You may think that a business contact’s direct mail data is accurate, but is it?
Like more and more companies today, you may be going back to using direct mail to engage your customers and prospects, especially after experiencing the disappointment of declining email response rates. However, possessing and finding accurate direct mail data for contacts is a challenge, especially if you are marketing business-to-business. When it comes to database building and maintenance, business customer contacts can be difficult to trace when they relocate to another company or even just change roles or offices within their organization.
You can run your list of contacts against records with the National Change of Address (NCOA) system, but you will only obtain mailing address verification for each contact’s business, not where the contacts themselves are located. For example, you may get the existing address for the headquarters of a contact’s business but there’s no confirmation that the contact is in that location or another. You might consider using a service that conducts data scraping, which involves pulling contact information from email signatures or electronic business cards. However, that data is often only 70-75 percent accurate.
The Lowdown on How to Build a Database
At SimplyDIRECT, we “curate” contact list building, gathering as much intelligence as possible on your target customers. Our contact lists are hand-crafted in the sense that we research each contact individually and we employ a two-step method with this contact research:
- Research the Internet
We will go to the Internet and thoroughly research each contact based on their job title, function, keywords, etc. and use that information to determine their mailing address versus simply scraping it off the Internet.
- Call the Contact’s Company
Taking what we learned through our Internet research, we’ll then phone call each contact’s company to verify their mailing address and other contact information.
With that confirmation from the contact’s company, we have a highly valuable piece of data for direct mail purposes. The accuracy of that data is 95% or more, which can only be achieved through this deep, focused and practical research in which we directly contact the business to make sure the contact is in that location. No other company that offers database building employs this type of contact research. Unless you have someone reaching out and touching the contact or their business, you’re not going to get the data quality or database accuracy that will ensure your direct mail campaign is effectively reaching your target audience.
This two-step method is part of our research-based selling approach, which utilizes surveys to glean in-depth target customer data, such as what systems they have installed, where their challenges are and what they are planning to do to solve their problems. We not only focus on capturing as much customer data as possible, but also capturing accurate data, which you can only get by going to the source the customer contacts themselves.
Effective ABM demand generation begins with our contact research process. To prove our value to you, we offer a Free Trial – Send us 25 of your contacts and we will verify them at no charge, delivering them with over 95 percent accuracy.