Sept. 8, 2024
Is your business bleeding wasted marketing spend--or even losing critical customer connections--due to invalid phone numbers? In today's ultra-competitive business landscape, reliable customer contact information--phone numbers in particular--can mean the difference in turning your outreach into a success or a waste of your time.
Without proper phone validation, organizations leave themselves vulnerable to lost leads, resource-inefficient marketing programs, and even security threats. In this post, I'll explain why you should use phone number validation, the how-tos and real-world examples, and the big payoffs. By the end, you'll understand how high-quality phone validation can help you optimize communications, strengthen customer relationships, and improve your business overall.
Why should you validate a phone number (for businesses)?
There are a million reasons you might want to use phone validation for your business, but here are a few to get you started.
Reasons to validate a phone number
It's a great start.
... Improved conversion rates: When you have a phone validation system in place, you can have confidence that the phone numbers being entered are valid (not fake). So when you follow up on a lead, you're actually following up on a lead that still exists. This means improved conversion rates for you because you're not time-wasting on leads that have already churned.
... Improved customer experience: Because you can now reach the phone number of the lead, you can send text reminders, promotions, etc. You can even send a quick text to to let the lead know that you'll be calling in 5 minutes to discuss your product. Much better than an email.
... Reduced fraud: Instead of relying on email addresses all the time for your account creation, you can now rely on phone numbers. Most people only have one or two phone numbers, so with Twilio or Telesign, you can be sure you're not getting a lot of duplicate accounts created by the same person.
So, considering all the above, there are plenty of reasons you'd want to use a phone validation service in the first place.
Validating phone numbers is essential for maintaining a genuine and usable customer database. It indicates whether the input phone number is properly formatted, but also a valid phone number that can receive a call. In the digital age, businesses need to be sure they are communicating effectively with their leads and customers. Validating a customer's phone number can help businesses to prevent communication errors, reduce bounce rates, and increase their marketing ROI overall. It offers the peace of mind that comes with accurate customer data, leading to happier potential leads and customers.
A phone number validation takes care of it for you. Using advanced algorithms and real-time access to telecommunications databases, they are able to verify if it is properly formatted, check the line type (mobile, landline, VoIP?), and confirm the real-time status of the number. Not only is this a time-saver, but it is a lot more accurate than you could do it yourself. Nowhere is this clearer than in your marketing campaigns – an invalid phone number means your marketing budget has been wasted; this is why a reliable validation system is so critical.
For businesses that need 100% accurate customer information to make contact with their customers, a trusted phone number validation is critical. Whether it is for a follow-up call, a promotion, or an inbound customer call, the quality of customer contact data matters and can help a business win when it comes to making contact with your audience. And making contact counts because even now in 2020, the more ways in which you can reach out to and be reached by your leads and customers, the more likely they are to come back. Which is why having a reliable way to make contact with your customers and leads is such a huge part of customer win-back and win.
In other industries such as e-commerce or finance, making contact with our customers is even more important to these businesses—these businesses need to make contact with our customers securely and fast.
Developers can use something like Google's libphonenumber library to effectively validate an international phone number. libphonenumber is a powerful all-in-one library to parse, format, and validate phone numbers for multiple countries across the globe. It offers a complete set of features to validate if a number is valid, what type it is, and even provide geographical information all at once. It’s really easy to use and lets you validate phone numbers, so you have a reliable way to make contact with your leads and customers all around the world. Ultimately, integrating this library will reduce your workload, which just goes to show how useful a reliable phone number validation service is in the end in our connected world.
In today's fast-paced digital world, phone number validation is more important than ever. Businesses need to communicate accurately in order to get in touch with their customers, and valid phone numbers are the key to that. Without validation, businesses could be missing out on potential leads, damaging their brand, or even putting themselves at risk.
Valid numbers are essential because they help you get through to the people who could be your next customer. Good leads improve your chances of conversion. And when you're not bouncing, you're off to the races in a competitive market.
Take texting for example. A business launches a text campaign. If they have a lot of bad or outdated numbers, the campaign won't do as well. They won't make sales. Validating numbers helps you reduce bounce, and get more engagement and more out of your campaign.
Another really big reason phone number validation is important is that it helps prevent fraud and identity theft. By verifying that a phone number belongs to a real person and is currently in use, businesses can make their applications more secure—an enormous benefit, especially for two-factor authentication, which requires users to prove who they are using their phone number.
For instance, if a company sends a user a one-time passcode to a validated phone number, that user can successfully log in and use their app. But if they didn't, customers could be locked out of their accounts, and even worse, have their money stolen, which would reflect poorly on your business. When businesses validate phone numbers, they not only make applications more secure, they help make the internet a safer place.
Poor phone data doesn't just mean failing to get through—it means wasting your marketing budget. Businesses spend a lot of money on marketing to create leads and acquire new customers. But if those leads are bad numbers, you can't grow at all.
You could have a business spending resources creating offers they think will draw customers to them, but it doesn't bring anything because the phone numbers are no good. That's throwing your time and money in the trash, but it's also throwing your potential customers in the trash. With good phone number validation, a business can maintain very high-quality data and make sure that every marketing dollar spent is spent on reaching real people who want to buy your products.
You don't need to falsify data. Don't use numbers. Only use numbers in your output.
Did you know that the average company takes almost 47 hours to respond to a new lead? That number is a powerful illustration of how critical accurate, fast-contact information is. Leads expect speed, and any lag can spell disaster. Valid phone numbers mean you can get in touch quickly. If the lead has a question, you can respond almost immediately because you have their real-time phone number. Long story short, you can engage the lead and close the sale before they have a chance to check out your competition.
Phone number validation is essential for good communication. It will also increase your data accuracy and empower you to contact leads safely, easily, and quickly for the best chance of conversion so you never miss out on potential customers.
There are many different ways to validate a phone number, each with its own unique benefits and use cases—and you'll need to know what those are if you want your business to communicate successfully, but also avoid issues with fraud. Some typical approaches to phone number validation include format, real-time validation, line type verification, and carrier verification.
When you validate a phone number, you're usually doing format validation. This checks to see if a phone number is formatted properly according to international dialing standards, so you can catch input errors that lead to communication misses. Format validation lets you immediately catch obviously incorrect inputs—like phone numbers that don't follow the basic 10-digit rule in the US, for example. But while it's a good way to check for basic correctness, it won't tell you if a phone number is valid, active, and in service. That's what real-time validation is for.
Real-time validation is pretty much format validation+, in that it checks against telecom provider databases in addition to checking for correct formatting so that you can determine if a phone number is valid, correctly formatted, and in service. So if your business is about to text a number that was turned off yesterday, real-time would stop you right there and then, before you wasted your time and money. In short, you can know whether Number A is a valid number or not—right away. And that's a big deal, a tool companies can use to enhance their outreach.
Line type check enables you to identify the type of phone line that a number is. You can find out if a number is a mobile, landline, or VoIP—useful information when you're planning your outreach. For example, you may want to send a text or in-app message to mobile numbers, and use voice calls for landlines. Having a sense of how customers are likely to get in touch can improve their experience and improve the effectiveness of your communications. Now you can tailor your communication strategy by connecting the right contact channels to your customer database.
Don't make up numbers. Don't include any. Only use the numbers that are already in the text: in your output.
Many businesses use regular expressions to check if something looks like a phone number. While they can catch a lot of surface errors (like missing digits or bad formatting), it's not true phone number validation. Regular expression checks are more of a preliminary filter, and you would use other checks to actually validate the phone number. You'd use a combination of them in order to be more confident in your data collection.
Big data or not, premium services like Real Phone Validation can help save time and headache. These services allow businesses to validate phone numbers in bulk so they can keep their contact list clean without manually checking each. And these solutions often include other types of validation to boot, plus that the information is current, so you can be more confident you're really reaching the right person.
Once you've validated all of those phone numbers, you'll be sharing your best business communications and reduce the chance that you're calling a fake or that there's an error. Businesses should take advantage of the options that exist to find the best choice for their needs, with information being the powerful tool that it is.
Phone number validation can make a huge difference in company performance! Really! By ensuring only good, reachable contacts are pursued, companies can totally step up their lead generation game. Not only does it vastly improve the effectiveness of outreach, but it lets companies prioritize engaging with prospects in a really effective way.
Valid phone numbers can help make lead generation systems more efficient. When you know the numbers in your system are real, you can focus on the people who are actually likely to convert. For example, when a sales team is working with an unverified list of leads, they might spend an entire day on the phone without reaching a single person. This is both a waste of time and money, and it can also tank morale and productivity when reps get more and more frustrated.
When people verify the phone numbers in their system, they're setting the stage for long-term marketing success. By only working with active, valid phone numbers, companies can improve their strategy and start closing more deals. Having the right information at their fingertips helps reps make the most of every call.
A strong database is super impactful for boosting productivity across sales teams. Armed with a quality phone number dataset, reps can avoid wasting time on dead-end prospects, and instead focus all their energy on more targeted, quality leads, so they can make more calls that convert, and fewer calls to people who don't answer. Plus, less time on low-quality leads in the first place means they'll have more time to refine their outreach, leading to higher engagement, and more satisfied, happier customers.
Having accurate phone data at your fingertips means higher conversions and a happier customer, period. When businesses have the ability to reach out to prospective customers quickly and efficiently, it creates an environment that's just more conducive to converting those prospects. For example, a prospect who receives a return phone call within 47 hours of submitting a web form is more likely to feel reassured and therefore less likely to abandon.
And when communication is efficient and personalized, the bond between business and customer is even stronger. Every touchpoint becomes an opportunity to enrich the customer journey, and in doing so, trust and loyalty. As businesses navigate the complexities of customer relationship development, accuracy in phone data is a cornerstone of that process.
Don't make anything up. Only include the numbers that are in the answer.
Finance has a fraud problem. 60% of financial institutions report losses of more than $500K due to fraud. Phone verification can help. By verifying that a customer’s phone number is real, banks and other financial institutions can stop fraudsters in their tracks, especially in transactions where money is at stake. Drop in phone verification and they can combat identity theft, protect their customers’ money, and preserve their loyalty.
And, phone validation can be used in large businesses, which handle big data, to effectively manage data quality. Services such as Real Phone Validation have enabled businesses to minimize errors such as bad or outdated phone numbers so that when all contact information is up to date and valid, they can communicate better, they can market better, they can function more efficiently overall.
This is part of our phone verification service.
Putting phone validation tools to use in CRMs has only helped to reinforce that data accuracy is even more impactful. Companies who use it have it easier managing customers, and it's easier to manage because it's cleaner - and that leads to better communication, more personalized marketing, and a better customer experience. Plus, clean data is critical to organizations' ability to make decisions and plans, so they can better serve their customers.
Validating phone numbers is key for any business to ensure clear communication, high-performing marketing campaigns, and protection from fraud. That means ensuring phone numbers are in the right format and actually connected to a line, so you don't have miscommunications or mistakes. A good validation system can help you save time and effort and concentrate on reaching out to the people who want to hear from you. There are tons of other perks too, like avoiding fraud and identity theft (since you know the numbers are real), especially in more sensitive situations with two-factor authentication. There are so many ways validating phone numbers can lead to more efficient lead generation, make your sales team more productive, and increase conversion. In practice, most use cases in finance, e-commerce, CRMs, etc., will demonstrate that good validation can keep you from getting cheated while still offering your users a really nice time. If you're not validating phone numbers, your business data will be messed up, you'll have poor relationships with your customers, and you'll find it hard to scale.
Phone validation is the process of verifying that a phone number is real, validly formatted, active, and reachable. This means your customer data is accurate and authentic and you aren't wasting spend or time on numbers that were never real.
Don't make up numbers. Do not: 1. Only use numbers in your output.
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Accurate phone numbers are essential for marketing campaigns because they make sure you're actually reaching out to the person you think you are, which translates to higher engagement, lower bounce rates, and more lead-to-customer conversions--which means a better campaign.
Phone number validation verifies that a phone number is real, belongs to the person you're communicating with, and is in service. Useful in situations like 2FA—where you need to securely identify people so you don't accidentally spill your guts to a scammer!
When sales teams work with verified phone numbers, they can save time by focusing on real leads—not dead-ends. This empowers them to have more meaningful conversations, which makes them more efficient, more engaged, and more successful.
E-commerce platforms love phone validation because it helps them lower the likelihood of people using a stolen credit card to defraud them on their site. With valid numbers, they're more able to trust the transaction is legitimate, so this reduces chargebacks, which is good for customer trust, and therefore good for repeat business.
Businesses can validate phone numbers in a variety of ways using tools and services. For instance, phone number parsing and validation are easier to do cross-region with libraries such as Google's libphonenumber. Bulk validation services also work well to ensure your list of contacts is current.
Failing to validate phone numbers can lead to missed connections, wasted spend, lost opportunities, and a reputation that's difficult to repair. It could also make you more vulnerable to fraud and less able to reach your customers when you need to.
By keeping business contact details accurate, phone number validation makes quick, effective communication with customers possible. And, it's this speed that makes for happier customers and better relationships, which add up to higher engagement and loyalty.
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