Contact data validation

If your contact information is wrong or out of date, your emails won’t reach your prospects’ inboxes and you’ll be unable to make contact. A product like Experian’s Email Validation helps ensure you’ve got the right information so that your messages can be delivered to both existing customers and potential leads.

Fake or incorrect emails result in bounces, which in turn impacts your reputation as a sender and reduces deliverability. By validating your email lists you’ll keep your bounce rates low and ensure your emails don’t fall foul of anti-spam tools. Experian’s Email Validation goes further, automatically suggesting corrections as emails are entered if they’re invalid.

In addition to harming your email deliverability rates, inaccurate, fake and harmful email addresses aren’t credible prospects. Ensuring the contact details you capture are valid means your sales and marketing teams don’t waste time and effort chasing non-existent leads.

Going through your email address lists manually is both costly and time-consuming. An automated API like Experian’s Email Validation captures and verifies email addresses as they’re entered to ensure you gain genuine, error-free email addresses at the point of first contact. Going forward, you can save more time by making use of a third-party data-auditing service, such as Experian’s Professional Services team, to regularly check and update your lists so they remain complete and accurate.

The best time to audit addresses is when they’re first entered onto your CRM system, website or online form. Solutions such as Experian Address Validation check the details entered against a range of official sources spanning 245 countries to ensure the data captured is accurate and complete.

While it’s important you record customer addresses accurately, entering addresses line by line is time-consuming. Experian Address Validation offers real-time validation and enrichment that allows you to auto-populate address fields based on limited user input, such as a postcode. This cuts data entry time by up to 80%, delivering a better experience for your end-users.

There’s no need to implement new systems to incorporate address verifications systems. Look for a solution that’s designed to integrate with your existing systems rather than the other way around. Experian Address Validation is extremely flexible – it can be incorporated into your websites, PoS systems, call centres and a wide range of CRM, ERP and ecommerce applications.

A good address verification system does more than simply validate addresses, it also allows you to link them to additional information to provide a more detailed view of your customers. For example, Experian Address Validation enables you to attach additional attributes, such as coordinates for latitude and longitude, as well as lifestyle, demographic and business data. All these elements are then linked together using Unique Point Reference Numbers (UPRNs).

People’s contact details can change over time, so it makes sense to periodically go through your contacts database checking for outdated and inaccurate information. A good service, like that provided by Experian Data Cleansing, enables you to audit your databases on a regular basis or as required, for example, ahead of marketing campaigns. These audits verify every address: updating, cleansing, enhancing and suppressing as necessary to ensure your database remains accurate, complete and compliant.

Suppressing records is a key part of maintaining accurate data records. Aside from ensuring you remain compliant, data suppression reduces the risk of miscommunication and helps reduce waste by removing contact details of those who can’t or won’t respond. Experian can suppress records using over 180 million records from a range of datasets, including two exclusive sets: Absolute Movers and Mortality Suppression. 

There are many factors that determine the validity of a phone number: the number syntax and format, country code and number length to name a few. Automated phone verification systems can go the extra mile and confirm a number is correct. They can also verify the number’s network provider and its existence on the network, its porting status and whether it can be reached, all of which helps ensure you don't waste time trying to contact unreachable prospects.

One way to check numbers when they’re entered onto your system is to use SMS messages to provide multi-factor authentication during customer onboarding. It improves your customer experience and ensures that important communications (including subsequent SMS messages) will reach the customer from the off. 

People are always switching phones (and numbers) and moving home. By periodically submitting your database to a trusted partner such as Experian’s Professional Services team, however, you can ensure your database remains accurate, up to date and compliant no matter how often your clients change their contact details.  The experts at Experian’s Professional Services purge fake, incorrect and dead numbers from your lists and provide you with a useful summary of your phone data’s overall health.

You need to know the product you pick is comprehensive – and proven. Experian’s phone validation service covers 100% of mobile phones in the UK and Ireland, and is partnered with over 1,500 telecommunications providers across more than 220 countries. In 2019, it was used to validate no fewer than 500 million phone numbers.

Good decisions rely on good data. Research indicates that organisations believe that almost one-third of the data stored in their CRM is inaccurate, which has a detrimental effect on your insight and decision making. Maintaining an accurate and up-to-date contact database is a necessary first step in the process of transforming your records so they can help you make smarter, more informed decisions.

The more accurate your customer contact information, the more effective your marketing campaigns. Increased deliverability ensures your communications reach the right person in a timely manner, resulting in more cut-through and profitable campaigns. You’ll also reduce the financial impact of data errors and improve your customer experience.

You shouldn’t have to switch systems to improve contact data validation. Look for a solution that’s capable of integrating easily with your current CRM, ERP and eCommerce setup – Experian’s data management products, for example, mesh effortlessly with SAP, MS Dynamics 365 and Salesforce systems.

Every point in your customer journey plays an important role in boosting your reputation. Choose a contact validation system that not only ensures customer details are valid from the get-go, but which also offers clients time-saving tools, such as auto-complete suggestions to simplify data entry.