ultimately save money by shifting focus to high scoring leads, fixing questionable leads and discarding downright bad leads. 

Do the Math-
Here is a simple calculation showing where businesses save money by validating their leads:

Let’s say your business generates 100 leads per day or around 3,000 per month. 20% or 600 of those leads turn out to be bogus or bad leads. If your telesales team spends around 5 minutes per call and calls each lead an average of 3 times before qualifying and discarding bad leads, that is 15 minutes per lead. At $23/per hour that’s about $5.75 per lead—or $5.75 wasted on pursuing a lead that was ultimately determined to be bad. Multiply that by the estimated 600 bad leads per month and that’s $3,450 per month wasted telesales resources. Using a service like DOTS Lead Validation℠ will validate leads in real-time, before they arrive at telesales, and costs only about $.22 per lead or around $678/month for 3,000 transactions.

That is a savings of $2,772/month-with an ROI on the use of the Lead Validation solution in about 5.8 days.

In a nutshell, lead validation works by:

Validating whether the contact information is real. Is it a real address? Does 100 Main Street actually exist in the zip code provided?
Verifying that the contact name or business is associated or linked with the address, phone number and even IP Address provided.
Correcting address, city, state, and email elements as needed to make the lead data as complete as possible.
Scoring the lead based on the quality of data. Estimating the quality of data entails not only a check on data correctness as entered but quality as established through a method of proprietary checking and sophisticated cross correlation of supplied data with other data sources. An overall score is provided based on the quality of the pieces of contact information such as name, business name, email, IP address, phone number and street address. Recommending that you Accept, Reject or Review the lead.

Download our case study for more details on how DOTS Lead Validation can save your business money today!

Posted by Gretchen N.