When lead forms are populated with inaccurate information, the business that accepts those leads into their database and attempts to interact with them are at risk of throwing away money and damaging their reputation. Whether you’re a lead generator or a lead buyer, you know that data verification is an essential part of the process, and XVerify is one company that is trying to stand in the gap and save companies from squandering their time, money and good standing.
Robert Huey, CEO of XVerify, took some time to discuss what his company does, along with his perspectives on data verification in general. Read on to find out how the process of verifying information works, which types of data verification are most popular and why time is an important factor to consider, among other topics.
Please introduce yourself.
My name is Robert Huey, and I started off managing media buying and email marketing for a couple high-volume campaigns in 2006. I have seen firsthand the ripple effect that poor data quality can have on marketing efforts. This is what led me to help create the powerful platform for data verification called XVerify. I have gained plenty of insight on the woes of media buyers and email marketers and put all the experience into this product.
How would you describe XVerify to someone hearing about the company for the first time?
XVerify performs real-time data verification to make sure you capture legitimate contact credentials. For example, if a user is on your Web form and they provide a randomly made up email address or even just a type, XVerify will prompt that user on the spot to make sure they provide an accurate email address. Not only checking the syntax of the email address and that the domain is valid, we are also checking that a mailbox exists at that address. Our email verification also comes standard with real-time scrubbing against harmful email addresses that you would not want to mail to. XVerify not only validates email address, but we also verify phone numbers, as well as verify and autocorrect postal address.
There are a variety of data verification companies out there. What distinguishes XVerify from its competitors?
Our level of accuracy and response times are top-notch — this is what our customers want, and we deliver. In addition to that, we also offer a built-in fraud blocking system to identify temporary email accounts; and high-risk, frequent complainers. This helps our clients who are email marketers lower their complaint rate and improve email deliverability. We also offer our clients a user-friendly dashboard where they can monitor their affiliates, optimize their traffic sources and set up custom settings for verification and fraud detection for their account. We are frequently adding new features to our core products and when we do, it is usually provided at no additional cost to the customer.
Can you take us through a brief overview of the various verification solutions the company provides?
Email verification is a solution we offer where we check in real time at the server level to determine if an email ID is a registered and active email account. We are also checking against our internal list of screamers, complainers, high-risk emails and temporary email domains.
Phone verification is to ensure you are capturing real, dialable phone numbers. We can identify if the phone number is a cellphone or a landline, or if it is a personal or business line; and we can also send you back geographic information as well. We can verify any phone number with in the U.S. and Canada, and we can validate both cellphone and landline numbers.
Address verification makes sure your customers are providing you with a real, mailable postal address. If an address has minor errors in it, we will also autocorrect it in real time to ensure that you have the most accurate information as possible. We can verify any addresses within the U.S. and Canada, and we are also capable of verifying P.O. boxes.
Lead scoring is a service that will help you reduce your risk of fraud. Lead scoring looks at all the information a customer has provided in your lead-capture form and then does a cross-comparison of data from a reverse lookup to generate a custom, unique score.
Phone confirm guarantees you that the user who provided you with the phone number has access to that phone. With phone confirm, we send an automated call to the user providing them a PIN, which they will have to enter on your website to confirm their phone number.
Which of these solutions is the most popular?
Our most popular services are our email verification and phone confirm. With the email verification aspect, most businesses and marketers are collecting the users’ email address as a first method of contact, so having real, active email accounts is crucial. Our customers love the fact that we are scrubbing against high-risk accounts, frequent complainers and temporary accounts, which helps their overall deliverability by not only reducing bounces but also reducing their complaint rate at the same time.
With the phone confirm aspect, my customers want to know that not only is the phone number that was entered correct and dialable, but also that it belongs to the user who entered the contact information on the lead form. Once the user submits the lead, they get a phone call right away to the phone number they entered, and they must verify a four-digit PIN. That is the best way to verify that the information the user entered into your form is their personal information and not the information of someone else.
It seems like verifying all these types of data requires a frequently updated database of phone numbers, addresses, etc. How does the company ensure this?
We certainly are updating our database very frequently. Our postal addresses come directly from the USPS as well as the Canadian Post, and our phone number directory is updated on a weekly basis. However, email addresses are not verified via a database — it is accomplished via real-time communication with mail servers.
Who benefits most from this type of data verification? Are there certain industries that need these services more than others?
Every industry can benefit from having clean data. If you are acquiring customer data through any means, whether it be through clerks at a retail checkout line, call center reps or through online Web forms, if you don’t have accurate contact information you have lost the ability to communicate with that customer, as well as lose a potential sale. We have customers in the lead-generation space across all different verticals, and we have a number of customers in industries like health care, retail, insurance and medical. We help them cut costs on lead-buying expenses by allowing them to immediately know the value of the lead they are buying and can help them identify which sources are sending them the most invalid leads. We also service a lot of major online retailers who find it necessary to validate customer credentials before checkout. This insures that the customer will get their receipt, the product will go to a deliverable postal address and that customers will be able to log into their accounts to check on an order status or make another purchase.
When it comes to lead scoring, XVerify offers eight criteria that can be assigned points. Which of those criteria is typically most heavily weighted?
That is completely customizable by our clients. We give you 100 points to use and you can disperse them across the various criteria areas to generate unique scores.
Can you discuss the importance of time as a factor in scoring leads?
We do offer time scoring as an additional part of our lead-scoring service. The importance of time scoring is that it helps you identify if it was a real human submitting the Web form or if it is likely to be an automated activity. For example, if you have a landing page with a decent amount of content on it, then your average lead-capture time might be around 1-2 minutes. However, if your Web forms are getting submitted in fewer than 30 seconds, that is likely to be suspicious and could be considered as fraud.
What are the most interesting trends that you’re seeing regarding data verification? Do you think certain pieces of data require more attention from those in the business of generating or buying leads these days?
One thing that is great to see is that many of our pre-existing clients are growing and increasing the amount of volume they send for verification. That proves to me that our service works and we are improving their media buying so they can continue to grow.
The majority of the companies that work with us use our services for email verification. In this industry, many companies prefer to use email as their primary method of communication with the end user. Email marketing has changed significantly over the last 10 years, so anything that can help get or keep your marketing campaign in the inbox is a must. Our customers are using our service to help keep their sender reputation in line, remove their bounces and lower their complaints.
How has the industry changed most since the company began? What changes do you expect to see in the verification game in the near future?
Data verification has not changed too wildly, however we are seeing an increasing urgency from our customers to have a verification method in place. We are seeing a higher level of new customers approaching us on a daily basis because either they see the value in the service we are providing or they have recently been burned by bad data and are looking for a fix. People are looking for ways to be smarter about media buying and email marketing, and that is exactly what our platform does for them.
Looking forward to the future, I think it is going to be necessary to take more steps to help identify and prevent fraud before it occurs. Within our technology, we are already identifying fraud-related email addresses and activity on a landing page; however we can and will be continuing to improve this as we move forward.
If you could drive home one message for our readers, what would it be?
I always say that it is better to be safe than sorry. We have two main goals with our service: help you save on your media buying expense by not wasting money on inaccurate and fraudulent leads, and help improve your email deliverability. I cannot tell you how many people come to me after the damage is done, their campaign has turned upside down and their email deliverability is next to none. You can no longer be reactive
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