StrikeIron Blog

Zero Touch Reference Data - The Address Verification Cloud

Leveraging the Cloud to verify addresses is easy to do and can pay significant dividends. Incorrect shipping addresses, address typos in Web forms, "return to sender" stamps, prospects who never receive marketing materials, and customers who don't get communicated to can all be a thing of the past simply by integrating a single line of validation code wherever address data is collected, either electronically or by humans. Address verification represents one of the best examples of how to leverage a cloud service to provide value internally to an organization with very little effort.

The United States Post Office (as do other postal entities around the world) publishes updates to their master physical address databases monthly. These updates capture all of the new houses that are being built, new businesses that emerge, the launching of new zip codes, and all of the other address additions, updates, and deletions that occur throughout the U.S. on an ongoing basis. Utilizing this master reference data as a validation source can ensure the accuracy of all collected addresses, comparing those collected to a master list in real-time (a millisecond across-the-Web check). This is something you definitely want to do as the address is collected, as waiting to fix bad addresses downstream can far more costly.

Obtaining, managing, and updating this verification reference data in the raw for an organization that wants to put it to use for maximum address accuracy can be a quite difficult exercise to undertake on their own however, and most often can only be done at considerable cost, requiring hardware, software, personnel, and time. And shortcut approaches that try to leverage this data without the frequent updates can be an absolute disaster.

This is where StrikeIron and the Cloud come in. We acquire and update the reference data from various third parties as frequently as they allow, maintain the data in our data centers within our multi-tenant, high performance delivery platform, have built and perfected intelligent algorithms to handle address matching ambiguity (a straight, raw lookup won't work), and provide interfaces to these verification algorithms available in multiple protocols (SOAP, REST, HTTP Secure) so they can easily be integrated into any business process, application, Web site, or even mobile device. We pull all of this together, productize it, and deliver it as simple, easy-to-use plug-and-play Web services API. A single line of code from any platform is all it takes to tap into these algorithms that are living out on the Web. And like all good Cloud services, all of the details are abstracted away.

Best of all, our solutions are usage-based in cost, so you don't have to bet the farm just to get started, and you can always start small. And, free trials are available, so we can gain your trust before you subscribe. Give it a try today!

Enrich Your Email Data to Provide Compelling, Relevant Offers

Do you ever wish you had more information on your customers and prospects? If you are like many marketers, you are trying to target your customers with limited information on who they are. This is not just from a contact perspective, but from a demographic profile perspective as well. 

The result is bland, non-relevant, and non-compelling offers and the associated low response rate.

There is an easy way to gain a much deeper understanding of who your prospects are and what they like. Using data enrichment services like StrikeIron's Email Append will give you additional demographic and socioeconomic data about your prospects so you can provide content and offers that resonate with them. 

For example, if you have just an email address for a prospect or customer, you can append contact and demographic information including:

- Name, address, phone number, and age

- Income level

- Homeowner probability 

- Do they live in a metro area or rural area

- Education level

- What interests do they have

...and much much more.

The more data you have on a prospect or customer, the better you are able to offer prospects the products and services that are interesting to them. 

For example, if you are a retailer that is collecting email addresses on your website, then you want to keep required information to a minimum to maximize the amount of submissions. With only an email address, you have two options:

1) Try to engage the user with untargeted offers.

2) Enrich the data with information so you know, for instance, that the email address belongs to a 27-year-old single female who owns her own home, makes between $50,000 - $75,000 a year, and is interested in books, fitness, and travel. 

The second scenario enables you to send targeted messages starting at the welcome message. This will increase your customer engagement and revenue.

Ready to engage your prospects and customers with rich and compelling offers? We are working with a few select, pilot customers on this new solution. Contact info@strikeiron.com or +1 919.467.4545 learn more. 

Four Tips For Customer Data Quality Management

As you think about improving the quality of data within your organization, here are four quick and simple yet key tips that will assist in your approach and strategy on your way to success:

- Think of data as a strategic asset.

Collecting and storing data alone is not enough. There must be a proactive plan in place to ensure that the data serving as the basis of decision-making, operations, and customer communication is treated as a strategic valuable asset. Effectively managing the quality, accuracy, and usability of this data on an ongoing, every day basis can translate into dramatic revenue opportunities and significant cost-saving efficiencies.

- Consistency is as important as accuracy.

Accurate data is important, but so is consistency. Inconsistent representations of the same data content (such as variations of a company name, a lead source appearing six different ways, etc.) throughout data tables can make data very hard to analyze, and can even throw off analytics and business intelligence processes. This can result in decision-making (such as where to deploy marketing assets) based on faulty data points. A focus on data consistency can reduce the incidence of this substantially.

- Data quality is far cheaper transactionally.

Improving the quality of data at the point of data collection (A Web form or via a call center representative) is much more inexpensive than waiting for broad data quality issues to appear downstream that must be addressed en masse. The cost difference can sometimes even be a factor of ten. Also, in the downstream case, considerable use of inaccurate and incomplete data might already have occurred. Validating the accuracy of data before it ever gets into core customer databases is very important.

- Data quality is about more than technology.

Tools can only do so much. Incentive programs for capturing complete and accurate data (such as bonuses for 98% or greater accurate customer data point collection) can go a long way in better, more valuable organizational data, as well as education in the importance of data as a key strategic asset across business units, not just IT. Any comprehensive data quality plan built for success will involve the entire organization.

Using State Sales Tax Rate Calculation Web Services Makes it Easy on your Customers

Last week, the world's largest online retailer Amazon.con agreed to start collecting sales tax in Texas and Nevada. According to its website, the etailer currently collects taxes in the following five states: Kansas, Kentucky, New York, North Dakota and Washington.

The days of Amazon not collecting state sales tax could eventually come to an end, whether due to state-by-state or federal legislative changes. We may soon be paying sales tax on all Internet purchases.

There is no better time than now to implement a sales tax calculation Web service. Why? First, it eliminates all the guesswork when it comes to determining sales tax rates. Due to ever-changing tax legislation, calculating rates can be tricky and time consuming. By integrating a sales tax Web service on an ecommerce site you have fast, easy access to the most current rates and taxability rules for all U.S. and Canadian jurisdictions. Automating sales tax calculations, especially when it is so easy to do and without any ongoing tax rate data maintenance (rates are updated automatically), means time and cost efficiency for your organization.

Secondly, a sales tax Web service is not only important for operational efficiency, but it is vital for customer satisfaction. If you aren't calculating sales tax properly as part of an online purchase, then don't assume it will go unnoticed. See the Tweet below where we responded to someone upset with PUMA charging the wrong tax rate:

 

 

We recommend utilizing a real-time sales tax calculation Web service that allows customers to instantly see their calculated sales tax rate. There are various solutions that get very granular, depending on the ZIP code.

Another shoe retailer, New Balance, is a customer of ours. We like how they have integrated the Web service into their shopping cart. Customers can quickly determine the rate they will be paying before checkout:

 

Integrated sales tax Web services are extremely beneficial for ecommerce businesses. They make it easy to calculate rates and remit payments, allowing etailers to focus on other issues besides the ongoing tax legislation. 

Get started now with a free trial of StrikeIron's sales tax solutions. 

Creating SMS Messaging Campaigns with SMS Web Services

The average person responds to an SMS text message in 90 seconds and average email in 90 minutes. SMS marketing is an excellent way to break through the noise and create a true 1:1 engagement with your customers and prospects. 

78% of the world’s population has one or more mobile phones and nearly all cell phones in use today support SMS text messaging. It’s no wonder that savvy marketers are turning to SMS to get both broad coverage and intimacy of message. 

However, doing SMS text messaging campaigns right in a non-intrusive, engaging way that adds value to your customers is tricky. 

StrikeIron has been providing an easy-to-integrate SMS text messaging platform to our customers for years and has learned quite a bit about what works and what doesn’t. 

Here are our top 3 tips for creating a compelling, engaging campaign:

1)   Know when to start. Sending random offers to prospects and customers that aren’t expecting it is a sure way to get a high percentage of opt-outs (and complaints). Be mindful about the entire customer lifecycle and how you can best inject SMS messaging into that timeline. For example, getting a customer to opt-in after a purchase for shipment notifications and marketing promotions is a great way to demonstrate to the customer how you will add value through improved order visibility, before using the channel for marketing purposes.

2)   Know what to send. The specific offers that resonate with a particular segment of customers are going to vary drastically. Take advantage of your internally collected data, as well as contact information append and enhancement services to properly segment your audience. Most importantly measure, iterate, and improve based on the efficacy of each campaign to each segment.

3)   Integrate into your full workflow. SMS messaging should be an ongoing communications channel between you and your customer. Don’t just do one-off campaigns from a SMS marketing tool, but rather integrate into your entire customer experience. Platforms like StrikeIron’s SMS Gateway provide easy to integrate access to the cellular subscribers in the US and worldwide that can easily be integrated into any system including marketing automation platforms, CRM systems, websites, eCommerce platforms, point-of-sale systems, fulfillment systems, and more.

SMS bulk text messaging is a great way to break through the noise and reach your customers and prospects…if you manage it correctly. By following the tips above and using common sense in creating and executing your SMS marketing campaigns, you can turn text messaging into a powerful, customer relationship tool.

For more information on SMS marketing, read the SMS, King of Mobile Messaging whitepaper. 

 

Top 5 Email Deliverability Tips and Why E-Mail Scrubbing is the Lowest Hanging Fruit

We all have noticed it, especially if you have a consumer email account like Yahoo!, AOL, or Gmail. Emails that you subscribed to, and are interested in reading, are being filtered into your SPAM or Bulk folders. The same may hold true for your email campaigns. Email Scrubbing, otherwise known as email verification or email validation, can help you stay out of the SPAM folder and in front of your customers.

The February 2012 release of the Symantec Intelligence Report reveals that 68% of all email is SPAM. This number has fallen significantly over the past year but it still means that 2/3 of emails sent are junk mail. Needless to say, email providers, companies, and security vendors continue to be very aggressive with their SPAM filtering algorithms.

So how do you, a legitimate email marketer, ensure you don’t mistakenly end up in the SPAM folder? You have to manage your reputation. Just like your friends, family, and community will base your reputation on your honesty and trustworthiness, email servers will also base the deliverability of your messages on your reputation.

Here is the top 5 tips to you can use to manage your reputation and make sure your emails land in the inbox.

1)   List quality – This is very low hanging fruit. By running your list through an email scrubbing service, like StrikeIron’s Email Verification, you can clean email bounces which are a key criteria in deliverability and reputation scoring. Also, if you use an ESP, too many bounces will force them to shut down your account.

2)   List acquisition – Make sure your list is acquired legitimately. Focus on good, valuable, organic list building and avoid email lists as they have a good chance of being littered with bad addresses and honeypots.

3)   Permission to Send - Make sure your users give you permission. Make sure your subscribers have opt’d in and understand what you will be sending and when. It is easy for users to click the Report Spam button, and they often do if your message is not expected.

4)   Content – Make sure your content is valuable and not spammy. If the email provider filters find content that has the right triggers, your message may get filtered. Also, if users don’t like your content they will be tempted to click the Report Spam button.

5)   Frequency – Make sure to keep up a reasonable cadence in sending your messages. Send to few and subscribers may forget about you and click the Report Spam button. Send too many and they will unsubscribe, or worse, click the Report Spam button. 

Much of running a successful email marketing campaign is common sense. Follow the 5 rules above and email marketing will become one of the most valuable tools in your marketing toolbox. Remember, at a minimum, to acquire your lists legitimately, and keep them clean with an Email Scrubbing solutions like StrikeIron’s Email Verification. 

StrikeIron's IronCloud powers the DataFlux Marketplace

We are very excited to announce today that StrikeIron's IronCloud powers the DataFlux's Marketplace. DataFlux, a SAS subsidiary, is the leader in data quality, data integration, and MDM solutions. 

Tony Fisher, president and CEO of DataFlux, said, “The ability to deliver data quality capabilities via the cloud keeps DataFlux ahead of the innovation curve. We are pleased to join forces with StrikeIron to provide cloud-based data quality solutions.”

The full release can be found at: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/5/prweb9457590.htm

 

For the Dataflux Marketplace release can be found at: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120501006204/en/DataFlux-Marketplace-Cloud-based-Services-Improve-Customer-Data

So what are you waiting for, signup for a free trial and see what StrikeIron can do for your business: 

Adding US and International Address Verification to your Check-out Process

Making sure packages reach your customers is the critical, final step in any eCommerce transaction. Address Verification Web Services are a cost effective, easy-to-integrate solution that avoids shipping to invalid addresses in the US and internationally.

Packages shipped to invalid mailing addresses result in both unhappy customers and address correction fees upwards of $11 per shipment from shipping companies. As seen in this Undelivered As Addressed Infographic, over $600 Billion dollars is wasted on shipping to invalid addresses every year.

Shipping, both charges and experience, is one of the most significant barriers to consumers choosing eCommerce vendors instead of brick-and-mortar stores.  You can streamline fulfillment and virtually eliminate shipments to invalid addresses with address verification web services like StrikeIron’s North American Address Verification and Global Address Verification solutions.

Here are 5 tips to use address validation API’s to improve your customer’s experience and save money on returned shipments:

1)   Be mindful on where you integrate your address checker into your checkout experience. As with your entire eCommerce flow, the goal is to minimize shopping cart abandonment. Where the user enters their shipping and billing addresses is a key piece of this overall experience.

2)   Pick a solution that corrects addresses instead of just verifying them. Correcting a mistyped address will streamline the flow and minimize abandonment.

3)   Give the customer choices. Great tip from one of StrikeIron’s long time eCommerce customers is to present the user with a corrected address and allow them to override the selection if they still feel their original address is correct. These overrides should be flagged and manually followed up on by your customer service team. This gives the customer a feeling of control and can help resolve any discrepancies through good, old-fashion customer service.

4)   Verify both shipping and billing addresses. Credit card processors offer AVS, but AVS only verifies the link between a card and an address. It does not  see if the address is valid. If you need to contact the customer at the billing address, make sure it is valid.

5)   If you ship internationally, make sure your forms are not only North American focused. For example, don’t require a state from a drop down box as this will frustrate international buyers and signal that you do not have extensive experience in shipping internationally. 

In addition to the tips above, it is important to find the right address verification partner. Make sure you pick a partner that has a dependable, high performance cloud delivery platform to ensure address verification, just like the rest of your eCommerce site, is available 24/7/365.

 

Amazon's NoSQL and Database Evolution: What Can Be Learned

Late last week, Amazon released an update to its DynamoDB service, a fully managed NoSQL offering for efficiently handling extremely large amounts of data in Web-scale (generally meaning very high user volume) application environments. The DynamoDB offering was originally launched in beta back in January, so this is its first update since then.

The update is a "batch write/update" capability, enabling multiple data items to be written or updated in a single API call. The idea is to reduce Internet latency by minimizing trips back and forth to Amazon's various physical data storage entities from the calling application. According to Amazon, this was in response to developer forum feedback requests.

This update to help address what was already an initial key selling point of DynamoDB tells us that latency is still a significant challenge for cloud-based storage. After all, one of the key attributes of DynamoDB when first launched was speed and performance consistency, something that their NoSQL precursor to DynamoDB, SimpleDB, was unable to deliver, at least according to some developers and users who claimed data retrieval response times ran unacceptably into the minutes. This also could have been a primary reason for SimpleDB's lower adoption rates. Amazon is well aware of these performance challenges, and hence the significance of its first DynamoDB update.

Another key tenant of DynamoDB is that it is a managed offering, meaning the details of data management requirements such as moving data from one distributed data store to another is completely abstracted away from the developer. This is great news, as complexity of cloud environments was proving to be too challenging for many developers trying to leverage cloud storage capabilities. The masses were scratching their heads as to how to overcome storage performance bottlenecks, attain replication, achieve response latency consistency, and perform other operations-related data management challenges when it was in their purview to do so. By the way, management complexity will likely still be a major challenge for other NoSQL vendors, and there are many "big data" startups offering products in this category, who do not offer the same level of abstraction that DynamoDB offers. It will be interesting to see if the launch of DynamoDB becomes a significant threat to many of these startups.

We learned this reduction of complexity lesson at StrikeIron within our own niche offerings as well. We gained a much bigger uptake of our simpler, more granular Web services APIs, such as email verification, address verification, and other products such as reverse address and telephone lookups as single, individual services, rather than complex services with many different methods and capabilities. This proved true even if the the more complex services provided more advanced power within a single API. In other words, simplified remote controls for television sets are probably still the best idea for maximum television adoption, as initial confusion and frustration tends to be inversely proportional to the adoption of any technology.

Another interesting point is that this is the fifth class of database product offerings in Amazon's portfolio. Along with DynamoDB, there is also still the aforementioned SimpleDB, a schemaless NoSQL offering for "smaller" datasets. There is also the original S3 offering with a simple Web service based interface for storing, retrieving, and deleting data objects in a straightforward key/value pair format. Next, there is Amazon RDS for managed, relational database capabilities that utilize traditional SQL for manipulating data and is more applicable for traditional applications. Finally, there are the various Amazon Machine Image (AMI) offerings on EC2 (Oracle, MySQL, etc.) for those who don't want a managed relational database and would rather have complete control over their instances (and not have to utilize their own hardware) and the RDBMs that run on them.

This tells us that the world is far from one-size-fits-all cloud database management systems, and we can all expect to be operating in hybrid storage environments that will vary from application to application for quite some time to come. I suppose that's good news for those who make a living on the operations teams of information technology.

And along with each new database offering from Amazon also comes a different business model. In the case of DynamoDB for example, Amazon has introduced the concept of "read and write capacity units", where charges will be based on the combination of frequency of usage and physical data size. This demonstrates that the business models are still somewhat far from optimal, and will likely change again in the future. Clearly they are not yet quite right for the major vendors trying to figure it all out as business model adjustments in the Cloud are not just limited to Amazon.

In summary, following the Amazon database release timeline over the years yields some interesting information, namely that speed/latency, reduction of complexity, the likelihood of hybrid compute and storage environments for some time to come, and ever-changing cloud business models are the primary focus of cloud vendors responding to the needs of their users. And as any innovator knows, the challenges are where the opportunities are.

Email Verification Software vs. Web-based Email Validation Services

There are a number of email verification software applications for sale that claim to perform email pings to verify your email lists from your PC. These applications are less accurate and scalable than Web-based Email Validation Services

While these email validation applications may sound like a great way to quickly verify your email lists, they can be fraught with issues. Some problems you may encounter include the following:

1)   Desktop software performs email server pings which do not provide accurate results, especially for consumer-oriented domains (e.g. Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.). Before spam became rampant, there was a simple VRFY command that could quickly be used for a mail client to check to see if the recipient’s email was valid. As you can imagine, this was abused by spammers and most email servers (consumer and corporate) have disabled this command.

2)   Desktop software uses your IP address. This is an issue because email servers will flag an IP address for throttling and blacklisting if they see a lot of inbound calls from addresses that normally do not generate high quantities of email. This could affect future emails sent from your IP address and may even raise red flags with your Internet Service Provider.

3)   Desktop software doesn’t scale. Tied closely to #1, you can only verify a certain number of email addresses before your IP addresses will get shut off or throttled.

A better solution is to use an email verification web service API solution, like StrikeIron’s Email Verification, for the following reasons:

1)   Cloud based services support the most up-to-date methods and algorithms to provide the most accurate results. At StrikeIron, we have a team focused on constantly evolving and improving our proprietary email verification technology. Additionally, since the web service API stays the same, customers do not need to install or integrate new software to take advantage of these constant improvements.

2)   Cloud-based solutions do not use your IP addresses. You call the web service via a SOAP or REST call, and we do all the work. Your IP address will never be flagged as a potential spammer.

3)   Cloud-based solutions scale. We handle scalability across all of our customers, so we can handle high volumes of throughput for either real-time or batch processing.

Email verification is a critical part of ensuring your email marketing campaigns are successfully delivered to your customers’ and prospects’ inbox. Cloud-based solutions are a much more accurate, reliable, and scalable way to validate your email lists when compared to desktop email validation software applications.