Steps to Maintain High-Quality Phone Number Database
Don’t just read the title and move away. If your marketing depends on the database, stay, read learn and apply. A company collects data in multiple forms amongst which email and phone numbers are considered the most popular ones. They might be popular and easy to gather, but they are equally prone to decay with time. Rather than being proud of a huge database, a wise company would ensure its database holds value and is not just a morgue of useless information.
Reasons that stand in favor of a regular phone validation and email verification:
Reasons that stand in favor of a regular phone validation and email verification:
- Data decay: Change is the law of nature. Anytime a prospect or an existing customer changes job moves to a new place or makes any other life change, their profile becomes outdated. You will be surprised to know that even a well-managed database decays at an average of 2-3 % each month. This means around 1/3 rd of your well-managed data could be invalid in just a year!
- Data Accuracy & quality: Data provided by customers might not be always accurate. Typos, handwriting legibility, or incomplete info are very common errors but can have a big impact on the quality of your database. API integration of phone number & email validation tools can limit the inaccuracies.
- Minimum wastage of resources: For any company, the basic valuable resources are money, employees and their time. Cleaning the database on a regular basis, removal of duplicate data ensures that there is minimum wastage.
Developing and maintaining a strong customer relationship is directly proportional to the quality of the phone number database. Incomplete or inaccurate data can lead to a bad impression and put a permanent wreck in your sales and marketing performance. Say for example you made a follow-up call to your customer only to find out he has been already contacted by another member of your team! Upon cross-checking, you find the reason to be a duplicate contact. Embarrassing right? To avoid similar situations the following steps are mandatory:
- Validation on phone field in your form:
- There are times when the wrong phone number is entered by mistake, but at times wrong information is fed intentionally to receive your content or another offer. Allowing people to complete the forms with wrong information creates an incredibly messy phone number database and hinders your efficiency. A simple remedy is the API integration at the phone number field to provide real-time validation ensuring the invalid phone numbers to stay out of the database.
- Regular scrubbing of the database through a phone validation tool:
- Regular scrubbing of the existing database and the new addition ensures the data to be up- to-date. This means any data which subsequently became inactive or invalid will be removed, avoiding any wastage of resources on them. With a phone validator like ClearoutPhone, that supports bulk validation, the data can be smartly updated.
- Ensure your database doesn’t include numbers that are on ‘Do not call list’:
- Calling or sending SMS to the phone numbers present on a ‘Do Not Call list’ can end up costing your business a lot of money— possibly even millions of dollars. With free tools being available online, consider scrubbing your database against the national Do Not Call list at least twice a year to avoid such unnecessary expenditures.
- Decide who can access and edit your database:
- Too many cooks spoil the broth, similarly too many users can spoil your data. A phone number list does not represent just an investment of money, it’s also a resource for your team to generate future sales. Limiting the number of people who can access and edit the list is a wise decision to avoid any misuse.
- Avoid entrance of duplicate leads, merge the existing ones:
- This step is required to prevent more than one resource working on the same lead. With phone validation tools like ClearoutPhone, you get the option of removing the duplicate phone numbers. Moreover, no credits are charged for the duplicate phone numbers.
- Segmentation of data:
- In the simplest terms, segmentation is the division of phone-number data based on status, location, carrier, line type, etc. This segmentation holds a high value in making your phone marketing campaigns successful. How? By ensuring you send the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format. For example, The success rate of an SMS campaign is going to be really low if the phone number database is not segmented into mobile numbers and landline numbers. Sending SMS on landing...Do I need to say anything more!
The conclusion is, technology has given us resources to make the best use of our database using
which we can create and maintain personal and healthier relationships with the customers and
prospects. Not maintaining a clean database can set in motion a wave of negative consequences that
will keep coming like a tide you can’t escape. So ensure to follow the above-mentioned steps and
make data integrity your top priority.
