#data appending

Retailers are increasingly relying on data appending companies to unlock deeper customer insights. Data appending enriches existing records by adding missing or updated details such as demographic, geographic, phone, email, and firmographic data. 

This process plays a vital role in the retail industry, enabling businesses to: 

Build seamless customer experiences 

Understand preferences and behaviors more accurately 

Implement dynamic advertising and pricing strategies 

Identify and tap into new opportunities 

The key to successful data appending lies in principles like accuracy, compliance, and timeliness. When done right, it not only strengthens customer relationships but also helps retailers gain a competitive edge. 

Damco Solutions offers end-to-end data appending services that enhance your customer records with updated, accurate, and complete information—ensuring your marketing and outreach efforts are more effective and targeted. 

Strengthen Your Customer Profile Database Faster and Cost-Effectively 

Incomplete data slows down marketing ROI and decision-making. Damco helps businesses fix data gaps with responsive B2B data appending services, improving customer profiling and campaign performance. 

You’ll benefit from: 

Higher response and conversion rates 

Enhanced segmentation and personalization 

Reduced bounce rates and misdirected communications 

Get Accurate Customer Profiling With Tailored End-to-End Data Append Services 

Damco offers a full suite of data append solutions tailored to your business needs: 

Email Appending: Add or update email addresses for better digital engagement 

Postal Address Appending: Ensure direct mail accuracy with verified postal data 

Phone Number Appending: Improve telemarketing reach with updated numbers 

Business URL Appending: Link profiles to their active business websites 

Social Media Appending: Enrich records with social handles for better targeting 

Demographic Data Appending: Gain insight into customer age, income, and more 

Why Damco for Data Appending Services? 

Damco stands out through: 

High-quality and reliable data 

24x7 accessibility and global delivery 

Cost-effective, scalable solutions 

Fast turnaround time 

Industry-specific strategies 

Ready to Get Started? 

Do you need a landing page? Umm… yes.

The co-founder of Unbounce and digital marketing expert, Oli Gardner, agrees.    

But do you need lots of landing pages? Yes!

According to this research as well, the number of landing pages is directly proportionate to the increase in conversion rates. Companies that have 10-15 landing pages showed almost fifty-five per cent increase in lead generation and conversion compared to the ones that have ten or fewer.

Why?

Let’s figure out together!

What is a landing page?

Simply put, a landing page is where customers land on by clicking a paid ad. In the world of marketing, where a business’ marketing efforts and sales pipeline take off. It works separately from your website and is a preferred online e-mail marketing tool for two reasons

It is a teaser to your business. You tell your customers what you care about and how your services or products can make a difference in your life.

It doubles up as a lead generation tool. As Neil Patel suggests, assuming that the CTR is bang-on and the campaign reaches out to your targeted segment, the customers would be okay to further slide down the sales pipeline.

A landing page has one job. To convert. To get you leads through targeted ads on social media, or via e-mail marketing campaigns or PPC. Therefore, have a high chance of a conversion. Since it is a separate page, its reporting, feedback and analytics become much more manageable.

However, don’t fall into the trap of thinking landing pages as a cure-all for your lead generation challenges. Creating landing pages is challenging, and making landing pages that work, are functional and beautiful is a Herculean task. It isn’t an overnight solution to bring traffic and generate leads either. Only one out of fifty people who would land on your landing page would go for CTA, making the average conversion rate on landing pages across industry verticals is mere 2.5 per cent.

So, what is it?

All landing pages are pretty. But why don’t they convert? Landing pages receive traffic from paid ads.So, your actual work starts much before dolling up a landing page, okay, launching an ad campaign, then? No much before that!

Irrespective of how you are launching an ad campaign-via a PPC ad, an e-mail or social media, you need to get your CRM database right. All campaigns are kicked off using the data of CRM. If the database your business is sitting on is dirty, you can’t expect to kick off a successful ad campaign and of course, can only dream away for a landing page that converts. This survey suggests that poor data hygiene costs $614 billion to U.S. companies alone. Bad data translates into work-impacting scenario across the processes. It increases operational costs, results in unproductive work hours, dissatisfied customers and poor business processes.

Data hygiene is no longer optional. De-clutter your data for sound business decision.

Why should you hire a data mining service provider?

The data quality 1-10-100 rule tells you that wise humans have been saying all these years. Prevention is better than cure. It costs you $1 to prevent the onset of data decay, $10 to rectify the data and $100 to counter its failure.

For instance, without e-mail data validation, an e-mail campaign can cost your business three times more than a targeted campaign. Not to mention, the less than three per cent response rate!

Why your CRM database is dirty?

Often companies get data from web scraping services, and as a result, the data could be inconsistent, copied and repetitive leading to poor data quality.

And also, because it is natural. People move to new cities; they change job titles and don’t give a damn about your database. Moreover, your salespeople could be in a hurry to fill the lead forms, or to complete their quota with typos or unfortunately, sometimes with false information.

Also Read: Now Save Time and Money with This New Way- Skip tracing for Banking and Finance!

So. if you want to run a successful ad campaign and make a landing page that works and brings you sales leads, fix your data hygiene first with data mining services. Let them find the hotspots for errors and rectify them. An integral part of data mining is data scrubbing and e-mail appending services.

Data scrubbing consist of cleaning the data of inconsistencies, syntax, validation and other inaccuracies. Enhancing the data with rich and relevant information of a targeted user base is called data appending or to be precise, e-mail appending or email verification for an e-mail marketing campaign.

Often when a salesperson would fill information manually, they would leave the demographics or buying preferences. They wouldn’t write a user’s age, demographics or buying choice. A data verification service provider not only does this for you but also gives it a structure and consistent pattern. So, next time when you are doing an address search from a database, you know that you would find it.

So, if you want people to land on your landing page, and not turn it into a no man’s land, you know what to do now!

Alright. But why do I need as many?

A business needs a different landing page at each step of a sales pipeline. People coming from a social media contest require a landing page with a suitable CTA. Similarly, so would incoming traffic from a blog, a webinar registration, an e-book download, a guest post or a YouTube channel. It helps you to track the traffic, figure out what works and what doesn’t while giving you as many avenues to open new possibilities. A landing page puts the spotlight on you by targeting the right set of customers.

Elements of a successful landing page

The first impression is the last. But nobody has told you that these first impressions take the only 1/20th of a second. The best part is you can have as many landing pages as you want. The bad news is there is no written rule or ten commandments set in stone as to what works.

It is mostly the collective knowledge that everybody works with and a simple rule that states eighty per cent of people remember visuals. But your aim should be to create a well-designed and balanced landing page that is visually delightful and pleasing. No noise and clutter, please!

The Conversion Rate Experts suggest that some changes in landing pages and banking on trust elements led to a jump in revenue for Moz. Would you not want to sail in the same boat?

If your answer is ‘Yes’, scroll down for lowdown on how to make a great landing page that brings revenue and relevant traffic to your website!

A landing page is meant for conversion. It is designed to do one work, which is to get clicks and convert. Here are some of the critical elements that make a landing page, exceptional and functional.

Copy: A great headline and a succinct copy with a simple CTA are the non-negotiable attributes that hold the key to success. A catchy headline will prevent bounce rate and prompt the users to read more. The to-the-point copy will tell the customers what is in it for them. Similarly, you wouldn’t like your customers to keep guessing what they are supposed to do once they land on your page. So. a well-thought-out CTA is a must.

What should your content look like? Types of content on a landing page:

Local content: Relevancy is the keyword here. If you can add local elements such as regional language, a local icon can take you a long way in search engine indexing and conversion.

Social content: It is advisable to have different landing pages for social media. Your audience on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is diverse and should be targeted separately to increase engagement rates.

Smart content: Apart from persuasive content, animation, GIFs, memes, and customised content is the way to go! However, it is recommended that you use them in a balanced manner and do not go overboard with any of it.

Your content should answer:

Why: The customers should know why they are at your landing page.

What: What’s your USP?

How: How your product can help them?

Trust emblem: The trust indicators for your business is a logo, customer testimonials and aggregators’ stamp of approvals. If a customer reads a positive review about a service or product, they are more likely to respond and convert into a potential lead. Ensure an optimised flow for your customers.

Keep it simple, silly: Landing pages are a dedicated way to tap into a prospective set of customers. Therefore, directing them to your website isn’t a smart idea. While a single CTA button can increase your conversion rate by sixty per cent, it is wise to keep the form and CTA easy to understand.

Form a connect: Think of a landing page as an experience that you are bringing forth to your customers. So, there shouldn’t be a disconnect at all from a PPC ad, social media ad campaign or e-mail they are coming from. They shouldn’t be taken away with surprise and have to cross-check if they are a secure connection or right page.

Make it pop: Your CTA button should stand out in the grand scheme of things. While it should ‘gel’ with the rest of the page, a customer should know the outcome. It has been observed that a ‘Free subscription to 10-day trial’ work any day better than a ‘sign-up.’

Steer clear of third-party navigation links: Having an external link on a landing page can make customers leave the landing page and move on to the said link. So, even if your landing page is offering a download or registration, it should happen there, without letting the customers leave.

Have a privacy statement: Tell your customers that you won’t sell their data anywhere. Yes, it is crucial. However, be it your website link, social media profiles or anything that can “distract” them from a landing page, should be kept in the footer space, which should also be the minimum. Often a landing page has so much going for it, and you wouldn’t have much space left for it anyway!

The lead generation form: Aha, finally! The only thing that you are going through the trouble of it. Ponder over your target customers and their information. What exactly do you want from them? Often, B2C businesses find that the customers aren’t comfortable giving away their data but the question is, will they check their e-mails even? B2B sales leads, however, thrive on direct contacts. So, figure out your target audience, opt for data scrubbing services, derive action-oriented insights and go for it!

Formulate the exit stage: There are two outcomes to a customers’ arrival at a landing page:

Assuming that the CTA is apt and a landing page is excellent, a customer would leave the desired details with you

The customers would like to get off as soon as they land.

In each scenario, you should have an exit strategy ready for them. If a customer leaves without leaving details, think of incentivising the exit. Then, you can think of redirecting them to your website, social media sites or blog where you can hold them off for a little bit longer.

Similarly, hoping that your customers expect the way you want them to, go for a simple Thank-You message with the relevant details in the e-mail and maybe an offer or promo code.

More than sixty-five per cent of B2B businesses believe in the lead generation capabilities of landing pages. Unfortunately, for most of them, it is either poorly designed or take the customers to the home page.

Imagine you going to visit someone and searching for the house in the area. When you think address search is done and you ring the bell, a door opens and you are greeted with a person with a questioning look, asking “Do we know you?” or a scenario when after searching every lane in the locality to find out you are possessing an address that does not exist. These scenarios suck right? This happens when you send emails to invalidated addresses. Wrong addresses lead to the disappointed visitor and wrong emailing lead to digital marketing disasters.

Whether you are a newbie in marketing or a seasoned marketer, you know that emails are an integral part of digital marketing. Emails are cost-effective and offer high ROI. The lead conversion rate of emails is 6.05 per cent, which is greater than other digital marketing techniques. The email marketing has better lead generation and leads nurturing than other digital marketing techniques. The emails have high customer engagement.

What gives an edge to email in comparison with other marketing tools is that it directly hit the potential client, whereas other tools such as social media marketing or SEO marketing are hit or miss. The evolution of emails has been significant over the past decade. The emails are not just a digital letter with words, now you can integrate images, newsletters, quick links, videos, discount coupons, social media feeds and many other functions.

To tap the potential benefits of email marketing we must have a valid list of an email address. To collect the email address for target marketing many sites offer registration benefits, email verification benefits, discount and lightening deals to lure the customer. Some site makes it necessary to register to view premium contents and offers. There is another way to collect email addresses which is covert and morally in a grey area that is email appending. Email appending means matching customer data with a third party database to obtain corresponding email addresses.

The difference between the practice of getting emails through registration and email appending is that with registration you have taken the appointment and with email appending you are knocking doors unsolicited. When a customer subscribes to receive your promotional content then your email will appear in customer inbox but when you send unsolicited emails then the emails are classified as spam and moved to a spam folder. When your email consistently moved to spam folder then the email service provider can blacklist you thus barring from any future email marketing.

When you can get the email address one way or another then what is the use of email validation? You might ask. Next question that arises is that even if some email addresses turn out to be invalid; it is not the end of the world. Doubts are valid even if some emails addresses aren’t. The answer lies in our understanding of email data validation, what it does, what it doesn’t and the differences between email validation and email verification.

What is email validation?

Email validation is the process of verifying that email address is valid or not by checking it real-time with reliable email domains such as Google, Yahoo or Hotmail. The email address entered is first checked for syntax. When that is validated, a requested query is sent to the domain server. Domain server responds to query and provide the status for an email address search. Sometimes in a hurry of getting registered, a customer does typo and sometimes it is done purposefully to mislead. Email data validation with prompt checking prevents this.

What is the difference between email validation and email verification?

Often these are used interchangeably by email marketers but there is a significant difference between the two. Email validation is simple whereas email verification is complex. Email verification verifies that there is an actual recipient on the end and email address is in use. Email verification assures you that your emails are reaching the valid inbox. It uses SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol). It does not send mail to address holder, just check with an email server that given email address exists. The process completes when email server returns with confirmation that user does exist.

How does email validation work?

The email validation can be done in two ways

1 Real time-When customer is entering the email address thorough validation service provided by email service provides we can validate the emails at real-time. Sometimes suggestion list of valid email addresses matching with a customer entered data is also shown.

2 List validations- When you have a list of address in your hand and want to create a verifiable list then email list verification tools help. There are paid and free tools available for list verification. There are paid tools such as emaillistverify.com, or zerobounce.net and free tools such as www.validateemailaddress.org, wahdata.com or www.verifalia.com.

What are the results of email validation?

Email validation categorized email addresses in three categories.

Valid – Receiving mail server accepts the email address, it will be categorised as a valid email address. Some email addresses are marked as “Accept All” or “Disposable” although they are valid but sending an email is not recommended. The email address is provided by a well-known disposable e-mail address provider (DEA) is highly risky. It is also called dark email. In this, a new email address is used for every contact. It is highly recommended to remove DEA from your email addresses list.

Invalid – An email address will be marked invalid if it is incorrect or an email account does not exist on receiving mail server.

Unknown –When receiving mail server takes too long to respond or its services are temporarily unavailable then in that case, the email address will be marked Unknown and email verification won’t be counted. A repeat attempt can be made for verification which will take a few minutes and the results will show whether the email address is valid or invalid.

Besides these, few exceptions result such as Unhandled Exception, Mailbox connection failure, Dnsquery Timeout etc.

Why email validation is important?

Reading the above information hopefully, makes you understand what the email validation is? Now we have to understand that if the email validation is not done properly where this heads your email marketing to.

Lowering sender score- Sender score is the numerical representation of your sending reputation. Many key metrics determine your sender score such as sending volume, sender rejected rate, spam trap hits, unknown user rate etc. The scores range from 0 to 100. If key parameters area affected by your email sending lists then your sender score fluctuate. The return path providers’ network generates sender score.

Spam traps- These are honey pots created by internet service providers to identify and monitor spam email. These lure spammers. You should remove spam traps from your email lists or you will end up getting blacklisted. These spam traps can land in your list when you use email scraping to increase your address list. Sometimes its just pure bad luck with typos.

Increase marketing cost- You have contacted bulk email service provider for email sending but when your list is laden with the dead weight of invalid email addresses, you are paying emails that will go nowhere.

Sales inefficiencies- You have identified the target customer segment and moving forward with your promoting strategy. But you are working with a defective database. The figures that your marketing strategy is showing are false, thus creating a gap between what progress you think you have made and what it is.

Increase bounce rate- Invalid address can increase your email bounce rate thus decreasing your sender score.

Poor customer experience- When a customer has done effort to subscribe to your content and if not receive due to wrong email address then he will leave with a bad impression about your services.

The decrease in revenue- Invalid email address can create a hole in your revenue money bag. It reduces the number of potential leads and sending marketing content to ghost addresses.

Email appending and email validation

Email validation is also used when we are dealing with email appending or skip tracing services for address search. The email appending matches customer data to get email address but that email address list may have invalid data. The list of email addresses needs to be validated to create a verified email address list that will be void to invalid email addresses, spam traps and blacklisted email addresses. This validated list also needs to be updated periodically. Just as people move and change their address, they also start to use other email address.

What was once used by the US military as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency network) is today known as the Internet. With data grew from few gigabytes to 1.2 million terabytes today. In 1995 the internet was used by 16 million users. Today there are more than 4600 million users on internet and numbers are growing with each passing second. The last two years alone has made up for 90 per cent of the internet data today.  

This growth of internet users and their information has increased the data storage exponentially. Whatever you do on the internet, you will leave a digital trail. Even a random search by a random user will count in internet trend and affects the indexing of search engines. The data servers are now occupying space of football fields. Major companies like Google, Amazon etc are providing with cloud computing and cloud storage services to tap internet users’ data storage demand. With the need to store replicate data in case of natural catastrophe; more space is consumed by dedicated servers.

The surfing of the internet as much as it can be fun for regular users like us, for data scientists and businesses that desire some relevant information can become an uphill task. To find a needle in a haystack is easier than finding desired data on internet manually. The amount of data created and stored by a single large company is so vast that private data centres are employed. By this, we can envision how much data is available on the internet.

The role of data science, data mining and data scraping has increased tremendously. Web scraping services are used majorly for data extraction and data analysis. Web scraping is used for diverse purposes like business competition, research and analysis, consumer insights, security purposes, government purposes etc.

What is Web Scraping?

The extraction of data from websites is called web scraping or web harvesting. The specific data is copied from websites to local database or spreadsheet. Web scraping services or data scraping services use hypertext protocol or Extensible hypertext protocol for data extraction. The scraping can be done manually by visiting the particular page and copying data manually into a spreadsheet.

The manually scraping is possible when we are working for personal usage and data we are working with is limited. When we are dealing with a large amount of data an automated process is essential. It is implemented using a bot.

Web scraping and web crawling often mistaken for same but are different. Web crawling is done by search engines for indexing of hyperlinks, whereas web scraping does the data extraction. Web crawling is used in web scraping for fetching pages.

The websites now a day are highly advanced with using gifs, scripts, flash animations etc in an integrated ecosystem. Websites are developed, keeping human in mind, not bots therefore data extraction become a challenging task. The data extraction is based on the data stored by websites in text form. The mark-up languages such as HTML and XHTML are used for the development of a basic framework for any website. The specialised software use this rich text data for extraction.

There are simple plug-ins such as Scraper, Data Scraper for Google chrome used for web scraping. There specialised software such as ParseHub, OutwitHub, etc employed for slightly advance level of web scraping. The major e-commerce companies such as Amazon and social networking companies such as Facebook provide their APIs (Application programming interface) for public data extraction.

AI is a necessary evil in data scraping. The quantity of data has forced the implementation of AI. The AI as helpful it can be, unnerve people with wild sci-fi fantasy that pales the Matrix trilogy in comparison.

Also Read: 12 Best WordPress plugins every Sales and Marketing website must have

The legality of web scraping

“Just like the wild west, the Internet has no rules”. The times have changed in the wild west and on the Internet. The computer fraud and abuse laws criminalise any act of breaking into any private computer systems and accessing non-publically available data. In 2016 hiQ  Labs, a data science company web scrapped the publically available LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn terms this as a violation of the company’s policy on data usage without permission and authorization. The hiQ took LinkedIn to court. In a landmark judgement for web scraping legality, the court ruled in favour of hiQ stating, “web scraping of public data is not a violation of computer fraud and abuse act.”

Also Read: Data scraping for BI: Picking the right service is vital

The morality of web scraping

The web scraping is used in business for online price monitoring, price comparison, product review data. The real estate companies use it to gather competitor real state listing. The websites use other website public data for their convenience without having to work for it. The web scraping lies in the grey area of morality where few times its use cab be justified with internet policy and sometimes complete violation of basic internet ethics.  

If you are searching for cheaply available phones with a certain price range and use web scraping tool on a major e-commerce website for data extraction then it quite ethical and can be justified. When you extract data for a content-based site with its USP being uniquely available content such as blogging websites and created a mirror site then it cannot be justified.

A basic moral conscience is necessary for making a righteous judgment in the age of the internet where the lines are quite blurred.

Concept of the good bot and bad bot

The supporting of web scraping often linked with freedom of the internet and fair use of public data but the picture is not as rosy as it seems. There are many bad bots ie malicious automated software available which can steal data by breaking into user accounts, overload servers with providing junk data and harm websites.

The AI bot gets a bad reputation due to malicious bot crawling the internet space. Many websites prohibit web scraping. The websites use advance tools for bot detection and prevent them from viewing their pages. This solution to this is the use of DOM parsing, simulation of human behaviour etc to extract data from sites.

Does it require adding a magic touch?

We are leaving in the age of artificial intelligence. It is the intelligence demonstrated by machines. The machines are incapable of thinking by themselves. The highly complex software is used to develop machine intelligence that learns, adapt and collects data. The AI is now used in several areas from traffic regulation, pilot training in the aviation industry, critical fields such as nuclear reactors etc. The AI has made possible rooming of the rover on Mars.

People are apprehensive of AI and believing a new world order where machine rules human. These make up for a good sci-fi script or story but the reality is too mechanical. AI has made it possible to work in an environment where humans could not survive. The sensitive area such as military, national security etc relies on AI for information processing. Human lives depend on AI proper working.

The internet is brimming with boundless data. The manual data extraction can be tedious in past but with data storage reaching in terabytes, it is nearly impossible. We have to implement AI for web harvesting and data mining services. The AI can extract store and process data from thousands of pages in a few seconds. The manual scraping does only a few hundred pages in days.  The AI has made it possible to scrape websites with a gigantic database and analyses it for forming business strategies and predictions.

Does that mean the AI has replaced human in web scraping area at least? Well, the answer is not binary. The AI does a spectacular job in web harvesting but the human touch is indispensable. When data is extracted just like an ore is extracted. It has to go through various processes of floatation, smelting etc to be useful. The data gathered from the site could be repetitive, redundant and in the wrong format. When we are extracting this kind of data we are overloading storage with unnecessary data. Data verification and data scrubbing will cleanse the inaccurate and corrupt records from the extracted data. These are quite state of art tools but the ultimate power lies in the hands of a human.

The intelligence of the machine is called artificial for a reason. The AI extracting data cannot determine its necessity for a purpose like a human does. Let us suppose a company want to launch a new clothing line for teenage girls. They are extracting data for what teenage girls find fashionable. Many times websites want to remain on the forward listing of search engines pages and use the metadata incorrectly. The AI being AI will extract the data for teenage fashion and data will imply something else.

Also Read: How Digitalization is transforming the Business of B2B Industry Data

Many websites prevent web crawling by using CAPTCHAS, embedding information in media objects, login access requirement, changing website HTML regularly etc. The AI right now cannot trespass these mechanisms of prevention of web scraping.

B2B sales is a lot like fishing. Often glorified as hunters, salespeople have their inside jokes and conversation to describe their situation of finding out a needle in the haystack. From “There is plenty of fish in the sea” to “Use the right bait” and “Catch and Release” – one can find countless analogies that draw a parallel with the world of fishermen that brings some fun to their dreary world as well as describe the challenges of leading a sales life.

Landing a new customer isn’t easy. It is similar to tread onto the unchartered territory of the sea and landing a big catch. But more often than not, it is the ‘catch and release’-the bane of the existence of a salesperson’s life.

What is the ‘catch and release’?

Recreational fishing or conservation of fish is often termed as a catch and release. Often when professional fishermen don’t find fish good enough to eat, too small or too big for use, they drop it back in the water body. However, it is as far as it could be from being a pastime. It leaves the fish severely stressed that it dies of shock. The hook is often ripped out of the fish’s throat, rendering severe damage to its guts and throat. The protective sheath of the fish’s body is also ruptured. You get the drift, right? The entire cycle is disrupted.

Similarly, a salesperson, after making all the efforts on the B2B leads might realise it not to be worth pursuing. But until then, time and efforts are consumed. You have spent your resources on pursuing a lead that isn’t ‘capable’ to give you any business. You just need to drop them back the moment you realise the futility of this exercise- without, of course, hurting them. Because don’t burn bridges, remember?

When a salesperson pursues an impractical lead (no lead/contact is useless, but not worth for a particular time or work you have been doing), the time, which should be spent on pursuing a quality lead, is wasted. However, your fellow salespeople who have been following it from day one, get to grab this opportunity by the horns. The catch and release is a ‘lose-lose’ for you because it is a catch-22 as well!

Also Read: 5-Surefire Methods to Boost B2B Leads and sales

How?

As a salesperson, you can’t just escape from a situation. Amidst the meetings and relentless pursuing, you realise that the person is not authorised to make a decision.  You can’t disappear. You need to have a proper exit strategy planned to bid your farewell in a manner that you could reach out next time if the need arises.

If this is a recurring pattern with your salesperson, your data ecosystem needs to be blamed. Your salespeople are pursuing leads from the database that is chaotic and disorganised. The disparate database never leads to useful insights or business decision-making. Businesses are launching products that nobody needs or opening a store where they can’t find customers. Without the ability to read the room correctly, they are trying to address the elephant in the room.

In the absence of organised, structured and quality data, businesses can’t find winning solutions. Data is pivotal. It might not be the big picture you are focusing on right now, but it is the palette, which decides how the big picture you are envisioning will look like.

How do businesses get data?

Data is precious. It is both the problem and answer for business. It is the necessary evil you can’t do without. A business, online or offline runs on data. Data is the flow of information. Everything that you interact with becomes data. Data is created when you take a cab, when you give your information at the cash counter for an exclusive discount, when you pay via debit or credit card at a mall, or post a picture of your outing on social media. Your information is stored in data storage centres securely.

When you sign up for email marketing with a company, give your information on a landing page or subscribe to their newsletter, the data is routed to them. Besides, companies also hire data aggregator companies to buy data to reach out to more customers.

How does data go bad?

By the time the data makes it to your business, it becomes hard to tell the pristine data from the corrupt. It has gone through several hands and processes, getting tampered and unoriginal by the minute. Then, there are click farms that route fraudulent and falsified data into the data ecosystem. Businesses fail to understand that having bad data the only thing worse than having no data at all! If a company is making its decisions based on bad data, it is all downhill from there. The lousy data paints an even uglier picture.

Also Read: How Data Can Help Sales Force

It is when data mining services make a grand entry into the picture.

Gartner research shows that bad data costs businesses more than thirty per cent of the revenue apart from costing opportunities and reputation. For startups, bootstrapped businesses, supply networks and data analytics, losses from sparse data translate into terrible cash leaks, and bad decisions impacting all verticals. The data leaks increase with a company’s growth.  While negligible at first ($18,000 per month for pre-seed startups), the hidden cost go up to more than $900,000 for semi-startups.

If your salespeople are relying on old data, which is sourced illegitimately or via non-transparent methods, you can’t expect them to turn to bring quality B2B leads aboard.

And the fact is while you can certainly don’t do anything about people and processes tampering your data, you can undoubtedly use data appending and scrubbing to ensure the timely sanitisation of data.

In real-life, salespeople don’t work in a best-case scenario. The challenges are murkier like the deep sea they are fishing in. It is why they need to follow the right methodology and have rich knowledge of the domain they are entering into. Good salespeople aren’t about hard work. It is about smart work.  You don’t catch good leads; you fish for them with meticulous planning and right bait!

For salespeople, the right bait begins with the identification of right lead, location and methodology. Based on this, they can cast their net or in simpler words, choose the best way to approach them. It could be email marketing, a phone call or an F-2-F meeting.

Like a fisherman can’t cast in an empty water body, a salesperson can’t expect to do much with bad data.

Data solutions such as data appending and data scrubbing cleanse the data inside-out. The data is filed, labelled, and maintained following your business’ need!

What happens when the data is bad?

When your salespeople realise the impact of bad data, they waste their time correcting it. However, the silos within departments make it a continuous process, and it becomes imperative that the leaks are sealed.

Marketing team bases its campaigns on an incorrect target segment, resulting in tarnished sender reputation, blacklisted email IP and spamming.

Sales People targets inferior quality leads.

Product team thrives on poor technical insights, doesn’t understand the demand and expectations of the market and thereby, launching a product that the market could do without.

The impact of not closing a sale or releasing the lead based on bad data isn’t pretty straightforward. It is a closed-loop.  Each department has to deal with the consequences of data leaks. If your salespeople are lingering in this dangerous sales zone of catch and release, it is time for your business to hire a data mining service provider now to eliminate the root cause of bad data making inroads into your business.

The state of good data isn’t a destination. It is an ongoing journey that a business has to take proactively to stay ahead of the curve. As long as there are people and processes involved in either side of businesses, there is always a scope of the margin of error. So, if you are serious about quality B2B lead generation, you need to get serious about B2B data mining services as well.

What are data mining services all about?

Data mining services ensure hygiene and cleansing of the data your business is thriving on. There are six phases of standard data mining process prevalent across the industries:

♦ Understanding of a business: It is significant to understand a business, its nature and objective to figure out the data it requires or retains. Sitting on a pile of data doesn’t help. It is the quality of the information that can transform your business.

♦ Data Evaluation: More often than not, data is sourced through several channels. Customers deliberately provide incorrect information, or sometimes, there is a typo from a salesperson’s end. All in all, mistakes are bound to happen. A data mining company assesses the quality of data your business is relying on in accordance with your business’ need.

♦ Data Scrubbing: The information is cleansed, sanitised and flagged with relevant labels such as incorrect, invalid, catch-all and so on.

♦ Data Appending: The scrubbed data is updated with relevant information and insights so that your sales and marketing team can make the most of their efforts and not waste time pursuing lake trout! (The Wire, HBO).

♦ Checklist: Data cleansing is an ongoing process. However, data hygiene can’t be practised if the teams and process aren’t enthusiastic about it. This is why a data mining service company not only ensures that the loopholes are addressed but also creates several checkpoints to retain the data quality and optimise the inflow of the data as per the directives.

♦ Training: Your team members get comprehensive training and are assigned to overlook the quality of data entering the system. Each checkpoint has a supervisor responsible for maintaining the filing of the data as per the established parameters. Since businesses are data-driven, communication between the teams is encouraged to flag any discrepancy before it is too late.

Why should you embrace data mining services NOW?

According to George Labovitz and Yu Sang Chang’s 1-10-100 rule, it costs only $1 if businesses to adopt data appending or scrubbing proactively. Once the data has entered the system and mixed with the processes, it might cost them $10, and if they choose to do nothing, it may result in losses worth $100.