Are Invalid Emails, Phone Numbers Hampering your Ability to Identify Qualified Leads?

Last Updated on October 6, 2020 by Rakesh Gupta

Why send your Inside Sales Team on a wild-goose chase with invalidated Email and Phone Numbers? We can do better than that – so, let us do it!

Inaccurate information can be staggeringly expensive – dampens productivity and morale – of your Inside Sales team, Marketing team, and the company as a whole.

Impact of wrong contact information on your business:

1. Lower customer satisfaction – Not receiving calls, mail, or parcels when they are expecting them is frustrating for your customers.
2. Lower sales & marketing productivity – Calling incorrect phone numbers and manually entering error-prone data is killing the effectiveness of sales and marketing teams.
3. Higher marketing costs – By cleaning your mailing lists (both email and physical) there is a lot of money to be saved in postage and email marketing solution fees.
4. Higher costs for returned and lost mail and parcels – Lost and returned mail and parcels not only make customers furious, they cost a ton of money too.

Verified vs Unverified Email

A business, whether it’s a Financial Services, Healthcare, or e-Commerce, builds its marketing campaign centered around a good mailing list. Therefore, it is better to have 500 verified Leads in a Lead’s object than 5,000 unverified Emails and Phone Numbers.

According to the Digital Marketing Association, Email marketing provides a whopping 4300% return on investment. That kind of return is next to impossible on most other mediums – whether online or offline. But the health and efficacy of Email marketing campaigns primarily depend on the integrity of a company’s mailing list, among other factors.

Why is this the case? Well, when you have accurate Email and Phone Numbers in a Lead’s object, it helps you to avoid deliverability problems and reduces the likelihood that you’ll get into trouble with your Email service provider. Furthermore, if information in your system is accurate then, you will end up paying less for your Email marketing projects! Basically then, having cleaner data is a no brainer!

Benefits of using a verified email in the system 

Being selective with your Leads, and ensuring that you only have verified Emails and Phone Numbers, builds a good foundation for your Email marketing strategy. Here are the 3 benefits of verifying your Leads in Salesforce:

1. Improve your sender reputation and avoid deliverability problems
2. Avoid getting into trouble with your email service provider
3. Avoid overpaying for your email marketing plan

The importance of having a clean, and reliable, Salesforce org should never be underestimated. Yet, the best-laid plans are often thwarted by a combination of human error and inconsistent physical address. 

 

In light of the above screenshots, the following questions arise – is the Email address of the Lead 1324@gmail.com is correct? If not then, what is the source of this inaccurate data? Is it due to importing data into Salesforce without pre-validation? Or, is it due to the creation of a Lead without validating an Email? It is difficult, if not impossible, to identify whether the Email or the Phone Number, is legitimate or fake.

How to validate, Emails, Phone Numbers, and Addresses?

We just established that invalid contact information is expensive! Now, let us take a look at how to avoid this pothole! We will do so by developing, and implementing, various checks and balances known as, data validation with a native Salesforce app.

Email verification services help you to verify that its mailbox exists and is able to receive mail. You will be able to do so without ever sending an Email! The same applies to Phone Numbers and Address verification. 

Validations improve the deliverability of both Email and postal deliveries. Usually, customers have reported postal delivery failures reduced by up to 70% and Email delivery rates of 97.5% on opt-in lists after validating it by using some services. 

How Does Salesforce handle Email, Phone or Address Validation?

Out-of-the-box, Salesforce doesn’t offer any services to validate Emails and Phone Numbers. However, Salesforce does offer autocompletion on standard addresses. Salesforce app users can enter text in standard address fields and see possible matching addresses in a picklist. But it is only supported in a few countries. 

Business Use case: – Suzanne Schneider is working as a System Administrator at Gurukul on Cloud (GoC). Suzanne knows that there are a few hundred inaccurate Leads in her org – wrong Emails and Phone Numbers. As a result, she is looking for some expert help to identify such records, as well as to create some process so that it also flags on new records. 

Introducing Record Validation – App for Email, Phone Number, and Address validation

Cleaning up data, in any org, is massively time-consuming – that is why prevention is better than cure. I tried many apps and stumbled upon –  Record validation app on AppExchange. The app does the following: 

• Validates Email Address – Validates all your existing Email addresses and checks newly entered Email addresses for hard bounces, disposable domains like mailinator, catch-all, role-based, and spam-trap Email addresses.  
• Validates Phone Number – Work efficiently and it makes sure that your sales and support agents only call valid phone numbers. 
• Validate Address – Record Validation validates address fields for over 240 countries worldwide. By autocompleting addresses, Record Validation saves your users a lot of time in creating and/or editing new records. 

Use Case #1 – Email validation in Salesforce

Emailing to invalid – or hard bounce – Email addresses is a costly exercise. It has a negative return on your investment financially and your reputation-wise. Validate all your existing email addresses and check newly entered Email addresses for hard bounces, disposable domains like mailinator, catch-all, role-based, and spam-trap email addresses.  

The best part is, you don’t need to create complex email validation rules or regex. Instead, you can let Record Validation do the heavy lifting for you! Using a batch validator, you can analyze your complete org (email fields on all (custom) objects) and have it cleaned so you work with accurate and validated records.

Use Case #2 – Phone validation and formatting

A phone number is a vital contact point for service, as well as SMS and mobile marketing. If your organization is looking to interact with customers then, having a verified phone number will ensure that the numbers you collect are accurate before you call the phone or send a text message.

The tool allows you to validate new and existing telephone number fields against the format of your choice: E.164, National, International, or RFC 3966. It also indicates the phone number type. That comes in handy when you want to run an SMS campaign. No need to write complex validation rules for international phone numbers; for, it is easy to configure them in Record Validation. Record Validation validates phone numbers for more than 240 countries worldwide, including automatically formatting phone numbers. 

Use Case #3 – Address validation and autocomplete for Salesforce

Validating a mailing address will reduce the delivery errors by up to 70%.  Record Validation validates address fields for over 240 countries worldwide. By autocompleting addresses, Record Validation can save sales reps a lot of time that they would otherwise spend in creating or editing new records. 

Record Validation offers a batch validator Jobs to Validate and verify all your existing records in Salesforce. In the process of setting up a new job, you have the ability to select a standard (Lead, Contact, or Account) or custom objects. 

So, why mess around with bad Emails, Phone Numbers, or Address data and generate a shadow of doubt on your org’s data integrity, your hard-earned reputation, and negatively impact your sales revenue?! Install Record Validation today and improve delivery rates of Email as well as make the right call to the right person by having correct phone numbers! Since Record Validation is a native Salesforce app, you no longer need that labor-intensive process of exporting records, sending them to a data cleaning service, and reimporting the cleaned records. All the validating is done directly in Salesforce.

Formative Assessment:

I want to hear from you!  

What is one thing you learned from this post? How do you envision applying this new knowledge in the real world? 

Let me know by Tweeting me at @automationchamp, or find me on LinkedIn.

Proofreader: - Munira Majmundar