This article looks at some important use cases for our DOTS IP Address Validation product.
Before diving in, let’s look at what IP Address Validation is. In a nutshell, it is a validation service that uses an IP address as an input parameter and returns details such as the IP address’ location, device type, as well as, details about potential proxies, proxy types, and more. While some of the underlying details of the service are less familiar to some people, I want to bring to your attention some of the more common use cases we see for IP Address Validation.
Location Intelligence Improves Marketing and Sales
One of the main responses you will see from the IP lookup is location information. The lookup will return city, state, country, and geocoordinates (latitude and longitude) based on the IP address. With real-time location information, sales and marketing (let’s be honest – their development team) can automate a number of rules-based uses, like:
For Marketing:
- Personalize geo-specific marketing campaigns
- In real-time, customize the visitor’s web experience by tailoring to their geographic location.
- For example, a sporting goods e-retailer might advertise snorkels to Hawaiian visitors and skis to visitors from Colorado.
- Offer to present the site in another language that is appropriate to the location.
- Enriching contact records by adding geographic details for better target marketing.
- Use location information with a demographics tool to append additional details to a contact record.
- Email and print campaigns can be better segmented and targetted.
- Alert visitors that your product or service is not available in their location.
- Attaching the location information to inbound leads allows you to see performance and insights based on geography.
For Sales:
- Identifying Designated Market Areas (DMA) that convert well for your product or service.
- Identify leads that are in top-performing DMAs and ensure those leads go to your high-performance sales teams.
- Conversely, you may want to deprioritize lead locations that under-perform or have been flagged as highly suspicious.
- When address information is not available, the geographic information derived from the IP address can help automate lead distribution, ensuring leads are properly assigned to their respective geographic sales territory.
- Some of our clients have used these insights to create new territories based on demographics or location.
Fight Fraud
Fraud can creep into systems in many ways, using IP address details can help combat fraud. The IP addresses of visitors on your web site, or more specifically of visitors submitting data through a form can be blocked or triaged when the user’s IP is flagged as a malicious or potentially malicious IP, or based on its proxy type. Additionally, red flags can be raised when the country returned from IP address does not match the country entered by the user.
You can also block or flag traffic from locations known for malicious and fraudulent traffic. Or deflect blocks of an IP range that you are experiencing fraud and denial of service attacks from.
Compliance Support
The data returned from IP Validation also provides insights that help your organization with their compliance efforts. A simple example is detecting the country they are coming from and recognizing the privacy and data protection laws of that country, like GDPR, CAN-SPAM, PIPEDA, etc, and presenting the correct terms of use for that visitor to agree to.
The service also returns CountyFIPS, StateFIPS, Latitude, Longitude, Country, Country ISO2 and ISO3 values. These can help you stay in compliance, as well as helping you avoid working with embargoed nations.
How can IP Validation help you?
There are a lot of different possibilities when it comes to IP Address Validation, and it has become a widely relied-upon service for our clients. You can find more information on our product page and developer guide.
IP Address Validation is a powerful component when it comes to verifying your contact records are genuine and accurate. Just imagine coupling this service with our other services such as Address Validation International or Lead Validation International.
Want to learn more about how our validation services can help your business? Let’s schedule some time to talk.
