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 sales tools tell you if your contacts are legitimate prospects? Lead validation fills the gap between marketing automation and sales efforts, creating more visibility in marketing and more efficiencies in sales.

Validating leads can help any B2B or B2C business improve their marketing and sales tactics, but it can be especially transformational for international companies. While all businesses face the issues of incomplete, incorrect, or spam form submissions, there are unique challenges to doing business in the global market. Differences in country address formats and language characters can muddy your data. What’s more, automated validation can provide a solution to international compliance issues.

What is lead validation?

According to Michael Brenner, the CEO of Marketing Insider Group, lead validation is critical to your marketing – without it, you run the risk of grossly overestimating the ROI of your marketing campaigns. We agree wholeheartedly.

Lead validation is the process of verifying and scoring the quality of the leads you generate. It’s risky to assume that each phone call to your sales team or form completion on your website indicates a strong lead. According to a recent study by marketing services firm Straight North, analyzing over 350,000 marketing inquiries, barely half of them were legitimate sales leads. Manually sorting through past inquiries could be considered a form of lead validation, but in practice it’s inefficient. Moreover, you may not recognize typos or spam entries by sight alone.

By implementing a lead validation service, you can use automation to cross-check new lead information and push your most promising leads to the top of your sales team’s to-do list. Our DOTS Lead Validation – International service supports more than 250 countries with the most accurate, current data available and integrates with leading CRM and marketing tools like Salesforce, Marketo, and Hubspot.

How does lead validation work?

Simply put, the contact input you collect from your leads is verified as real, then compared to existing data sources to correct and append the information where needed.

How does our Lead Validation – International service work? It verifies and cross-validates contact data, including a prospect’s name, address, phone, email, and IP address against hundreds of authoritative data sources. Following verification and correction, it provides an overall quality score of 0-100 for the lead itself, and a specific quality score to each data point. Your business logic determines the parameters of how the output works with your processes. Our notes even indicate if a contact is covered by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), so you can be sure you’re in compliance.

Why is lead validation important?

Almost every department in your organization benefits from lead validation. Here are just a few of the ways that lead validation can directly strengthen your business practices:

• Marketing – Gain a better understanding of effective (and ineffective) marketing practices, pivot campaigns quickly, and create powerful and personal marketing automation. Scores can be connected to campaigns for a more accurate lead gen reporting.
• Sales – Spend more time and energy focusing on leads that score the highest, gain insights to leverage during sales calls, and deploy effective sales drip automation.
• Business Development – Collect clean, accurate data to make projections and plan growth.
• Compliance – Adhere to regulatory guidelines, such as GDPR.

Lead Validation – International can be deployed in four ways

• Real-time API – Check and score data at the point of entry.
• Cloud Connectors – Connect with major marketing, sales, and ecommerce platforms.
• List Processing – Batch services are available to clean up existing databases.
• Quick Lookups – Spot-check leads that come in through nontraditional channels.

The bottom line: validating your leads ensures your contact records are as genuine, accurate, and up-to-date as possible, and helps your team identify contacts that fall under data privacy regulations. If your business is spending time and money on global marketing and sales efforts, lead validation should be the next tool you add to your toolkit. Get your free API trial key and see how Lead Validation – International provides powerful insights to help your business grow.

As with many of our services, DOTS Lead Validation – International fits in our main company objective to reduce fraud, increase conversions, and enhance incoming leads, Web orders, and customer lists. One of the main purposes of this service is to allow organizations to prioritize leads based on their quality.

This service returns an overall quality value and an overall certainty score that examines all of a lead’s component inputs – such as business name, name, email, address, phone number, and IP address – and evaluates them as a whole. The certainty score is a value in the range of 0-100 that represents the overall certainty the service provided on this lead, while the overall quality value indicates whether a lead should be rejected, reviewed or accepted. Each component has several outputs that paint a picture of the component result, including each individual component’s certainty and quality.

Which brings us to the purpose for this blog: explaining the differences between the component results of Lead Validation – International and the component services themselves.

Lead Validation – International leverages other services we offer to help it make and determine a score, because there is often confusion between these two different sets of results.

Email Validation 3 versus the EV component

What Email Validation 3 does

DOTS Email Validation 3, which is used by Lead Validation – International, follows a series of steps to determine the validity and meta data about an email address. It dives deep into the input email, with high level steps that include email correction, syntax check, DNS check, SMTP check and integrity checks. Data points returned include flags to show if the mail server is operational, will accept mail for the specific box, or will accept mail to any box in that domain. Other data points include an estimate on the validity of the mailing address, warning codes with flags indicating a bogus, garbage, spam trap, disposable, known spammer or vulgar email, and many other data points.

How Lead Validation – International is different

The key difference why one service is not a replacement for the other is because Email Validation 3 only has the email to validate against. Everything Email Validation 3 finds can be determined based on the email itself. Lead Validation – International has many fields that can help make other determinations that work in concert with the email data points. For example, Lead Validation – International asks itself how the email stands up against a name input, the name of the person on the phone contact, or even the name of the company involved in the lookup. In other words, the email is evaluated and the data is returned based on how the email results stack up against the entire lead as a whole.

Lead Validation – International could steer a user down the wrong path if they are trying to use the results to determine whether they should send mail to a given email address. Lead Validation – International gives some basic indications, but it does not reveal everything that would be helpful for validation geared towards an email campaign, because it doesn’t need to – Lead Validation – International is for validating leads as a whole and not just its parts. The evaluation of the component parts does not happen in a silo.

Address Validation versus the AV component

What Address Validation – International does

What DOTS Address Validation – International does, in a nutshell, is validate international address. (I know, it’s strange, you were likely thinking it measured gravitational waves…) But seriously and more specifically, I pulled this from our developer guides since it sums it up so well, “Address Validation – International is designed to take an international address, validate it and return a standardized international version of the address. Depending on the information available for a given address, Address Validation – International can return additional information about a given address. For example, it can return Delivery Point Validation (DPV) information for US addresses”.

What Address Validation 3 does

DOTS Address Validation – US 3 is our US address validation product. The input to the service is typically a non-standardized address, and what is returned is a standardized, deliverable (where possible) address that is validated against the latest USPS data. It also returns a DPV score that lets the user know the degrees of validation of what was determined by the service: for example, a DPV score of 1 indicates a valid mailing address was returned, and a DPV score of 2 shows that the address was not found in the USPS database of valid mailing addresses. Further, a DPV score of 3 and 4 typically indicates that portions of the address were valid but with a critical piece missing for making mail delivery flawless.

There are a lot of details returned with this service, such as features that help save on shipping costs or allow for processing the fragments of an address when companies have limited space on labels, and much, much more. The service returns a lot of codes that can help you understand the changes that were made to an address during the validation as well as error codes to tell you what went wrong.

What Address Validation – Canada 2 does

DOTS Address Validation – Canada 2 is the Canadian counterpart to Address Validation 3. The goal of the service is very similar to the goal of Address Validation 3, but due to the nature of available Canadian data it does not have all of the same type of fields. For instance, it does not have DPV scores. If this service does not return an error then you are looking at a valid address. But like Address Validation 3, it does have correction codes to guide you through the changes that were made. Since Canada is bilingual Address Validation – Canada 2 allows for French and English validations based on a Language input flag.

How Lead Validation – International is different

The magnitude of the differences here is not so large when it comes to the address component. Just like EV3 and the other components, Lead Validation – International benefits by evaluating the address with other data points outside the address component values. A perfect address in Address Validation – International may not have an address certainty score of 100 in Lead Validation – International, however, because some of the other components may have not been a good match for the address. In general there may be good reasons to penalize an address or good reasons to increase its score, based on the other components. Again, the address component in Lead Validation – International is not a strict address validation.

Name Validation 2 versus the NV component

What Name Validation 2 does

Users can use DOTS Name Validation 2 to validate names, verify name accuracy, fix unordered names and return gender information, among other details. In essence it gives you insight into a name, even providing similar names to the name in question, as well as outputs such as name origin, vulgarity, celebrity, bogus and garbage name scores. These are just a few of the main results from the service.

How Lead Validation – International is different

So what is different? Most of the things mentioned in the Name Validation 2 service can be found in Lead Validation – International, however only to varying degrees. For instance, the Name Validation 2 outputs for vulgarity, celebrity, bogus, and garbage are scores, while in Lead Validation – International they are flags, which means that the Name Validation 2 product will return greater resolution when it comes to these kinds of result fields. Lead Validation – International will have less detail on the name component, but it is not designed as a name validation service, so even in this situation this component is again evaluated in context of the lead and not the name alone.

Summary

We intentionally did not go through all the components in Lead Validation – International, because the examples above all make our main point: the underlying services work in a silo, and Lead Validation – International does not. Component results from Lead Validation – International are tightly associated with each other to help people make decisions on the whole lead, rather than just the individual components of a lead.

The decision between using one or more component services versus Lead Validation – International is tightly tied to your project requirements. For example, you might use Lead Validation – International if you have a couple or more components that you want to make larger decisions upon and don’t have a heavy requirement for the underlying component to lead the way. Conversely, if you are doing email marketing and don’t have much need for the other components then Email Validation 3 is better suited, because you’ll have access to better email data points. The same can be said for the other components.

Of course, the best way to determine which combination of services is best for your project is to talk about it. Reach out to us and we’ll go over, in detail, the advantages and disadvantages in each scenario. We are always available to help you make the best decision and make your project a success.

DOTS Lead Validation – International has been available for almost a year, and we have received great feedback from our customers on how they are using it. Using this feedback, we have compiled some general best practices to help you get the most from the service and learn how it helps your business.
There are two main uses for this service, prioritizing leads and regulatory compliance.

Lead Prioritization

When your business generates hundreds to thousands of leads daily, it is best to prioritize them based on their quality. One of the simplest ways to determine a lead’s value is using the two outputs from Lead Validation – International; OverallCertainty and OverallQuality. OverallCertianty is a value that comes back in the range of 0-100 and represents how likely the prospect could be contacted with the information they provided. The OverallQuality output shows whether a lead should be rejected, reviewed or accepted.

Each main component of a lead (name, address, email, phone, IP address, and business) is also scored this way. For example, the address component also has certainty and quality scores directly associated with it, AddressCertainty and AddressQuality. The purpose of these individual component values is to allow you to see how the components’ scores break down and make even more informed business decisions.

GDPR Compliance

The second major use we have seen for the Lead Validation – International service is determining if any component of your lead is from a country that falls under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We have made this simple to identify by providing an output, IsInGDPR, which simply identifies that your lead is covered by the GDPR. Our customers are using this to ensure they stay in compliance with the regulation and avoid its hefty fines.

Now that we’ve outlined its main uses, let’s focus on the three most important parts of the service: Inputs, Test Types, and Outputs and how they can be used.

Inputs

The more inputs you have, the better the returns will be. The service heavily cross-references the individual inputs for each component, which means the more data points you share with the service, the better we can analyze the data.

Some organizations simply do not collect all the data points, or the data they buy doesn’t include them. For these reasons, it is very common to have an abbreviated number of inputs for the service. But Lead Validation – International goes a step further and makes adjustments along the way to help maximize results when not all data points are available. If you are missing an IP address, company name, or another data point, Test Types have you covered.

Test Types

To avoid penalizing lead scores because of lack of data, TestType is a required field that works like a directive to the service, adjusting the algorithm itself to work with the data available. Using a test type is not only required, it is also just as important a consideration as the other input data. For example, attempting to validate business leads without using TestType=business will skew the results, leaving you scratching your head at the end of the day. Best practice is to match the following test type to your available inputs:

Standard Test Types

• normal1p/normal2p – Incorporates all the main components except the business component. The only difference between the two types is that normal2p allows for a second input phone number, where normal1p is limited to one.
• noip – Same as normal1p, but does not incorporate IP address input in the processing.
• nap – Simple but common test type that looks at name, address and phone components, a second phone number is optional.

Business Test Types

Designed for business-to-business leads, not having a business name in a business test type is allowed, but providing a business name returns better scores.

• business – Like normal2p, but adds the business component.
• business-noip – Like the business test type except it does not utilize the IP address component. While designed for data with a missing IP address input, this is NOT one of the more recommended operations. Having the IP address as an input for business to business leads provides strong links to connect to other data points and provides some useful flags for fraud.
• business-n-e-p – Checks name, email, and phone components.

Custom Test Types
Custom test types can be created for specific needs. In some instances, you may have a component that you don’t have much confidence in and want the system to be less strict in analyzing. Conversely, some organizations may have fields that are so critical that they want to scrutinize specific components over others. Most organizations fit into one of our predefined test types, but customizations are available to ensure unique business needs are met to maximize the results from our service.

Multiple test types
Some companies use multiple test types. It is less common to see multiple test types in the same process, because if a field is missing you likely want that lead to be penalized in OverallCertainty. However, you may have multiple processes fed by leads from several departments and various sources, so ideally you will match the test type to the process and available inputs.

Outputs

Lastly, you will want to pay attention to the OverallCertainty and OverallQuality fields when prioritizing your results. It all comes down to the higher the certainty, the better the lead. There are several factors to consider when thinking about prioritization. For instance, cost of leads, sales team bandwidth, or automated CRM lead scoring could all affect priority outside of validation. Your organization will make these considerations before making any final decisions.

The Notes field is helpful for tying everything together, and will help you understand how the return was generated. The service will output general notes about the validation such as IsNamePhoneMatch or IsPhoneAddressMatch, but also creates Notes about each individual component like IsBadStreet for address or IsPublicProxy for IP Address. Each component that can associate itself to a country can impact the output, IsInGDPR, indicating if the lead or a component of the lead falls under GDPR.

In closing, it is worth reiterating that the quality of the results from Lead Validation – International are predicated on the number of inputs and using the correct test types. This service helps you prioritize your leads, identify the weak and the strong points in your data, and stay in compliance when it comes to GDPR. If you’re working with international leads, reach out to our team to learn more about how our validation service can help your business.

Late in 2017, Service Objects released a new service, DOTS Lead Validation International, which is helping companies validate their residential and business leads from around the world. Lead Validation International is built on our core foundation of data validation tools and uses the best of ten of Service Objects strongest contact record validation services, providing the unparalleled ability to validate and correct leads from around the globe.  Below is a list of some of the services that Lead Validation International relies on:

DOTS services used with Lead Validation International

6 Key Components of Lead Validation

Our Lead Validation International service looks at six key components: name, business, email, IP Address, mailing address and phone, performing hundreds of tests to validate the authenticity of each of these individual components, as well as, their connection with each other. A built-in scoring system provides quality scores for each of the individual components and provides a weighted overall quality of the lead based on the results from the components. In addition, a verbose notation system provides insight into how the individual scores were achieved, highlighting interesting data points both good and bad for each component.

Recently, we introduced a set of fields called InformationComponents, which allows for the seamless addition of new content and provides flexibility for our team to work with clients on custom solutions without interrupting the service for other clients. Another example of our continued commitment to improve and evolve our Lead Validation International service is helping our customers evaluate their risk with regards to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Meeting the GDPR Needs of our Customers

Using Lead Validation International, customers can identify potential risks with regards to the new GDPR, which went into effect in most European Union (EU) countries on May 25th, 2018. These new regulations, designed to protect the personal data of users within the EU, put a great burden on companies and require them to know if their leads are physically located in the EU, as well as, making sure the contact record data is authentic and up-to-date as possible.

So how does Lead Validation International help? In addition to the primary goal of determining the authenticity of a lead and its data points, Lead Validation International is now using geolocation to help identify the physical location of a lead and the various regulatory laws and restrictions that impact that location. The potential for GDPR risk is determined by examining the individual components; Address, IP Address and Phone number of each lead, as well as the overall lead, and determining if the lead resides in a country that observes the GDPR. If a component is found to be associated with the GDPR group, it is given a note: “IsInGDPR”. From here, an analysis of all components is automatically performed to determine if an additional note of “IsInGDPR” should be assigned to the overall notes of the lead.

Companies can use these data points to help assess their risks with any given lead. As of today, Lead Validation International only tracks GDPR risk. However, as new privacy laws and regulations come out, this feature of Lead Validation International will be extended to take these new laws into account and address the needs of our customers.

Check out the power of DOTS Lead Validation International!

DOTS Lead Validation International is easily our most robust and valuable service. This service improves the quality of your leads by correcting or eliminating unreliable contact record data while providing you with an overall quality score, so you can make informed business decisions. This service cross-references prospects’ name, address, phone, email, and IP address to ensure the lead information is genuine, accurate and up-to-date.

The quality of each of these data points is analyzed and scored separately and also combined to provide a weighted composite score for the overall lead quality and certainty. These individual and composite scores are included in the fifty-plus outputs the service provides, allowing you to tailor business logic to meet your needs.

Lead Validation International can be used like our other services; as a real-time API, as a cloud connector for major CRMs and marketing automation platforms, or as an FTP service. If none of these work for you, you can send us your list and we will validate and correct the leads for you.

Customizing Lead Validation International to Meet Your Needs

Even if you are missing some of the contact record data points (e.g., email, phone, address, name, or IP) that the service uses to validate leads, our service can be customized to use the data you do have, correct any issues with it and provide certainty scores. To customize our service to work with your available data, we suggest using the variable, TestType. There are a number different test types that address common variations of available data points and the needs of our clients. These test types can be further configured to meet the specific needs of your application and business. If you are not sure about what test type you should use, please don’t hesitate to reach out, we will gladly help with best recommendations. We are committed to making sure you receive the full benefit and power of our Lead Validation International service, and if none of the available test types meet your needs, we are happy to create custom ones that will.

Interpreting API Responses

Interpreting the response from our API is an important first step in determining the best ways to use the service and how the resulting validated data can benefit your business. There are only three “required” inputs to Lead Validation International: Country, TestType, and LicenseKey. If all three of these inputs are provided, Lead Validation International will attempt to process all the lead information that is present. If the required inputs are not provided, here are some of the errors you might encounter:

1. Error Code 1 – Authorization Codes

These errors indicate there is something wrong with the license key and we recommend that you double check you are using the correct key. One of the most common causes for this type of error is using a test key in a live environment (or vice-versa). Fortunately, this type of error is simple to detect and correct. In the test environment, the request URL should start with “https://trial.serviceobjects…” and be used with the test key sent to you. Production keys and URLs are different and issued only to customers. For other errors, please do not hesitate to reach out to us to help troubleshoot.

2. Error Code 2 – User Input 

Something is wrong with the inputs. Either necessary fields were left blank, or the inputs entered are too long.

3. Error Code 3 – Fatal Errors 

This unlikely error indicates that the web service is behaving in an unexpected way. If you see this error in a production environment, please notify Service Objects at once.

4. Error Code 4 – Domain Specific 

Some of our other services return Domain Specific errors which indicate the validity or lack thereof of the information sent to the service. Lead Validation International works a bit differently since it is a composite service and cross-checks data points to provide an overall score for the lead. Currently, there are no Domain Specific errors in our Lead Validation International service.

Validated International Lead Outputs

If everything is working as expected, the service will return over fifty outputs including validated and corrected data, quality scores and any additional notes that might be helpful. The table below shows the most common outputs and a brief description of what they mean.

When available, Lead Validation International can return the contact name and address information associated with the phone number.

Hopefully, this quick primer is the first step to developing a better understanding of our Lead Validation International service and how it can be applied to your needs. Please reach out to us with any questions, and we will gladly provide recommendations, integration assistance or any other help you may need.

If you do business in Europe, you are probably quite familiar by now with the acronym GDPR – the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. In May 2018, companies that handle personal information from European consumers will be required to follow strict new regulations for privacy, data security, and accuracy of personal data from EU citizens.

Many organizations are focused on avoiding the stiff penalties associated with GDPR violations. I have a different view. To me, the GDPR is an opportunity for business growth and marketing success as a result of the fundamental decisions you make about your data quality.

Let’s start with Article 5 of the GDPR, which will be one of the most critical compliance areas for most organizations. It requires you to make a good faith, best practice effort to correct or expunge errors in your contact database, along with ensuring data security and appropriate usage. You will need to be able to document these efforts to avoid penalties.

This Article responds to a norm among some organizations that a certain amount of bad contact data is an unavoidable cost of doing business – and in fact, according to SiriusDecisions, as many as 25% of marketing contact records currently contain critical errors. So what if Hans in Frankfurt or Liv in Stockholm gets a little extra junk mail because someone else lived at that address years ago?

To me, Article 5 of the GDPR forces you to care about something you should care about anyway – protecting your customers from unwanted marketing contacts. In addition, these unwanted or erroneous contacts are a serious drag on your marketing expenses and a waste of resources for the environment. Now that inexpensive API and list processing tools can validate addresses, lead quality and much more, it has long been past time for most organizations to put data quality on autopilot.

I feel that a similar nexus exists for much of the rest of the GDPR. For example, it has strict opt-in requirements that prevent you from “defaulting” a customer on to your marketing contact list, and you must make it simple for customers to modify their information or even be “forgotten” if they wish. Some may see rules like these as an onerous intrusion on their marketing process. I personally see it as the dawn of a new era in customer relationships, away from interruptive marketing and towards more collaborative – and ultimately more profitable – relationships.

So, go ahead and join the rush to become GDPR compliant by May. But in the process, take advantage of this time to re-think your data quality and marketing strategies for the long term. I think you’ll find that a new and much more effective business strategy lies in your future.

“Nobody is perfect. And my company wasn’t even talking about things like data quality ten years ago. So, what is the big deal if there are a few problems with my contact data? That’s life, isn’t it?”

Actually, it is a big deal. First, it affects your costs and competitiveness. Second, it affects your reputation in the marketplace. And finally, because bad data can be so easily fixed with the latest automated tools.

With new regulations on the horizon and an increasingly competitive marketplace, companies need data they can rely on. If you’re still on the fence, below are some of the main reasons your business needs confirmed data.

Saving Time and Money

Bad data always costs your business time, money, or both. It affects areas such as sales leads, delivery accuracy, your reputation when sending email marketing, and much more. It is estimated15-25% of contact data is inaccurate, incomplete, fraudulent, or out-of-date, and a great deal of resources are wasted due to inaccurate or straight-up bad data.

Getting sales leads is costly for most organizations, especially when leads are bad or inaccurate. The earlier you can validate incoming data, the better you will be able to utilize your resources.  Our Email and Address Validation services can help make sure your incoming contact data is coming in clean and valid, and our Lead Validation service helps prioritize your resources toward better targeted leads.

Improving Your Marketing Efficiency

Think of all the wasted resources involved when materials are sent to the wrong address, or salespeople chase after bad or mislocated prospects. Even a small percentage of errors can result in a great deal of frustration for everyone involved, and fixing these problems is low-hanging fruit you can easily automate.

Beyond our Address Validation services, our Address Geocode product can translate addresses to exact latitude-longitude coordinates in real time. For incomplete addresses, our Address Detective product can prevent you from purging good leads. It fixes fatal addressing errors by filling in the gaps of missing address data in your contact records, using a fuzzy-matching API that returns a confidence score for each updated address.

Protecting Your Email Reputation

Suppose you bought an email list and you are ready to send the perfect email, after weeks of refining. Nothing can give you a bad reputation quicker than sending email to a bunch of addresses that bounce, not to mention getting mediocre results from your campaign.

Use our Email Validation service to keep your reputation in good standing. Using a real-time API can reduce bounce rates up to 90%. Our service can process rented lists as well as your own house lists, giving you valuable insight into your contact data assets to make sure you get the most out of your investment.

Cleaning Up Your Existing Contact Data

We often hear people say, “What if I just realized we were doing things wrong and I want to get our data on the right track?” Once your database gets corrupted with uncertain data, typically two things must happen to reverse course. First, you need to draw a line in the sand and commit to making sure to validate any new information going into your system. The next step involves validating all your current database information in a separate process.

We can help automate much of the extra work of cleaning up existing data. We have lots of sample code and support many platforms to make it easy to integrate with us, not to mention the top-notch technical service team we have standing by to help you implement a robust solution.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Finally, we wanted to mention the importance of keeping your data current. Even after validating data coming into your system using our API or cleansing your system afterward with our batch process, data will still get old and invalid over time. People move, new homes are built, old buildings are repurposed, emails change, phone numbers are disconnected, and so on.  Like showering, regular data hygiene will help keep your data in the best condition possible, and we make this easy for you.

There are many benefits to keeping your data as up-to-date and accurate as possible, and we are here to help you every step of the way. Contact us to see what we can do for you and your data!

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.

We love data here at Service Objects. We are constantly working to expand and improve on our datasets to further innovate our product lineup. A big part of what makes our Email Validation (EV) service so good is the data that helps drive it. When communicating with a mail server in real-time to verify an email address it helps to know what kind of mail server it is dealing with and if it is trustworthy. Just because an email address is deliverable does not always mean that it is good.  For example, an email may be disposable, vulgar or worse yet, a spamtrap.

Our Email Validation service already keeps track of mail server behavior patterns for millions of domains, which allows us to identify and flag mail servers with malicious activity or servers that have a high association with malicious activity.  In addition to monitoring behavior patterns, we are now focusing on determining the geographic location of the email servers.

What benefits does identifying mail server location offer?

Email addresses can be sent and received from anywhere in the world. They are not anchored to one physical location, and at a glance, one cannot easily discern its geographic origin. Even email addresses with a country code for a Top Level Domain (TLD) can have a global presence and may have servers located in multiple countries.  Fortunately, mail server location data can be derived and aggregated from some of our other datasets. This allows our Email Validation service to better identify potentially malicious mail servers and flag servers from known geographic hot spots.

In addition to helping identify problematic email servers, mail server location data can provide additional insights and benefits. From a marketing and administration perspective, the mail server location data can be used to help identify and organize email addresses for a particular region. The location information can also be used to gain business insights about a company and its location(s). At Service Objects, we are using the additional information to further enhance some of our other services, such as Lead Validation.

Challenges to identifying mail server location information

There are a number of challenges to accurately identifying mail server location information. First, we are identifying the mail server locations of a domain, not attempting to identify where an email message was sent from. This would require more than just a simple email address. However, the location data can be used to help cross-check and verify the legitimacy of an email message. For example, an email message is received, and the headers say that the message was sent from Gmail.com. However, the server IP address in the header does not match any of the known Gmail mail server locations, so chances are the message was spoofed and that it is spam or part of a phishing scam.

Second, trying to identify all of the mail servers for a particular domain is not something that can be done quickly enough for a real-time service where end-users expect sub-second response times. Real-time communication with a mail server can often take several seconds, but trying to identify all the mail servers for a domain from around the world can sometimes take several minutes. For this reason, our DOTS Email Validation service does not include mail server location identification in its suite of real-time checks. Instead, the service relies on background systems that have already collected and identified mail server locations from around the world. This ensures that the service is not bogged down by slow processes and continues to respond normally. While mail server location identification may be too slow for a real-time check, it is a daily process that we perform to ensure our list of locations is up to date. The process is also quick enough that our background processes can routinely check for any new domains that we have not come across before and process them hourly.

Third, if a business has multiple locations, then a typical DNS lookup for a domain will just tell you which mail server(s) to connect to that are closest to your area, and not necessarily tell you about their other mail servers. DNS does this to help ensure that communication is quick and efficient, that way an end-user isn’t trying to communicate with a server on the other side of the country or potentially in a different nation entirely if it doesn’t have to. Part of what makes the location identification process “slow” is that we are looking for mail servers in every major region of the world, and not just in our own local areas.

What’s going on behind the scenes

While our email validation service will currently only display the location(s) of the mail server(s) in the notes of the output when it has been identified, it is doing a lot more with that data behind the scenes. Knowing the IP Addresses and locations of the mail servers means that we can perform cross-checks against more data points in other areas. Service Objects is extremely interested in fraud prevention, so we use this data to check for associations with known proxies, VPNs, bot services and other data points that have ties to malicious activity. The data allows us to check various data driven blacklists and white hat resources against more than a simple email address and domain.  Instead, we can pull back the curtain, so to speak, and dig deeper into the mail server(s) that run behind the scenes. All, while continuing and expanding our server behavior monitorization.

With the addition of this new data, we have added additional NoteCodes to the output from our DOTS Email Validation 3 service. Below is a list of the new notes codes and that have been added:

For more information about terms for international addresses and locations please check out this previous blog post.

Unlike other NotesCodes where the corresponding NotesDescriptions value will be a human readable flag to describe the note code, the value will instead contain the list of locations found.

Get started testing DOTS Email Validation by downloading a real-time API trial key or sending is a sample list to run for you.

A brand new year is upon us – and once again, many of us are making resolutions for 2018. Perhaps eating better, working harder, or even blowing a thick layer of dust off that exercise machine in our basement. The new year is always a great time to make a fresh start.

Here at Service Objects, we have our own resolutions for 2018 as well. Of course, ours are designed to help your 2018 marketing efforts be even more successful than last year. Here are some of the biggest ones on our list:

Automate your regulatory compliance. More than anything, 2018 will cap a growing era of global consumer rights and stiffer regulation. Between the pending May implementation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the recent expansion of the US Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), your use of consumer contact data for marketing is more tightly controlled than ever. And ignorance of the law isn’t bliss: fines for TCPA violations run as high as $15,000 per violation, and GDPR violations can command fines as high as 4% of your gross turnover.

We can help you get started on your path to achieve compliance with both of these new regulations. For GDPR, which requires maintaining explicit customer permission for use of their personal data, products such as Address Validation International, Lead Validation International and Email Validation can flag European addresses for GDPR processing and clean your contact database at time of use. And for TCPA, which prohibits unsolicited calls to consumer cellular numbers, our GeoPhone Plus product can help ensure that customer contact numbers haven’t been ported to new mobile customers.

Help you move into global markets. The world is getting smaller every year, which means that your potential market is getting larger. We can help you validate and verify international leads with tools such as Address Validation International and Lead Validation International, to help you target your overseas marketing more effectively.

Reduce the amount of fraud in eCommerce transactions during sales peaks. Did you know that 2017 saw the largest online sales volumes ever for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? According to data from Adobe Analytics, consumers spent a record $11.6 billion dollars across these two peak sales days – and according to Forbes Magazine, fraudulent transactions spike during these peak periods as well. We have a wide range of solutions for eliminating online fraud, ranging from lead validation to best practices such as validating IP addresses, to ensure that order from Kansas isn’t originating in Kyrgyzstan.

Give your customers a better experience. Your business rises and falls with the service experiences you deliver your customers. Our flagship delivery accuracy solutions, powered by continually-updated USPS, Canada Post and international address databases, makes sure your products get to the right people at the right address every time. And even when customers slip up and give you an undeliverable address, our Address Detective product can help make things all better.

Lower your costs. Would you like to get better lead response rates in 2018? Keep your contact database clean and up-to-date as prospects move or change jobs? Or improve your marketing ROI by filtering out bogus or fraudulent leads? We can do all of that for you, and more. We have a whole smorgasbord of solutions that help you have genuine, accurate and up-to-date data, improve marketing campaign performance, ensure better leads, and do more with less.

One more thing that makes our New Year’s resolutions better than most people’s – we always keep ours! That’s why we have over 2400 clients and counting today. And we look forward to serving you in 2018.

Service Objects has recently released a new member of the Lead Validation family, DOTS Lead Validation International.  Lead Validation International builds on the strengths of our DOTS Lead Validation service but adds a significant number of new tests and features.  Lead Validation users will likely find Lead Validation International familiar; however, a brand-new interface adds new levels of detail over the older service. Lead Validation International works better than ever for US and Canadian leads but now covers over 250 other countries as well. This service gives users the flexibility to validate leads anywhere in the world.

The Lead Validation International service looks at six key components: Name, Business, Email, IP Address, Mailing Address and Phone, performing over 200 tests to determine both how strong the individual components are as well as how well they connect to each other. These tests give a strong indication of the quality of the lead. Each component is given a 0-100 score, and a recommendation.  The service also provides an overall lead confidence score, giving users a lot of flexibility in how they want to evaluate their leads.

While building on the strength of the old service, Lead Validation International adds scores of new tests, digging deeper into the leads than the old US and Canadian API as well as providing new international specific tests.  The new API exposes more data and points of interest than the older API and provides more details than previously returned by the service. The Notes sections for each component highlights interesting data points that used to be more obscure. An overall Notes section highlights comparisons between data points, providing more indications of how well the various components in the lead matched each other, making it more obvious where the data broke down or providing more confidence in the quality of the lead.

DOTS Lead Validation International’s new interface also allows more customization than previous services.  A new set of fields called InformationComponents allow client specific rules and outputs to be written.  This allows new rules outside of the normal Lead Validation structure as well as the easy addition of new rules we feel could benefit all users.  One of the biggest strengths of the new operation is its ability to be tailored to almost any client need.

Service Objects has always been strong in International Name, Email and IP Address validation.  With the recent release of International Address and Phone validation products, we can cross-reference far more of the contact record’s data points to provide a qualitative view of the international lead and deeper insights into the lead, creating a fuller picture. The user will know the location of origin for all data points now and be able to find the red flags in their data.

International Lead Validation Provides the Complete Picture:

International addresses present their own challenges in identifying, parsing and outputting. While Lead Validation International is not a perfect replacement for a true international address validation tool, the outputs in this new API are designed to be as universal as possible.  Users will get a result that is formatted consistent with the country of origin, as well as details on the locality, primary administrative areas and country of origin.

International phones, address and IP addresses use a new Service Objects proprietary fuzzy location identifier that does a great job of cleaning and standardizing data points so that even the messiest of data can provide useful validation.  If the proper locations can be identified, we have the best chance of cross validating all of the components.

Our international lead service can be deployed in several ways; whether seamlessly integrating our fully supported, real-time API into your software, as a plugin for industry-leading CRM, marketing and sales platforms or as a list service to validate and improve existing lead records.  We also provide sample code, sample data and a robust developer guide to help get the service up and running.

If you are interested in learning more about Lead Validation for the US and Canada, please visit our DOTS Lead Validation product page.  If you are interested in our International service, please check out our International product page.

As part of our commitment to making our data quality solutions easy to integrate, our Application Engineering team has developed a series of tutorials on how to integrate our services.  The series highlights various programming languages, with this tutorial exploring the “how-to’s” of applying our services using ColdFusion.

ColdFusion is a scripting language that has been around since 1995. It was created to make development of CGI scripts easier and faster.  ColdFusion has unique aspects, including use of its native ColdFusion Markup Language (CMFL for short) to allow HTML style tags for programming with systems. Like most things in the tech world, it can draw a lot of polarized opinions, where some are ardent supporters, and others, less than enthusiastic fans. If you fall in the supporter camp, and want to learn how to call a web service with ColdFusion, that is where our experts can step in and help.

To get started you will need a ColdFusion IDE (we’re using ColdFusion Builder 3) and a Service Objects’ License key. We’re using one for DOTS Lead Validation but you can follow along with your service of choice.

Project Setup

The first step is to launch your IDE and select an appropriate workspace for your project. Next, we will create a new project.

Select next for a blank template and then click next again.  On the following screen give your project an appropriate name and click finish.

Congratulations! You created a brand new ColdFusion project. Now it’s time to add some code. For starters, we’ll want to add a form and elements to initialize our form inputs so that we can create a sample page to input data to send to our web service. This likely won’t be what you will want to do in a live environment, but this is for demonstration purposes.

The DOTS Lead Validation service that we’re using has quite a few inputs so this may take a while. Once you are finished it should look like the following:

Making the Web Service Call

The next bit of code that we will add is to make the actual HTTP GET call to the Service Objects’ web service. Let’s use the CFML tags to make the actual web service call.

After the code makes the call to the trial.serviceobjects.com endpoint, we perform a failover check in the code. This failover check and the try catch blocks that it is nested in will help ensure that your integration of our web service will continue to work uninterrupted in the event that the primary web service is unavailable or not responding correctly.

The primary endpoint should be pointing to ws.serviceobjects.com and the backup endpoint should be pointed to wsbackup.serviceobjects.com.

Displaying the Results

Now that you have successfully called the web service, you will obviously want to do something with the results. For demonstration purposes we will simply display the results to the user.  You can use the code snippet below to display.

If you are having trouble figuring out how a particular output is mapped in the ColdFusion response, then you can use the <cfdump var=””> tag to dump the outputs onto the screen. This should allow for easy troubleshooting.

Now that our CFML is all set up, lets see an example input and output from the service. Below is sample lead information that you might encounter:

And here is some of the response that DOTS Lead Validation will return:

The DOTS Lead Validation service can return a multitude of information about your lead.  To download a trial key for any of our 23 contact validation solutions, please visit https://www.serviceobjects.com/products

P.S.  Here is the full ColdFusion script page in case you need it to get up and running.