Email Validation of Contact Data Can Trigger Sales Actions
Email validation, if done effectively, not only keeps organizations off of spam lists when communicating with customers and prospective customers, but also can provide new opportunities. Running a batch of email validation checks against an entire CRM contact database at certain time intervals is likely to yield a subset of invalid email addresses within the contact data. Of course, this is usually because people leave organizations for one reason or another. It could also mean they changed their email address, or be the result of some other possible reason.
Since the majority of the time these invalid email addresses likely represent contacts at customer or target companies that are no longer there (and their email addresses have been disabled), they likely have a replacement or someone else within that organization that is important to create a new relationship with. Realizing this and being alerted of it via an email validation process approach helps savvy customer-facing employees get in front of and be proactive with replacement contacts sooner rather than later in order to maintain key, existing relationships.
This process only works of course if real-time email validation solutions are utilized that do not rely upon static database lookups using data that can age quickly. Only solutions that go out to the Internet with each email check to recognize invalid email addresses in real-time will be useful in these scenarios.
The identification of these invalid email addresses in real-time typically triggers an action for a customer service representative or a sales person to reach out to the company to begin building the new relationship. This contact action can be a key trigger for new opportunities as well as strengthening existing customer relationships as there is a basis for communication with the customer, partner, or target company since the point of contact is no longer a part of the organization.
Fortunately, it is very easy to run these kinds of batch email validations using a Cloud-based email validation product such as StrikeIron provides. A mechanism is created that calls out to the StrikeIron platform via an API function call as each contract record is checked, simply reporting which email addresses are no longer valid. This creates a contact action list for customer service or sales teams to follow up with and potentially turn into new business opportunities in addition to maintaining existing ones.
The appropriate time interval to run these types of mass email validation processes against a contact database could be every 30 days, every 90 days, or whatever seems ideal for a given business. Keeping contact data fresh and current can be a tremendous competitive advantage, especially when it's so easy.
