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1. Reduce costs. SMS marketing demands phone validation and is a sure bet to reduce messaging costs. Phone validation can separate land-line phone numbers from mobile phone numbers. With this, you don’t have to worry about your business wasting money sending messages to numbers no longer in use or unable to receive an SMS message on a landline. Improve your insight into customer behavior.
   
   
2. Better customer insight. Phone validation can reveal meaningful insight to improve your ROI. With a valid phone # you use any number of services to reverse append valid postal addresses and in many cases demographic insight to further improve your marketing results.
   
   
3. Better Marketing Returns. Eventually, you will notice a significant increase in your marketing return on investment.  

And what a long year it was. As always, some things (like you and me, for example) just kept getting better with age. But some did not....

For example, your customer and prospect data lose value with every passing week and month, becoming increasingly outdated as people change jobs, emails, phone numbers, companies, roles, and even their names.

Maybe it’s time for a data diet! Say goodbye to stale data junk food! Out with the useless and in with the useful should be your data motto. If you are not utilizing data, is there any point in holding on to it and clogging up your CRM system? Did it help you deliver content? Was it timely, relevant and easy to access? Is it worth keeping? Why not apply these lessons to your data implementation strategy?

1. Get Back in touch. Your customers and prospects still need to hear from you. And, if you don’t contact your customers, your competitors may!
2. Develop and use data-driven insights. Prospect audiences in a more relevant and engaging way?
   
3. Think outside the box. Ask your data vendors for proactive recommendations – they are the experts and may already have a solution you need.
   

Did you know… there are zombies in your contacts file? And, just like zombies everywhere, you can’t always tell that they are zombies ...until it’s too late!

These are special DATA ZOMBIES

They don’t commit their evil deeds until you’ve pushed the SEND button. Then off they go into the world, entrusted with your precious message and determined to make sure that it never reaches your targets. Now, your entire campaign is infected with reduced open rates and sub-optimal ROI. Perfectly innocent-looking to the untrained eye, these decayed addresses, spam traps, catch-alls, and dysfunctional domains careen diabolically through the plumbing of the Internet, yielding only bounces and failed deliveries where real recipients once flourished and engaged.

But zombie management is just one component of the larger issue of data maintenance. Keeping data updated, validated, and complete is foundational to transforming data into insights and insights into relationships.

DATA DECAY NEVER SLEEPS

According to Dun & Bradstreet, 25-33% of mail addresses change every year. In the next hour, 58 business addresses will change, 11 companies will change their names, and 41 new businesses will open …not to mention how many companies will go out of business.

Unfortunately, keeping pace with these changes is not a problem solved with data tricks (or treats). It requires the use of information from outside the virtual walls of your company, data that has been acquired with proprietary, real-world verification processes, deployed with consistency and regularity. The data providers who manage the updating problem take the burden of data verification off your shoulders, doing what they do best so that you can focus on your wheelhouse ...and use their data and your own to make it effective.

But the referential data that you need to bring your data zombies back to life is problematic for the same reasons it's useful: It's from outside of your enterprise ...and it's outside of your data ecosystem. How do you integrate these datasets to optimize your own information?

There are two approaches to this challenge. One is to use technology to integrate the data. For this, you can look to the data vendor, who is ready to sell you a solution (and accompanying services) to enable you to consume their data. For each data source, you'll need the vendor-specific solution. Or you can look to a data integration solution provider like Matchbook Services [ https://matchbookservices.com/ ] for a stand-alone toolset that enables you to manage multiple data sources.

The other alternative for utilizing 3rd-party data is to turn to a data and data services provider that will manage the data acquisition and integration problem for you. Preferably, one that is data-source-agnostic. Ideally, one that can put decades of B2B data experience to work on helping you achieve your lead generation and account-building objectives, getting you the data you need from the right sources, and then making it easy for you to put that data to use.

If this approach sounds promising, contact me or visit Alliance 4 Data [ https://www.alliance4data.com/]. We are specialists at finding your zombies and administering the only known cure for data zombification: Updated, validated, verified, fresh-from-the-source information!

IT organizations and business units turn to iPaaS providers to eliminate the rigidity that burdens SaaS integration; allowing business users to compose workflows between these platforms, data, users, and business processes. The ensuing obsession among iPaaS providers is a drumbeat of no-code or low-code API middleware-like solutions that tout a simple GUI, workflow, and process orchestration capability.