Validation, enrichment and other trending topics from LeadsCon New York 2015

From August 24-26, marketers and other business professionals from all over the world flocked to the Hilton in New York City to talk about one thing: performance marketing. LeadsCon has always been focused on helping marketers with lead generation and customer retention. We at Experian Data Quality were thrilled to be a part of the fun and bring our own strengths to the table.

There were many businesses who stopped by our booth bringing up the same concerns:

1. Can you help us make sure that the information we’re collecting is usable?
2. Do your verification and enrichment services work in real time?
3. What kinds of customer attributes can your data enrichment service give us?

These are all great questions, and for those of you who couldn’t make it to the LeadsCon New York event, we thought we would answer them for you.

Can you help us make sure that the information we’re collecting is usable?

Short answer: Yes. Here’s the long explanation. You acquire customer contact data from your website, call centers, mobile apps, mobile websites and from third parties. It’s not always guaranteed, thanks to human error and lack of quality control, that the data you spend time and money to collect is accurate and ready for use. The most proactive businesses that we spoke with had some sort of data verification process in place; however, a good amount of clients did not run a quality check on their data.

This is a particularly bad mistake to make when you are acquiring leads or prospects from third parties, where the integrity of data isn’t always up to the standards you need it to be. Our verification and cleansing services do the first step of making sure that the contact data—emails, phone numbers, addresses—are correct. That’s the foundation. After all, what is lead generation and customer retention without having the right customers to reach?

Do your verification and enrichment services work in real time?

A lot of the businesses we spoke to were interested in the real-time validation of data, that is, being able to immediately correct mistyped or wrongly entered data before it hits your database. We saw businesses who oriented around call center operations, direct mail and websites spanning all verticals including retail, mortgage, insurance and legal compliance issues. All of them realized that getting rid of bad data at the point of capture was a better solution than having to deal with it after it got into the database.

What kinds of customer attributes can your data enrichment service give us?

Data enrichment services are the best way to retain customers or find people that fit your description of an ideal customer. Businesses know that personalized, relevant and value-added messages are what consumers care about, and marketers absolutely know this fact.

That being said, our data enrichment services enhance basic information such as first and last name and phone numbers with socio-demographic, locational, lifestyle and many more customer attributes to give businesses a complete profile of prospects or customers they reach out to.

We had a great time at LeadsCon New York 2015—great people, interesting booths (we saw one set up as a car racing game, complete with wheels and a gas pedal) and saw businesses bringing innovative ideas to the performance marketing space. One overarching theme we noticed was the complete focus on the customer. How do we bring more value to our customers? How can we engage more of our ideal customers? Performance marketing isn’t just about making sure your time and resources are being well spent. It’s about optimizing your data to make it work for you, whether it be through generating more quality leads or connecting with your customers through better conversations. We were glad to see these challenges being met with gusto, and even more thrilled that we have the solutions that will help. ‘Till next time, LeadsCon!