In sales operations, the verification of contact data is often relegated to the background, if not completely forgotten. As a result, prospecting and nurturing efforts are impacted by inaccurate or obsolete contact data, with significant economic and reputational implications (returned parcels, risk of spamming prospects, poor campaign deliverability, etc.).
In this article, Data Enso explores the importance of verifying contact data for commercial prospecting, particularly in the e-commerce sector.
Checking contact data: what impact on the ROI of sales prospecting?
Prospecting efforts cannot do without the verification of contact data, since their accuracy and reliability have a direct impact on the return on investment (ROI) of the sales function in the broadest sense. Often overlooked, this good practice has fundamental economic and strategic implications, which can be summarized in the following three points:
- Resource optimization. The accuracy of your contact data determines the relevance of your targeting. By directing your efforts to the right people, you optimize every euro invested, as your marketing and sales resources are not wasted on inaccurate, substandard or obsolete emails, phone numbers or postal addresses.
- Improved message deliverability. Verified contact data ensures that company communications reach their intended recipients. This increases your chances of effectively engaging prospects, with interesting repercussions on response and conversion rates.
- Preserving the company's reputation: sending marketing and sales communications to erroneous or obsolete contacts can damage the company's image, insofar as it can be assimilated to a source of spam... especially if its database is polluted by duplicates.
In the rest of this article, we'll look at the concrete case of an e-commerce website whose sales performance has dropped due to a data verification problem.
Case study: data verification for an e-commerce website
Fashion Rush (fictitious company) is a fast-growing e-commerce business specializing in the online sale of designer clothing. Its main competitive advantage? An offensive, sometimes aggressive, marketing strategy and a "remarkable" shopping experience, based on innovation and immersion with two tools that make all the difference in this highly competitive market:
- A product recommendation module powered by AI and Machine Learning, which achieves a very high degree of personalization based on the visitor's interactions with the website.
- A virtual reality fitting tool, which also acts as a Lead Magnet, feeding relevant data into the product recommendation module.
After a phase of dazzling growth, e-commerce sales performance seems to be taking a beating. The team therefore decided to investigate the problem and carry out an in-depth analysis of marketing KPIs. Four major anomalies were detected:
- High email bounce rate: Fashion Rush observed that the bounce rate of its email campaigns had risen considerably, with emails failing to reach their recipients.
- Decreasing conversion rate: the conversion rate of site visitors into actual customers began to fall. While site traffic continued to increase, thanks in particular to the Lead Magnet, it seemed that marketing messages based on contact data and user preferences were failing to convince visitors to make a purchase.
- Low response rate to satisfaction surveys: Fashion Rush regularly sends satisfaction surveys to its customers by email, to gather their feedback and improve the service offered. The response rate to these surveys was well below the industry average. Two hypotheses: the surveys are not relevant, or they simply don't reach customers' inboxes.
- High parcel return rate: the company has noted an increase in parcels returned by delivery services due to incorrect or obsolete addresses.
These observations all point in the same direction: a poor-quality database that has a direct impact on a company's sales performance.
As Fashion Rush grew, the amount of data it collected (from its website, social networks, newsletters, etc.) exploded. This rapid accumulation of data was not accompanied by a relevant data management strategy. Contact information, such as email addresses, telephone numbers and postal addresses, was not verified either at the time of entry or afterwards. The database contained numerous duplicate entries, with slightly different information for the same customer.
How can we get Fashion Rush's sales performance back on track?
#1 Checking email addresses as they are entered
Checking contact data in real time is a decisive best practice for a website that relies on lead generation and receives a lot of traffic.
This feature checks the accuracy of the email address before submitting the form, as a preventive measure. The aim here is to avoid typos, non-existent domains or formatting errors. For example, if the user enters " gmail.cmo " instead of " gmail.com ", the verification tool can immediately flag the error and ask the user to correct it.
Fashion Rush will therefore be able to ensure that each email address collected is not only valid, but also active and capable of receiving its prospecting emails and nurturing campaigns. By ensuring the accuracy of email addresses at the time they are entered, Fashion Rush will also reduce the time and resources needed to clean up the database after the fact (discussed in point 3).
#2 Checking postal addresses
This is an essential step for e-commerce, as it authenticates and standardizes postal addresses so that every entry in the Fashion Rush database is accurate and usable for delivery. Postal address verification will have an impact on three levels:
- Lower return rates, with reduced costs associated with returns and new delivery attemptsÂ
- Customer satisfaction: smooth, frictionless delivery contributes to the quality of the experience. Customers receive their orders at the right address at the right time, without the need for multiple exchanges.Â
- Efficient direct marketing, especially for catalogs and special offers sent by post, with improved campaign ROI.
#3 Cleaning existing databases
Implementing a real-time email address verification solution helps to ensure the reliability of future data... but Fashion Rush already has a database that is well supplied, but polluted with incorrect, obsolete or redundant data, collected before the solution was implemented. This is where "curative" cleaning comes in.
Data cleansing involves identifying and correcting (or removing) errors, inconsistencies and duplicates in a database. In the case of Fashion Rush, this might include incorrect e-mail addresses, incorrect telephone numbers, duplicate customer profiles or invalid postal addresses.
Typically, successful e-commerce businesses may have between several thousand and several million entries in their databases. The solution will therefore need to incorporate Batch technology for batch processing.
The impact of this data cleansing on sales prospecting is immense. On the one hand, by removing duplicates, Fashion Rush ensures that each prospect or customer is contacted only once, improving the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and reducing the risk of churn. By correcting errors in email and postal addresses, Fashion Rush increases the reach of its marketing campaigns and ensures that its messages reach the right target.
Data Enso: transform your Data capital to boost your sales prospecting
Whether it's real-time email address verification with EnsoEmail, database cleansing and deduplication with EnsoDedup, or postal address verification with EnsoAdress, Data Enso has developed a range of turnkey solutions for companies and e-tailers wishing to leverage Data to boost their overall performance.
In addition to boosting the ROI of their prospecting efforts, our solutions also enable them to consolidate customer engagement and better seize cross-selling opportunities. Don't let a poor-quality database hold back your growth. Test our solutions for 30 days, free of charge and with no obligation!
