DOTS Lead Validation for US and Canada, along with its counterpart Lead Validation – International, validate Name, Email, Address, Phone Number, IP Address and optionally business names to validate and score B2B and B2C leads. We are constantly improving our service and wanted to share recent updates, new features and abilities.
Enhancing component matching algorithms
One of the main parts of the latest Lead Validation service is the improvements to the algorithms around matching name, business name, email and phone contact data to each other. These updates allow us to match more challenging cases like a partial Name to an Email or identify matches that deserve more points awarded to them in the final score.
A lead with the name of Robert Johnson and the email robjohn@hotmail.com used to return a bad name to email match. Our latest build will now return a strong name to email match and assign full points. The same lead with robman@hotmail.com or johnnyboy@hotmail.com, also formerly returning a bad match, now return as partial matches and receive some points. We consider partial names and nicknames in these checks and look at both sides of the comparison be it a name to email, an email to phone, a phone to business name etc.
In the previous build, we gave too many points to leads having either a good match (e.g. email matches name) or as a result of the email returning good with no positive match. Our latest build splits that logic apart a bit more so that some points are given for those earlier things, but more points are given when both a good email is identified AND a match is made.
In addition to that, since matching two data points like name and email is an imperfect science, we are also allowing points corrections. That is, if we cannot get a match on email to name but we match name to phone and phone to email, we can give some points back to the failing test by using transitive law logic. Some mixed business/residential cases are helped more by this sort of logic.
Name doesn’t match Email
Name matches Phone
Phone matches Email
Therefore: Name = Phone = Email
Identify organization types by email
Our Lead Validation – US service have new informational notes and tests for educational, government, military and organizational (.org) email addresses. Users can identify the organization types by looking in the Email Notes section of the Lead Validation – US output:
- IsEducationEmail
- IsOrganizationEmail
- IsGovernmentEmail
- IsMilitaryEmail
These notes allow clients to identify these types of leads and use them in their decision-making process. In addition, there are new scoring tests associated with these notes that allow our users to customize scoring a bit more to suit their needs. For example, one user might be looking to do business with reliable companies and might favor good emails coming from the government, military or a .org email, and they could choose to add some extra points to leads identifying this way. The same company might also be getting requests from students with .edu emails and want to take some points away from these, since those would be less reliable B2B leads. This sort of scoring is very customized, so clients looking to make changes here should have a custom test type and reach out to the Service Objects team for assistance.
Recent improvements from Lead Validation – International
The recent improvement from Lead Validation – International identifying high and medium-risk countries has now been incorporated into Lead Validation – US as well. While international leads themselves will fail Lead Validation – US for being outside of the US and Canada, this update still allows mixed data points to be identified and dealt with more harshly. For example, this means a lead alleged to be a US lead that is identified with an international phone number, address or IP Address could be flagged as an at-risk data point.
Since Lead Validation – US is designed to fail leads coming from other countries, the data points mentioned above are mostly informational. The update does incorporate the ability to add some extra decision-making on affected data points, so there may be future uses that we did not consider for our Lead Validation service.
Coming soon to Lead Validation Services
The next big update coming to Lead Validation – US and Lead Validation – International is an improvement to detect bogus company information. Business names can vary greatly from name to domain to contact data, and no dataset containing business data is ever complete. We have added recent updates adding vulgarity checks, and the next step is identifying bogus or garbage data, which can be very difficult to do when given the unstructured nature of a business name.
Translation software is being added to other services currently, and while Lead Validation- International currently handles names in foreign character languages in an acceptable fashion, it will make better use of the new features with proper integration.
Another upcoming update will be to identify emails, IP addresses and potentially other data points that are entering a company’s system too quickly. Repeated instances of an email or IP address – especially with other data points that are different – should be considered a higher risk, and we will be investigating the best ways to use that knowledge.
Lead Validation – US and Lead Validation – International are continuously evolving to cater to the changing requirements of our clients. Please feel free to contact us to discover the extensive benefits these services can offer and how they might help your company!
