StrikeIron Blog

Validating the "Big Three" Data Points of Contact

There are three primary points of communication with customers and potential customers. They are the physical address (mail), the email address, and the telephone number. And often more than one in each case.

All businesses aren't the same, but in general, how important is it to communicate regularly with customers and contacts? What value can you place on the accuracy of data about your customers? Does it mirror the value of the customers themselves?

Most would agree that these data elements are important enough to ensure this contact information is current, accurate, and complete. After all, these are the gateways, the points of contact, to those who drive the bottom line. Can you afford for this information to be wrong or incomplete?

So what are some of the threats to "Big Three" accuracy?

One threat is that email addresses are changed regularly, often resulting in the disabling of existing email addresses. This can happen when someone changes jobs or leaves a company, and in an era where 95% or more of email can be spam, sometimes email addresses are changed just to be relieved from this electronic deluge of junk email.

Also, at least 40 million Americans change their mailing address at least once each year, and this usually results in one or more phone numbers being changed. And of course with the skyrocketing popularity of smartphones, keeping up with a contact's various telephone points of contact can be a bear.

Each of these are just some examples of how contact data can degrade over time.

Taking these "facts of life" and combining them with the large number of typos that can occur during the data collection process of these data elements, especially over the Web, and you have a recipe for a significant data accuracy problem.

Getting the "Big Three" right isn't always easy, but in mose cases, investing effort and resources on this issue along with the application of various solutions designed to solve these kinds of problems can pay significantly dividends, both short-term and long-term. Focusing on these three primary points of contact, and greatly improving the validity and accuracy of that information, can go along way in getting the results you are looking for when communicating with customers and potential customers.

And of course, perhaps our Contact Record Verification Suite can help. We'd be happy to talk with you about it and help address your particular situation. After all, that's what we do every day.

Revisited: Delivery Point Validation Versus CASS Style Validation

When customers are using our address verification capabilities via a Web service API within their applications and Web sites, they often ask what the difference is between an "address validation" and a "delivery point validation."

The ability to determine both exists within our product offering, but there is often confusion concerning the difference between the two and where and why the distinctions are useful. So let me try to explain.

In the case of "address validation" and whether or not an address is "valid", this refers to the CASS-certification-related style of determining the validity of an address according to the United States Postal Service master database (typically employed to gain postal discounts). However, this particular database only contains ranges of valid addresses for a given zip+4 location rather than a listing of actual physical addresses.

In other words, if you are trying to validate an address of "500 Broad Street, Anywhere, USA  12345", the database will contain entries of the ranges street numbers of that street in that particular city, and if the address to be validated falls within that range of valid street numbers, an address will be considered valid. This is without consideration as to whether or not that specific address physically exists and mail can be delivered to it. There could be a "490" Broad Street, a "496", and then a "504", but no "500". However, because it falls within a valid range, it will be returned as "valid."

This is where "delivery point validation" comes in (also known as DPV). During the address validation process, if the DPV flag is set to Y (because it exists in the DPV database), then this means that this particular address does indeed physically exist, is a "delivery point" and mail can be delivered to it. This is a more granular indicator in cases where that is necessary.

Here is an example of the two approaches. In the first, "500 Broad Street" would be determined a valid address:

In the second, the DPV indicator for this particular address would be returned as "N" since the address does not exist within the delivery point database:

So while a CASS-certified style of address verification is useful and effective in a broad set of business cases, what this demonstrates is that in terms of saving postage on undeliverable addresses and address quality in general, the DPV indicator, with its database containing over 145 million verified delivery points in the USA and its territories, is a more effective means of determining the physical existence of a given address and whether or not mail can actually be delivered.

Using both together, which StrikeIron does within both its North American Address Verification and Contact Record Verification Suite offerings, is a great approach to better address quality within any system.

Verifying Email Addresses Can Keep You Off Spam Lists

Email is a great way to communicate with customers and prospects. However, not managing a database of email addresses for accuracy and eliminating disabled or inactive email addresses from these lists can be disastrous.

Sending emails, whether it's newsletters, account information, or any other standard customer or prospect communication, to invalid or disabled email addresses, if done frequently enough, can land you on spam lists. This means that your important communications to working, legitimate email addresses will land in the spam folder and likely go unread.

How can this happen? People change email address all of the time. They leave companies, or create temporary email addresses for certain purposes, or just simply start getting too much spam so they create a new email address and disable the old one.

If you continue to send email to addresses that are not valid frequently enough, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) that host these email addresses can and will put you on their spammer list under the assumption that you are sending email to random addresses. They will then block all of the email you send in the future to any other email accounts they host. This can severely hamper your marketing and customer communication efforts, so maintaining clean email address databases is very important. Also, once you are on a spammer list, it can be very difficult to get off.

Syntax checking email addresses alone is not enough. It's important to know whether or not the email address can receive emails and not get bounced back. After all, the syntax of a disabled email address will likely be correct. This is where a sophisiticated email address verification process that employs multiple algorithms and online mechanisms is important and useful.

A scan of all email addresses prior to outbound communication (or at least at some regularly scheduled interval) to verify validity, and then removing those email addresses that are no longer receiving email, is now an imperative for an effective communications program.

Onward & Upward for Cloud, SAAS, Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is holding its Dreamforce event this week in San Francisco, and its staggering run continues to show no signs of slowing. The conference is Salesforce's eighth and largest ever, with twenty-two thousand attendees. Salesforce and its CRM "Sales Cloud" has always been one of the poster-children for SAAS, and is now riding the Cloud wave higher and higher. It was a product offering originally geared towards SMBs with minimal IT staff but now has penetrated companies of all sizes with its annual revenue run rate of $1.7 billion USD.

The use of the product at large companies is a clear signal. It was very telling during the keynote that half of the enormous audience raised their hands when Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO, asked how many in the keynote hall were from companies with 1000 or more employees. This is solid evidence that SAAS, and the Cloud, or at least the Salesforce.com version of the Cloud, has arrived emphatically in the enterprise and is growing there at great speed.

Salesforce has not only been a success for the company itself, but also for its hundreds of technology and product partners, many of which are at the expo with booths (including StrikeIron). Many of these partners have fared well providing add-on capabilities (like our native, Force.com data verification/quality services for Salesforce) to the core CRM and related-product suite. For example, there has been an 82% increase of application installs from the partner AppExchange this year versus the same time last year, nearly doubling the usage of partner applications and add-ons.

Some other feathers in the Salesforce cap:

In addition to its recent nine-figure acquisition of Jigsaw (a giant, crowd-sourced database of business cards), a $212M+stock acquistion of Heroku, a Ruby-based platform-as-a-service play was announced this morning.

Also:

- Salesforce's Chatter product was named as one of eWeek's "products of the year".

- The stock price (NYSE:CRM) has doubled in the past year.

- They have recently acquired 14 acres of land (at a price of $278M) near downtown San Francisco for groundbreaking of a brand new campus, as they are currently busting at the seams at their current Financial District address (spanning multiple high-rise buildings).

- New offerings such as Database.com (a Cloud-based database product) and Chatter.com (Facebook for businesses and business people) have been announced.

- Revenue continues to grow at 35% year, and recently beat analyst revenue estimates (November).

And on and on...

And since nearly 80% of all software purchases are still for on-premise software applications, there's a long way for Salesforce, and the Cloud, to go.

So anyone who suggests that Web-based applications, the Cloud, and SAAS applications are a short-term fad need only look to Salesforce.com for the evidence that suggests otherwise.