As a business, you will constantly gather data and information about your clients. It makes it easier for you to stay in contact with customers, understand them better, and deliver products more efficiently.
Unfortunately, your business can be negatively affected if your customer data is poor or inaccurate. This is why validating your clients' contact information is essential.
Customer contact information is usually in one of three forms; phone number, email address, and home or office address. When you validate this data, you can improve security, minimise wasted time, improve marketing and eliminate data duplication.
However, although it is essential you verify your customer data, it can be time consuming, especially if you do not know how to do it. In this article, we look at ten ways you can validate your clients' contact information quickly and efficiently.
Ten ways to validate your clients' contact information:
1. Use Python to validate phone numbers
Python is a high-level, general-purpose computer programming language with several uses, such as building websites and software, automating tasks, and conducting data analysis. You can also validate phone numbers in Python.
Python is user-friendly; even though validating phone numbers is usually challenging. It has a library known as Python Phonenumbers that makes it easy to validate them.
There are two ways of validating phone contacts using the Python Phonenumber library. The first is the is_possible_number () method. The second is the is_valid_number () method.
The steps involved in the is_possible_number () method are:
- import or install the Phonenumbers library
- create a variable called string_phone_number containing the phone number
- parse the given phone number
- use the is_possible_number () method to validate the phone number
- set up the print output to get the result of the validation
The second method, the is_valid_number () method, follows a similar process but in step 4 you use the is_valid_number () method to validate the phone number.
Another difference is that while the is_possible_number () method verifies the phone number by checking the length of the parsed digits, the is_valid_number () method does a complete validation by inspecting the length, phone number prefix, and region.
2. Adopt JavaScript for contact validation
Like Python, JavaScript is an open-source computer programming language. It is faster than other programming languages..
In JavaScript, email validation is an essential part of the user experience of a web application. It is used to validate the data on the client-side of a web program.
Validating email or other contact information is essential when validating an HTML form. You can usually find HTML forms on web pages that allows users to enter data that is later used for processing. For example, when your business creates a contact form using survey templates and you include the form on your website. For this document to be validated, you need to verify the contact information such as email address or phone number.
The most common way of validating email in JavaScript is by using regular expressions to describe the pattern of characters. The first step, when verifying with JavaScript, is to define a regular expression (RegEx) for authenticating email addresses. Then, you will confirm whether or not the input value matches the regular expression. The final stage is to send an alert stating whether it is a valid email address or not.
3. Ping test emails
Pinging involves sending a query through a local network or the internet to another computer to ensure a good connection. In other words, pinging an email is when you send a query to an email server using the address you have been given to check it is legitimate.
The processes involved in pinging an email address are relatively simple.
- get the details of the mail server
- connect to the mail server
- "chat" with the mail server with a set sequence or protocol of commands
From the "chat" you can determine if the email address is a valid.
The tools for the pinging process are free and available on your desktop. Examples are Telnet Client and Console Application if you are using Windows.
4. Have real-time contact data validation with Experian
Experian is software that provides real-time validation tools for a business. These include address, phone, and email verification.
Experian's postal address validation services for businesses use up-to-date US Postal Service (USPS) data. It helps you to validate your customers' address information. Also, Experian's address validation solutions use delivery point validation to verify your mailing addresses.
When you validate your clients' addresses with Experian, it saves time and money by ensuring the correct locations are input into your system.
The phone verification tool from Experian ensures you collect accurate and active phone numbers from customers. This advanced phone verification tool uses data from about 1500 telecommunication providers in over 200 countries to deliver quick and accurate results to you.
When you have the correct client phone numbe, you can contact them quickly and increase customer satisfaction. Also, using Experian's phone verification tool to validate customers' phone numbers helps reduce the time employees spend calling inactive or wrong numbers.
Experian's email verification services cut down on bounced emails by verifying email addresses before sending them. The tool ensures that the provided email address is accurate and can receive messages.
When you validate clients' emails with Experian, it will help your business increase the open rates, improve email marketing, and provide accurate analytic data on customers.
5. Validate clients' emails with ZeroBounce
ZeroBounce is an accurate, fast, and secure platform that helps you validate clients' emails. This software will ensure your messages land in your clients' inboxes so you can connect with them easily.
Also, with 98% accurate email validation, AI-driven email scoring, and powerful deliverability tools, ZeroBounce helps you drive up open rates and ROI. When you notice issues like bounces, spam complaints, and low open rates, they point to the fact that you need to clean your email list.
Running the email list through ZeroBounce's bulk email verifier assists in getting rid of poor-quality contacts, boosting metrics, reducing bounces, and eliminating invalid email addresses. But, of course, once your email list is clean, you will want to maintain that.
A great way to do so is by connecting the email validation API from ZeroBounce to the signup and registration forms. This API will check every new email address in real-time.
6. Confirm clients' addresses using Loqate
Loqate is software that makes it easy for you to reach every customer wherever they are. It is an address verification system powered by the most accurate global location data.
When you validate customers' addresses, you can deliver exceptional experiences without location barriers. Loqate hopes to solve the problem of inaccuate information by being the one complete solution to capture any global address and verify and enhance the data.
Loqate's services also help to reduce failed deliveries. When you verify or validate addresses, you can save your business from losing substantial sums of money. Once you are ready to use Loqate, their excellent customer service is prepared to assist you through the process.
7. Authenticate email addresses with Mailfloss
Using a platform like Mailfloss is another excellent way to validate clients' contact information, especially their email addresses. Mailfloss allows you to automatically remove invalid email addresses from your list before they become a problem.
When you connect Mailfloss to your email service provider, you will increase email deliverability. Mailfloss scans the online correspondence list and removes invalid emails daily.
Also, you can avoid your emails ending up in spam and get more messages in the inbox of actual customers.
8. Use an address verification software like Data Ladder
Data Ladder is an address verification software that validates customers' addresses by running them against an official database like the USPS. It also updates these addresses to comply with the standardised USPS format.
The authentication process on Data Ladder helps businesses ensure the address they input is a mailable, accurate, and is a valid location within the country for delivering their products.
This procedure typically starts with address standardisation, then parsing, geocoding, formatting, etc to ensure you get the best results. Address verification with Data Ladder reduces mailing costs, improves customer service, and helps you understand customer behaviour.
9. Check for obvious typos in the contact information
Typography errors in email addresses and home addresses can invalidate the clients' contact information. For instance, email services like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo are frequently misspelled.
These mistakes will result in invalid email addresses and increase bounce rates. However, you can validate your clients' emails by either checking for these typographical errors manually or using platforms like Mailfloss to fix these typos without lifting a finger.
10. Enable contact validation with Melissa Lookups
Melissa Lookups is a collection of various tools that help businesses verify and validate their customers' information. For example, the Personator tool verifies, corrects, and appends the names, addresses, phones, and emails of your clients. Also, if any customer changes their location this tool will update it.
Another tool, the Address Check, allows you to cut and paste an address for a quick and easy verification process. You can also search for the global location of your customers by house number, street name, city, or postal code, with the Global Address Check.
Conclusion
Validating your customers' contact information is crucial for many reasons. However, it can be a challenging task. You can simplify the process by using the top ten ways to validate your clients' contact information presented here.
Fortunately, many of these methods are beginner-friendly and affordable, meaning you can jump right into validating your contact information without special training or breaking the bank.
Copyright 2021. Article made possible by Lydia Iseh for SKALE.