StrikeIron Blog

Beyond Address Verification: Enriching Address Data

Address verification, the concept of using a Web service API to ensure that an address exists according to United States (or Canada) post office reference data, is easy, straight-forward, and valuable. With a single line of code, the capability can be built into Web forms, applications, business processes, and more to ensure that customer and prospect addresses that have been collected are accurate and complete.

From a business perspective, the United States Post Office estimates about $2 billion annually is spent on postage each year to undeliverable addresses. And this number doesn't include the cost of wasted print and marketing materials, missed opportunities, and poor customer service as a result of bad address data, the costs of which can very well be several times higher.

But solving this problem with address verification and correction is only part of the story. If you are already verifying the existence of an address, you can also enrich the data around the same address with many additional data points determined from that address. This can add some significant business value ROI, especially considering the ease at which it can be done.

For example, you can programmatically look up the current phone number that is associated with a specific address in a national phone book database that is updated every 24 hours. You can add latitude and longitude coordinates to an address to allow them to be plotted on a map to gain visual information about sets of addresses. You can also add other geographical information such as county, congressional district, and other post office specific data such as carrier route.

You can also determine if the address is that of a business or an individual, and then append the appropriate demographic data, such as revenue and SIC code for businesses, or estimated income, length of residency, and other census data for individuals.

In addition, you can also perform distance calculations on that address to other addresses (such as your closest retail outlet, or distance from your headquarters.)

For example, if all you have is this kind of simple, incomplete information about an address:

With a few Web services SOAP or REST calls you can automated the process of it becoming this:

As one example, we have integrated a lot of these capabilities into Salesforce.com using these same APIs, and that eliminates even the simple integration step: http://crm.strikeiron.com/

In other words, a simple address can be an effective gateway to a wealth of information that can aid marketing, customer service, sales, and provide better business intelligence about your customers, members, prospects, and other addresses you consider to be an information asset.

StrikeIron Exhibiting at Eloqua Experience 2009 Marketing Conference in San Francisco November 2-4

The Eloqua Global Users Conference is happening November 2nd-4th at the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco. I truly enjoyed attending the event last year, learning a great deal not just about Eloqua and its product's marketing capabilities, but also from the many case studies of how the technology was being implemented and finding success in a broad range of marketing organizations across several industries (I'm sure I drove our marketing director nuts with several new marketing ideas upon returning home!)

Also, the keynotes last year were of tremendous value as well, digging deep into the art and science of traditional marketing, and how it can be applied in the new era of marketing, including interactive Web marketing, email and viral marketing, social media, and metric-based optimization. Guru marketer and psychologist Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of the marketer's bible Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, gave a powerful keynote presentation on human behavior and its applicability in marketing. This year's keynote speaker is David Meerman Scott (author of the New Rules of Marketing and PR) and I am certain it will be just as compelling as last year's main event.

Several members of the StrikeIron team will be there to meet with our Eloqua customers and prospective customers. We will be demonstrating a couple of the Eloqua solutions available to their customer base, as well as our other data sources and APIs that are easily integrated into any platform.

For example, you will be able to see the integration of our SMS text messaging Web service into the Eloqua platform (actually built into the Eloqua product by their team) and how it is being used by Eloqua customers as part of a mobile marketing strategy.

We will also be showing how our address, telephone, email, individual, and company data verification capabilities can help provide a more accurate, better base of data from which to utilize the Eloqua platform, and how these straight-forward approaches can provide a much greater Eloqua ROI.

In addition, we will show how data enrichment with business and individual demographics can aid lead scoring efforts, lead nurturing, and other process-driven business rules to help optimize the time and maximize the output of a sales organization.

If you are at the event, please stop by the booth and say hello to our friendly, knowledgeable team.

Some other sponsors and exhibitors include Oracle, Reachforce, Astadia, EchoLane, eVariant, and Brainshark. It ought to be a good time.

What Domino's Pizza Can Teach You About Mobile Marketing, Social Media, and How to Use the Web

At the Direct Marketing Association event this week in San Diego, I enjoyed Rob Weisberg's presentation about Domino's Pizza seeing itself as a professional marketing organization rather than just an innovator in home pizza delivery. Rob is the Vice President of multimedia marketing for Domino's. I have always been a fan of Domino's, especially considering their use of our SMS text messaging capabilities.

Domino's is really trailblazing within the food industry using the Web, social media, mobile marketing, and online innovation in driving its business. Currently, 20% of all of its orders are received over the Internet. Considering the millions of dollars of orders per day they process, it makes Domino's one of the largest ecommerce companies in the world (and you thought Twitter was hot!)

They maintain oceans of demographic data about their customers so they can personalize messaging, and even predict when they are most likely to want to order a pizza. They have hundreds of thousands of fans of their Facebook page, and a legion of followers on Twitter.

Last month, they launched an iPhone-optimized Web application (also for Palm Pre and Android) for ordering from smartphones, and they use mobile platforms such as Air2Web to track mobile marketing efforts. For example, at the San Diego DMA event, they gave a simple code to the audience to send in via text message to receive $5 off their next five orders at Domino's Website, and they will be able to track the proliferation of that code through social networks and get a read on the demographics of the individuals that respond to the code, allowing for even more precision marketing going forward. Send me an email (bob.brauer AT strikeiron.com) if you would like the code.

"Pizza Tracker" on their Website enables you to follow the progress of your pizza (in the same way you can track packages with Fedex). You can see your pie moved from being "prepped", "in the oven", and "out for delivery" so you can make sure you are home once it is on its way to your house (or end the meeting at the office).

They also have an interactive pizza builder on their site so you can customize your pizza experience, as well as other online tools, most of which are now also available on their smartphone applications.

Domino's is a shining example of some of the ingenuity we will see in consumer products both in marketing and customer interaction in the social media and mobile age, and demonstrates well how a traditional, established company can turn itself into an exciting ecommerce company.

Optimizing a Sales Team's Time With an Email Verification Web Service

Great Marketers know that one of their top priorities is to optimize the time spent on leads for the sales organization. One way to achieve this is by verifying (more than just syntactically) the existence of an email address. Email verification is an effective means of filtering garbage, non-existent leads out of the sales process thereby preventing a considerable amount of a sales professional's time from being wasted.

For example, A lead should only be inserted into a CRM database from a Web form once it is confirmed that the email address is indeed a valid one (or definitely NOT an invalid one), otherwise a sales person could spend valuable time composing emails and trying to contact these phantom, non-existent leads while legitimate opportunities otherwise dangle in the wind. Of course, running an entire email list through a batch email verification can also go a long way in keeping customer and prospect data up to date, especially since people often leave organizations and once-valid email addresses are sometimes no longer valid (and this can trigger a sales-related activity as well once discovered trying to determine who the new contact is).

The first way to determine that an email address is invalid (within an algorithm) is to parse out the domain name from the email address and sure be certain that it does indeed exist. After the email structure is first validated structurally, existence checks can be achieved with an Internet "ping." Ensuring existence of the domain is one of the first of several tests.

One thing helpful to an email verification algorithm is that there are some level low-level SMTP (a standard protocol for sending email) functions that can be taken advantage of, enabling for the querying of the actual existence of email addresses without actually sending an email. Unfortunately, many different email server implementations may respond in many different ways to these queries, so pulling this off algorithmically can be very complex. In some scenarios, email servers will respond with success even though the email address does not really exist, meaning no individual has that address (and no one is certainly reading the emails). In these cases, email servers accept these unknown email deliveries and either discard the email or archive them. This kind of email server behavior is why email verification algorithms sometime respond with "unknown" (or equivalent) when an email verification check is performed. The server is saying "ok to send" even though nobody is using that particular email address. In other cases, some servers just take too long to respond (using distributed server locations as part of a commercial offering can help overcome this) and therefore the validity of an email address is also unknown in those cases.

The key to a good email verification process is to eliminate the 20-50% (or more) of made-up email addresses submitted by individuals who want to remain anonymous (and therefore submit email address such as mickey@mouse.com, elvis@graceland.com, etc.) or otherwise don't have any real interest in the product or service being offered. Achieving this kind of optimization is a big win for Marketing organizations because it enables sales reps to spend their time working on legitimate, interested leads.

New Web Services Now Available, Minority and Woman-Owned Business Indicator and Federal Employer Identification Lookup

Two new data sources are live and available on our platform for easy integration into applications, Websites, third-party solutions (such as CRM) and business processes.
 
The first is the Minority and Woman-Owned Business Information Web Service. It provides minority-owned business flags such as whether a business is woman-owned, veteran-owned (both disabled and Vietnam veterans), its certification status (8A, state/local government, HUBzone), and minority type (Asian American, Black American, Hispanic American, Native American, South Asian American).

Typically, this type of data is necessary for eligibility in certain government-related programs and for meeting federal guidelines of vendor diversity, or internal diversity goals, for larger organizations.

The second new service available is the Federal Employer Identification Lookup Web Service. It provides Federal Employer Identification Numbers, also known as EINs, of over 12 million businesses in the United States.

This type of data is used for the purposes of business verification, to locate Tax ID numbers for vendors you are working with, for assisting in federal compliance with BSA and Anti-Money Laundering legislation, as well as compliance with other legislation such as the US Patriot Act.

Both of these services are related to vendor information that is often very incomplete, outdated, and inaccurate in organizations that work with a large number of vendors. These two services, especially when integrated for real-time data enhancement when new vendors are added to databases, can go a long way in improving the quality and usefulness of this internal data. Of course, it can also be used to target certain organizations for diversity programs as well.

This is a case where we have made two new services available as a result of customer demand. If you have other ideas for additional useful data sources to integrate over the Web where we make things incredibly easier for you by handling all of the data updates and data maintenance, please let us know.

Webinar Showing Creation of Web Data Feeds with Kapow Thursday, October 15th, Noon EDT

Note: this Webinar has been recorded and is now available here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/551640186

On Thursday via Webinar we will be introducing the availability of Kapow Web Data Services via the StrikeIron platform. Now, using your StrikeIron account information, you will be able to create custom data sources and feeds from the infinite supply of data that you can find out on the Web. In other words, all the world is a data source! To reserve your seat for the Webinar, click here:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/551640186

The 45-minute Webinar plus Q&A will focus on the exciting new launch of a subscription-based service of the Kapow OnDemand technology, specifically aimed at the SMB market and departmental use. This technology enables "data robots" to quickly and easily be built, allowing users to create their own custom data sources from anything they can see in a Web browser, even data only available behind login screens. These custom data sources are easily exposed as REST services or RSS feeds for seamless integration into applications, Web sites, mashups, business processes, or any other place Web data feeds can provide value.

I'll be joining with Kapow founder and CTO Stefan Andreasan to discuss how cutting and pasting from the Web is a thing of the past. We will demonstrate the technology, discuss why this launch is important to the industry, show how easy it is to create these data sources and feeds, and talk about common use cases.There is a press release discussing the actual launch, as well as another blog entry I did on the subject that will provide some more background information.

I hope you can join us!

Speaking on "Missing Data" at DMA '09 in San Diego October 19-21

I am speaking in San Diego at the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) event October 21. I'll be alongside Peg Kuman, CEO of Telematch, and David Burton, Product Director of CRM Services for Epicor. The title of the session is "The Missing Data Quandary". Telematch is one of StrikeIron's data providers who assist us with providing the live data for our Reverse Telephone and Reverse Address Web service/API solution that some of our customers have integrated into Web sites, applications, and business processes.

Many StrikeIron customers use our various address, name, telephone, and email data sources (available as SOAP or REST calls) to augment the data they have on a customer for business intelligence purposes, or simply to decrease per-call time in call center scenarios. This includes auto-filling information about a customer or prospect in an interactive Web or application form based on a phone number, zip code, etc., providing more time for the purposes of the call rather than information gathering. And of course these types of real-time information checks go a long way in data collection accuracy.

If you are attending the DMA event in San Diego, come by the session and let's have a passionate discussion about data and Web services!

E-commerce Related APIs Explored in Webinar Thursday, October 8th, 2009

The holidays aren't as far off as you might think, and many folks are in the middle of development, on the homestretch, or in the case of rare birds, completely finished with the site buildout planned to capture Web buyers this coming holiday season (and hopefully you have at least started.) With the dollars stretched thin as it is in most households and most businesses, every little advantage you can gain with your site and customer experience can be crucial to success as we prepare for the season.

So I thought with that in mind, it might be a good idea to take 30 minutes and demonstrate some of the capabilities of the various e-commerce related Web service APIs that we make available for integration into Web sites, callable with a simple SOAP or REST invocation from just about any e-commerce platform.

I'll demonstrate the various ways to validate shipping information, both in North America and around the world, so you can substantially minimize customer service problems related to missing information or data entry errors. I'll also discuss the different sales tax rate capabilities that are available, from simple all the way down to product level rates.

We will also explore how to show localized currency product prices from an IP address, as well as some neat automated shipping notification capabilities using SMS text messaging and text-to-voice notifications that can reach anything with a phone number, letting folks know that something is about to arrive, or should have arrived, another big customer experience advantage. Validation of email addresses and telephone numbers provided by online customers will also be shown.

Finally, we will discuss and demonstrate some of the demographic data sources that are available so you can customize messaging and perform customer profiling based on who is buying from you now so you can optimize marketing resources in the future.

The Webinar is scheduled for Thursday, October 8th at 1:30pm EDT. To register and attend, click here.

I hope you can attend, but if not, send me an email at bob.brauer "at" strikeiron.com and I can send you the link to the recorded version (or give you the specific information about these APIs that you might be looking for).

Building The Long Tail of Data Sources Yourself With Just a Few Clicks

We have just launched (and it's now live) the Kapow Web Data Services product available via our Website on top of our IronCloud infrastructure using Ironcloud's pay-as-you-go API-driven capabilities:

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kapow-technologies-and-strikeiron-bring-enterprise-class-web-data-services-to-smb-market-63081782.html

I think this is a landmark contribution to the industry and I am excited about this new announcement with Kapow Technologies for several different reasons.

First, I have always thought that the true power and potential of the Internet was its ability to serve as a communication mechanism for the high-speed transfer of a wide variety data, and a shared I.T. resource for everyone, connecting systems and applications around the world. I think this far outweighs the value of the collection of "brochures" that represent a substantial part of what the Web is today. I think this joint offering we now have with Kapow takes us another big step closer to the vision of a hyper-connected world via the Internet.

The general idea behind this offering is that you can custom create your own data sources using the vast resources of the Web and the incredible amounts of data that exist out there rather easily. Simply point and click on any part of a Web page (or Web application) including as many data elements within that page as you would like to have access to. This process is the creation of a “robot” (which can be thought of as a kind of "script" for technical types) that is the core component delivering the data source. Once built, this robot has a REST interface (or can be used as an RSS feed) that when invoked will retrieve the desired data from the specified source as if the data were just sitting in a database somewhere. This retrieval via the robot can occur weekly, daily, hourly, in real-time, or whatever you specify, as it is eternally standing by awaiting your command to go out and get the latest data.

These robots essentially enable you to create your own unique data sources from anything on the Web. Now that is powerful. They (and the data they provide) can then be accessed by any application or Website in a purely automated way. Not only does this save a tremendous amount of traditional cutting and pasting (and the time and cost associated with that) for people to get the data they need regularly, but its ease-of-use and flexibility creates an endless set of possibilities.

For example, you could create individual robots that collect competitor pricing information from twenty different competitors, and then do analysis within Excel using each of these robots to display and analyze current pricing information at any given point in time. You could perform worldwide currency analysis from data provided by many different banks, analyze large diverse sets of data that might trigger investment activity, or even create the most incredible data-driven fantasy football tool ever imagined.

Then, these data sources can all be used within applications like Microsoft Excel, Salesforce.com, business intelligence tools, reporting tools, ETL and data quality tools, mashup builders and development environments, and basically any other application that thrives on data.

The environment itself to build these robots on the Kapow Website is very solid and very easy to learn. All that you have to do is register at StrikeIron and then take your UserID and password to strikeiron.kapow.net (you will need to register for a Kapow account as well when you get there) and start building and deploying robots. It is a visual environment (no code needs to be written) enabling these powerful data-collecting robots to go deep within Websites and extract 100% of any data from anywhere on the Web. It is the only product of its kind that can deal with Websites that contain Javascript and AJAX as well. And, if a source Website should ever happen to change, there are alerting capabilities to let you know,  minimizing any potential downtime. You can also actually extract data behind login-protected sites and from the results of search forms simply by passing input parameters to the REST interface for the robot.

For a "getting started" walk-through guide, click here.

Another nice benefit to StrikeIron is that in the past, we would be approached with requests for all kinds of obscure data sources, from lottery data, to global temperature data, niche medical data, and on and on. Our focus has always been providing more mainstream data such as sales tax rates, address data, telephone number data, business demographics, and financial data. These are all sources of data that have a lot of general applicability that we have done a heavy build out around and make available via API.

Now however, instead of saying "sorry" when approached with niche data requests, we can tell our prospective customers that if the data is publicly available, then a robot can be built to go and get that data in an automated way whenever desired, and that data can be fed into anything. In other words, the "long tail" of data sources is now within easy reach.

And finally, this joint offering showcases our IronCloud pay-as-you-go infrastructure offering, demonstrating that StrikeIron can provide a full solution helping software and Internet companies quickly bring enterprise solutions into a SAAS, subscription-based, pay-as-you-go model.