Data service provider

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Why website design is necessary for any business

We choose a design in anything we purchase from a car, furniture, clothes, watches etc then why not for websites. For a business, were solely based on e-commerce or an established business looking for digital space exposure, a website is forefront you present. If your business is an e-commerce or you are providing digital services like blog hosting, online course or domain hosting then this is something you have to get it right as your entire business depends on it. It takes 0.05 seconds for users to form an opinion about your website. 94 per cent of negative website feedback was design related. If you have any other business but want a website so that you can cater to a wider audience then your business website is the first impression of your business profile and a powerful means for business lead generation. There are nearly 2 billion websites on the internet and to stand you and compete you have to pull your designer socks.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever. You cannot decide which design people find beautiful and which one not but what you can do is make use of different website designing tools, understanding colour palette, typography and many more tools and techniques to make an aesthetically pleasing website. You can get inspiration from the voted best-designed website such as seriously unsweetened, Crypton trading, Apple, lemonade etc. What makes these sites beautiful is that they are simple, minimalistic and in touch with what their brand represents.

What is web designing?

Web designing or website designing is a process of designing, planning, conceptualizing the web content that is to be hosted on the internet. Web designing is not limited to how good the website should look but also entails how it should work. Website functionality, navigation, action on any icon clicks or button press, an arrangement of content, display details for images, videos, layout, the shape of icons and buttons speed, animations, ads, cross-browser compatibility and cross-device compatibility all come under the purview of web designing.

There are two ways to create a website design

1 Adaptive website – There is two or more version of the website created to various devices and a user agent can inform the server to load which version.

2 Responsive website – These uses flexible grids that adapt to the screen size of various devices.

Although various tools such as WordPress, Squarespace etc are available online through which you can create your website without writing a single code. Some of these tools are based on WYSIWYG(what you see is what you get) approach. They make web designing a child’s play.

These tools can be used when you have to create a website based on individual content or small business. When a business scale is medium or large or business is solely based online then taking professional web designer help is advisable. Web designing is nowadays not just simple formatting through HTML but is more complicated than that.

Also Read: What makes WordPress the best CMS for SEO?

Why website designing is important?

A good website is something you cannot do without if you want to stay relevant on the internet. A business website is not just a website but your digital showroom for your products and services and it has to be appealing.75 per cent of consumers judge a business’s credibility by the design of its website.

First Impression

You cannot make the first impression twice. When you market your brand through any means like social media, word of mouth etc, you want people to reach out to you or visit your site and make some purchase. When people visit your website the first time, it makes a lasting impression on them. It is the first step a major step through which they form an image for your brand. If the design of your business is outdated or unappealing then visitor won’t return to your website. A bad design can also hamper the process of trust-building with clients and also make them think about a future issue like query or customer service issues could be solved through your website or not. There is a saying that never judges a book by its cover but in case of the website, it is the digital cover of the business book that people are judging and this judgment is long-lasting.

Defines your brand

A good website can make your brand image and a bad website could break it. Good website design is the one that is in line with your brand image and vision. Like you have a meditation, health and wellness centre then your website should be such that it conveys the peace that you are offering at your centre through the website. Light pastel shades, soft edge buttons and image display, the de-cluttered webpage with bare essential information will represent what your brand project that is peace and tranquillity. Every brand has a logo. The website of your brand should be in sync with the logo of your brand. The website colour scheme and typography should match the design and colour of your logo. Your brand vision should be reflected in your website design. 88 per cent of online consumers are less likely to return to a site if they’ve had a bad experience.

Engages the customer

When a customer visits a shop or a showroom the shop keeper will engage the customer to find out what he wants and what else he can be sold. In the digital marketplace, that salesman is replaced by a website. When a customer visits your website he or she should feel welcomed and find your website engaging. The interactive animation and link should take to the product that he was looking for and during this navigation, he should be made aware of the amazing deals that you are offering right now. Your website homepage should be simple enough so that customer doesn’t feel overwhelmed and attractive and aesthetically pleasing enough that it holds his attention.

Navigation is vital for pleasant user experience. As a customer accesses your various web pages, he should feel ease in navigation. Good design makes it possible. A good design will be such that it uses the basic online customer behavioural aspects into consideration. Like most visitor focuses on the top right part of the website when accessing through desktop or laptop so try to put the content you want the customer to focus on in that area. Your homepage can be used to make people aware of new product arrival, flash sales and discount you are offering.

Visual content like images, videos and animation can make your site eye-pleasing. As customer attention has shifted towards infographics, images and visual content, nobody has got time to read large paragraphs. If you try to cram content on your website it will look overwhelming and nobody got too much time in their hands these days to read each line. That is why quotes are more famous these days than poems and prose. Your design can make use of infographics and images to get your point across with minimum words.

Nowadays there is a paradigm shift in how the customer accesses your website. Most people are comfortable in navigating the web through mobile phones, mini-laptops and tablets thus your website design should be adjustable to accommodate various platforms. 85 per cent of adults think that a company’s mobile version of their website should be better than their desktop version.

Also Read: B2B Customer Engagement Strategy and How You Can Make It Work for You

Point of sale

Your website is the point of sale for your business. The customer visiting the site will contact you, view your products and services and will place an order. Bad design can make these simple tasks too complicated for the customer. Like if you are doing some online purchase and added few things in your cart now want to remove them or reduce and increase the quantity then the design should be such that allows that with ease or for example your have filled your entire details for subscription and loss the internet connection if website design makes use of cookies then you don’t have to type the details again. They will get an auto-fill. These are basic things that your website design will have to get right because sometimes small things grate on the nerves of your customer and make them abandon their session.

SEO optimization

Your website design is the placeholder for all the keywords that get your website on the top pages on search engine listing. Your website design will aid your SEO strategy to win the uphill battle for visibility on the internet. Your website design must be SEO friendly. There is no use of an amazing website if nobody can see it.

Also Read: 10 Things Google Loves to See on Every Website! Does your Website have them?

On-time

If your design is bad without javascript optimization, CSS optimization or poorly designed script it will increase your website loading time. 47 per cent of website users expect a maximum loading time of 2 seconds. If your website takes longer to load customer is most likely to abandon session in middle.

In conclusion

When so much money is spent on digital marketing through social networking sites, SEO optimization, web scraping services, data verification, data appending services, data mining services, data scraping, data scrubbing, skip tracing services, address search and email appending services then why make your site look like this

When it could look like this

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Why Wahdata is the best email verification tool for all CRM needs? Enhance CRM performance with our five-step email verification approach!

Welcome to the post-COVID-19 era. In the times of Coronavirus where businesses are trying to embrace the new regular frantically irrespective of whether it makes sense or not and for instance, sending out emails to their customers in a desperate attempt to stay in touch with them. In email marketing, the health of your database is crucial -almost as critical as washing your hands and wearing masks. While your customers are maintaining social distancing, avoiding visiting your premises, you need to reach out to them. And it is only possible if your CRM is spic and span. However, in the absence of an email verification tool, a business’ marketing endeavour can meet four scenarios, all resulting in disaster:

An email marketing manager can send emails to as many as customers in the database and wait for their replies. It could be an eternity before they finally get to delete the bad information manually and meanwhile, missing out on their essential time of creating strategy, devising a marketing plan or studying the competition. You know where this scenario is headed towards. The Email Service Provider has already assigned a negative score to the business’ email, resulting in damaged Senders Reputation. Besides, sending an email costs money. Imagine hitting the button for hundred such emails and wait for the hard bounce to scrub them off the list. That is ladies and gentlemen, money down the drain too.

Despite this, the business continues to send emails recklessly without a care in the world to abandoned and incorrect email IDs, leading the ESP to block the domain of the company. Don’t see it as having the digital storefront of the business shut down for a couple of emails gone wrong. The website was taken off the cloud because the company failed to deploy an email verification tool for its CRM.

The business continues to connect with customers who aren’t the right demographics or “fit” in general for its products. The customers would mark the sender’s email as spam and inappropriate, hurting their reputation.

An indirect, but far more damaging situation is to lose out on new customers and to lose touch with existing customers. Since your customers aren’t available on previous IDs, they don’t know anything about your current offers, services or sales. They can’t reach out to you either-depriving business managers to feel the pulse of the market.

It is intriguing how many businesses continue to fall in the same pit and repeat the same mistakes. Especially when CRM cleaning is one of the simplest and most fundamental processes, they can invest in to ensure a business’ reach and expansion. Working with Wahdata is setting your CRM data on an autopilot mode and forget about it. We are here to set some rules to maintain data hygiene for your company and fixing the root cause of data decay.

Dirty data can have an irreversible consequence on customer relationship, B2B lead generation and marketing. It is because data flows through every process and each part of business machinery. Corrupt data will leave the system crippled. You may not see its direct impact, but this shouldn’t come as a surprise that more than $651 billion is lost every year due to bad data.

Why does your business need CRM cleaning?

Data is a double-edged sword. An Achilles’ heel that can become the cause of constant worry for businesses that would like to harness it. The size of data may vary, but its sheer importance and relevancy to the growth of your business don’t. During this pandemic, when you would like to get to your customers, via WhatsApp or a phone call, your data must be up to date.

For e-commerce, small businesses and conglomerates, this data and its importance can change the equation for them. It can help them stay ahead of the curve or reduce them to just another contender playing for the other team. The data can help them unearth the business insights and reach to the customers effectively.

Also Read: Scaling your eCommerce start-up in the age of Amazon

However, we all live in a dystopian world where more than thirty per cent of data gets corrupted and outdated. People change jobs, move to new cities, or simply get unique email IDs. And you can’t reach to them using your old database. Additionally, it is a lot of work to keep your database clean and proper without an email data validation service. Your project managers would either keep trying to fix the broken links in the database or communicating with customers that aren’t even there.

Dirty data is natural. It is the byproduct of the volatile landscape we are operating in. According to this report,

Almost forty per cent of email addresses are changed every year.

Nearly seventy per cent people change their jobs, and hence, titles are broken and so do their email IDs and locations rendering your database useless and unfit to use.

Your B2B sales suffer a massive deal because more than twenty per cent CEO positions are shuffled, or they move to greener pastures.

And unfortunately, there is no respite as many companies are still trying to make their bad data work in the hope of a miracle maybe! A few people understand that data quality trumps quantity and bad data can cost them money, time and effort.

This Harvard Business Review concludes that only three per cent of companies meet the data quality standards. Yet they continue to base their product decisions, marketing campaigns and sales channel on it. The report further suggests that almost fifty per cent of newly created data has one critical error! So, data hygiene and quality are an on-going process and should be deployed like that!

Five common problems that plague CRM data

While sixty-seven per cent of companies rely on CRM data to target customers and make business decisions, as we mentioned earlier, only three per cent are serious about its accuracy. Rarely businesses realise that it is essential to optimise the CRM database to help marketing campaigns reach full potential, to yield high-quality sales lead and to understand customers better.

The four issues that are persistent with every CRM, irrespective of the data size, industry type and business are:

Incorrect information: The reason a CRM has gaps in information is because of the people. Often salespeople fill information with inaccuracies, discrepancies and without necessary details to move on to next prospect or fulfil their sales quota. Or it could be the customers not wanting to part with the details. Either way, your database is corrupted.

Outdated information: The database doesn’t get regularly updated with present information, making the CRM database ‘unfit’ to use. If you continue to base your market decisions based on this data, you will soon be written off the competition.

Spam emails: A business relying on the old database has to deal with inaccurate information, which is outdated or irrelevant in the present context, it is not updated as per new SPAM ACT rules and privacy regulations, leading the customers to report the ID and harming your reputation. Besides, you would like to reach out to as many customers and not have your image tarnished for sending them irrelevant emails.

Shallow data: When you don’t hire an email address validation service provider, your CRM database is at risk of not only having old information but also has a lack of depth. Even if it is relevant and up to date to the present day, you don’t have any insights into targeted demographics. You can’t find new customers by just looking at the data or figure out what are their expectations. Market forecasting and action-oriented insights can be reached upon with email data validation and email appending services.

Why do you need Wahdata?

According to 1-10-100 rule, the timely prevention of data decay can cost you $1, the correction $10, and the internal failure can cause you the damage worth $100.

Wahdata helps you track the root cause of data decay and transcend the data quality beyond the silos of your organisation. Often businesses indulge in an on-the-spot fixing, but bad data seeps through cracks and ruins. During this email data verification and CRM data cleaning, we ensure that your business managers could establish ground rules for a streamlined process across the processes. While we fix the issues, we also train your team to look for errors and report them to an appointed person to rectify it immediately.

For optimised and high-quality output of lead generation and acquisition campaigns, try Wahdata email verification services now! Besides, if you are looking to upgrade your systems and move to market automation, you need to fix your database first. You can’t expect to reach out to target customers when your CRM database is far from listing them.

How does Wahdata help?

Dirty data can have an irreversible consequence on customer relationship, B2B lead generation and marketing. It is because data flows through every process and each part of business machinery. Corrupt data will leave the system crippled. You may not see its direct impact, but this shouldn’t come as a surprise that more than $651 billion is lost every year due to bad data.

Wahdata comes in picture when you decide to call it quits with bad data. It is when the companies realise that they could do a lot more and better with better data than just sitting on it or doing nothing to rectify it.

We, at Wah Data, adopt a five-phase email cleaning process involving uncovering and correcting the data. We empower the marketers and businesses with our data-driven processes to help them stay ahead of the curve.

We start with some basic yet critical email validation steps such as

Enforcing basic formatting requirements: Manual check of B2B and B2C email list to cross-check the email list for simple specifications and help the marketers to avoid bounce rate. This data formatting is the first step to our five-phase email verification requirement. Often there is an @missing, or there is a dot com instead of dot edu in the domain name. Sometimes even customers send wrong information purposefully and can trick the system. Such molehills become mountain when you initiate an email marketing campaign at a mass-level. Our full-scale, dedicated CRM cleaning service can check these emails for domain, syntax, spam trap and SMTP validation.

Email address append: When your email verification service provider is Wah Data, your CRM not only get cleaned but also enhanced with valuable leads and relevant information.

Spam Trap Check: We clear your CRM database for spam trap and ensures its hygiene.

Prevention: While CRM cleaning and email validation is an on-going process, it is vital to figure out where the errors are entering into the system. Wah Data offers tailor-made solutions and fixes for businesses to keep their database clean and neat.

Training: Wah Data works in tandem with business managers to fix the data and maintain check posts at several points where the entrant data could go awry. With us, all your employees become a stakeholder in the process to keep your data clean.

Wah Data offers bespoke email validation services unique to your business type and industry. We bring our manual expertise to the piles of data and turn it into a goldmine! The data you could dive into and drive revenues home. By eliminating outdated and irrelevant details from the B2B email list and appending it with present and useful information, we help you stay on track with your business objectives and goals. So, what are you waiting for? Contact us now for scalable B2B email list cleaning services at affordable packages! Don’t forget to mail us here to get your 5K credit for FREE!

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How much can you save with the address validation?

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.

The email validation will help in getting genuine insights into the reception of your email marketing programme. It improves in getting more focused marketing direction. The invalid email address will not only leaks money you spend on marketing but can also jeopardise your reputation The message sends to someone only matters when they receive it.  Next time make sure that when you put the message in a bottle that bottle is not lost.

[nehatiwari454545-blog]

How much can you save with the address validation?

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.

The email validation will help in getting genuine insights into the reception of your email marketing programme. It improves in getting more focused marketing direction. The invalid email address will not only leaks money you spend on marketing but can also jeopardise your reputation The message sends to someone only matters when they receive it.  Next time make sure that when you put the message in a bottle that bottle is not lost.

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Web Scraping: Leave it All to AI or Add a Human Touch

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.

In a situation like these, human touch became essential. As they say, “The artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as an artificial rose is to real rose.”

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Scaling your eCommerce start-up in the age of Amazon

The popularity of Amazon is indisputable. From a humble bookselling start-up in 1994 to eCommerce business giant, Amazon has come a long way. Amazon is holding its share of business in the cut-throat eCommerce business. No other competitor in many countries is anywhere near it. Amazon itself has an inventory of about 12 million items across all its categories and services but on a broader level all the items that Marketplace sellers list, that number expands to about 350 million. Amazon was responsible for 45% of US eCommerce spending in 2019 and is expected to rise to 47% in 2020.

With the driving force of Amazon web services, it seems impossible to stop this juggernaut. Amazon is a market place where cheap manufacture meets sellers for branding. Amazon’s strategy of flooding of cheap products and free shipping has toughened the survival of small and medium scale competitors. The small e-commerce businesses neither have the capital nor reach of Amazon. Some e-commerce businesses opt for the strategy of competitive pricing. A competitor based pricing strategy can be sustained during the initial stages of market entry but as you progress you cannot use it effectively. The eCommerce business with low pricing, high operating cost, and expanding its supply chain and distribution network will suffer from the loss.

The above statistics paint a dire picture indeed but all hope is not lost. Amazon competitor in many countries has proven that even the dragon giant as Amazon can be slain using the sword of ecommerce solutions and data mining services.

The ecommerce solutions to this modern-day problem can be found in the traditional business model which is still surviving and thriving in this online global marketplace.

Knowing your self

Amazon is become so large and selling everything under the sun that its brand image is turned generic. No consumer in this wanted to link to a bland and vapid brand image. It is a chunk in the armor that can be explored. Why ecommerce businesses like Esty, Myntra, Casper, etc are successful because they know what they are offering. In the bookselling market, Barnes and Noble are giving Amazon run for its money. Knowing your brand and building its image can help small ecommerce businesses in holding their own in this competition. Be courageous enough to be authentic. Just as a shopkeeper will know what it is offering that shop around the corner is not.

Knowing your market

It is like opening a shop of frozen yogurt where everyone is offering ice-cream. The massiveness of Amazon can be used for business advantage as it cannot focus on every market opportunity. When you sell from toothpick to table lamp focused on the quality of every listing becomes sloppy. Another ecommerce giant like Flipkart in India has covered the market of mobile and electronics extensively which Amazon has not focused on. Myntra has covered the market for fashion that Amazon till now is not offering much. Cosmetic market, which is now a fast-growing market, ecommerce brand like Nyaka has covered it. There are many unexplored avenues in e commerce business that can be explored.

Seeing through the eyes of the customer

A traditional shop owner will keep the focus on the ambiance and neatness of the shop. That traditional customer experience is replaced with user experience UX in ecommerce. E-commerce business websites should be eye-pleasing and user friendly. An out of place color icon can even turn off some customer and can vow to never return. A single bad experience on a website makes users 88 % less likely to visit the website again. The data mining techniques can be utilized that capture various parameters of user behavior on the website. With the analysis of this data, various inferences to visitor behavior can be made.

Ecommerce sites can look for customer’s stay time on-site to track whether it’s up to visitor liking or not. If visitor time of too short or too long both are problems. If it’s too short or abandonment in middle signify that it has not to find a site to his liking. In the case of abandonment, something before abandonment was not working for him. If staying too long means that either website was confusing or it has not found something he was looking for.

Not getting lost in the crowd

Amazon is offering consumers with quantity with flooding of products but users prefer quality too sometimes. This trade-off can be managed if the quality product offers at somewhat competitive pricing. But presented with quality products people will choose even if pricy. The demand for Apple products is a living example of this. If you are offering a genuinely good product, without advertising, you will be lost in the sea of cheap products. In traditional business, advertising is done by pamphlets and hoarding. In ecommerce SEO will help you reach in forward pages of search engine listing. The majority of web users are likely to view up to three pages of search engine listing. Your presence of different social media outlets can be like Instagram, Facebook, etc will build brand image, new product advertisement, customer reach, and in turn will increase site visits. As the customer base, today is millennial with ages from 18 to 34 social media presence is essential. Brand storytelling through videos and customer experience promotion have a high social impact on the customer. You can also reach in the prime listing of the search engine when users search for no particular product in mind just through social media presence. When users hit your site even when no sale is made, it can improve your search engine presence.

Also Read: The Ultimate B2B SEO Guide

Knowing your customer

When we visit a shop and shopkeeper remember our name, preference, or item we have recently purchased as a customer we feel validated. The same could be offered through sites too. The Amazon also utilizes these tools but customer engagement is deep when business is small and customer connects to brand image. With the utilization of customer behavior data analysis tools customer behavior can be tracked. Customizable site theme, a suggestion based on previous searches, pitching for more items based on online searches, a suggestion for you may also like gives the customer an individualized experience and could hike sales of connected items. Beautiful packaging adds to customer satisfaction. By making packaging interesting so that opening the product itself is an experience for the customer and inspire him to post on social media so that your product gets to advertise for free. Amazon free shipping is difficult to compete but with the help of an efficient and reliable logistic service, this hindrance can be overcome. The clear shipping policy, package tracking, and clear return policy can keep customers happy without free shipping.

Customer a true promoter and reviewer

Some shops offer customers with suggestion boxes and reviews shop experience that collecting feedback will help in the improvement of services and removing loopholes that can be used by competitors. On b2b website reviews, storytelling, and suggestion by the customer can be included so that engagement is felt. Sometimes customers like your product but forget to review it. Email appending services, email verification services, or email data validation can be used and Emails can be sent to the customer as a reminder for review. Online visitors are more prone to customer reviews in deciding for purchase of product then product description by seller. Customer loyalty programs like providing with pre-sale benefit, exclusive discount offer, limited deals will incentivize customer loyalty and they will felt connected and appreciated. The sellers can be provided with basic and premium membership services through which they can create their homepage, replying to buying leads, and contact buyers. Amazon uses this strategy through Amazon prime services. There are over 150 million Amazon Prime members around the world and they typically spend over $1,000 a year. The estimated percentage of Amazon prime customers is 63%.

Customer forum helps customers connecting and making even pitch for product sales. FAQ section can help in resolving doubt. Live chat tools can provide that and may redress many customer issues. A site should provide a room to vent customer frustration or another will. Proper customer complaint mechanism is important and so is its prompt resolution.

Also Read: B2B Customer Retention Strategies – How To Retain Your Best B2B Clients

The foundation of Ecommerce Empire

All the strategies are just a building block for e-commerce business but the driving for is SEO, data analytics tool, and skip tracing services. Data verification, address search, web scraping services, data scrubbing, and data appending services play a major role.

These tools will help in b2b lead generation. Many web services provide ecommerce solutions, cloud computing services, and data servers for storage. With limited investment in dedicated servers, these online services could be used. Analytics tools are crucial to today’s marketing success. Google Analytics, Bitly, Piwik, Open Web Analytics, etc tools are available for free.

Amazon is truly far-reaching as Amazon River with a dominating presence in 16 countries. B2B giants such as Alibaba, Indiamart, e world trade, etc prove that as uphill the task may be, it could be done.

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5 Ways to Increase sales After the Corona Holidays

As the end of corona holidays are near, the world rejoices as life returns to its normal route. People are also filled with apprehension. With some countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Georgia, etc have managed to contain the outbreak of COVID 19, other countries are still reeling from this pandemic. The death toll as of June is 380265 and still infecting millions.  India despite sincere effort has been unable to contain it with the death toll due to the coronavirus rose to 5598. As vaccination of COVID 19 is still an elusive dream, learning to live with it is the only option.

Corona outbreak has shown the fragility of human life against nature. Corona has impacted the world on all levels whether it be social, economic, and psychological. Corona effects have been positive on the environment and flora- fauna. The other repercussions are nowhere positive.

The world economic ecosystem has got disrupted and from the looks of it, recovery will take years. The world economy has estimated to lose 9 trillion dollars due to the coronavirus. The World Bank has estimated India’s growth rate to be lowest in three decades. The lockdown has affected people socially and psychologically. As the world adjusts with social distancing, distancing with profit has filled business with uncertainty. According to the IMF report, the world economy will shrink by 3 percent in 2020. This slowdown is sharpest since the great depression in the 1930s.

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The world economy is heading towards a deep recession. The COVID 19 induced economic shutdowns and market instability have to lead to a sharp rise in unemployment, the decline in government income, collapse of tourism and hospitality industries, stress on supply chains, and reduction in consumption of products and services. The majority of companies are forced to reduce or completely stop production as demand has fallen. The new start-ups are struggling for funds as the market has dried up. Stock markets in India have announced their worst losses in history. The plight of migrant workers is not hidden. The government is obligated to spend its revenue on food security and medical facilities. The prime minister has announced a package of 20 lakh crore rupees. The effects of loss of lives are immense.

The halting of industrial production, exports, and allied economic activities has plummeted b2b sales. Even after corona holidays get over, the momentum of b2b sales as prior still unpredictable.  There is one thing in business that is certain, is uncertainty. The uncertainty fuels business with opportunities. With well thought out action plan and courage, rebound for these turbulent times is possible too. The five ways that will keep you afloat in stormy COVID 19 times are

Keeping the spirit high

We cannot control situations in our life but we can control our reactions to them. An upbeat attitude will keep us sailing through tough corona time. Corona pandemic has affected people immensely. People’s hesitation and reluctance are genuine. The halting of the economic machine has broken the back of many and dried upmarket with money flow. Many have faced income cut down while others have been laid off. The manufacturer and seller both have faced major losses. The manufacturer lost by stopping production and seller lost by steep fall in the purchase of products. The instability of the market has tied the hands of both manufacture and sellers. These factors have in turn led to a drop in b2b sales and new b2b leads are abysmal.

These are the facts that should be accepted for what they are. These are the problems that every business i0s facing right know. The economic packages of government are ventilators for an economy that is struggling with corona symptoms but completer recovery uncertain. Acceptance of the situation will open the doors for change. The belief that too shall pass is the need of the hour. The eradication of corona is a difficult nut to crack. People along with businesses have to learn to live with.

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

Sense and sensitivity

With the world still recovering from the pandemic and your marketing strategy, oblivion to the sensitivity of matter will create a negative impact. Aggressive marketing approach in these times will leave a bad taste in your client’s mouth. Business in this time should be looked upon as empathic and concerning not money hungry and selfish. Brand image will take a serious hit if even after this global tragedy no compassion is shown.

B2b website content and social media communication channel should reflect the sincerity of the brand. The creation of video content to educate people could be included on-site and social media. The advertisements on-site should be as per condition right now. The people are apprehensive to travel in their town and your site is advertising discounted world tours.

The valuable steps were taken by the company during corona times to help people and emergency service personnel will demonstrate the humane nature of the brand.  Like the majority of companies has come forward in making and distribution of mask, sanitizer, gloves, respirators, and other essential medical equipment. The steps taken as CSR (corporate social responsibility) should be publicized so that others are inspired. The people get connected to the brand which is aligned with their values and morals, not some entity that is cold and unfeeling.

For b2b business related to selling, in homepage listing, hygiene and medical products could be included. All e-commerce companies are taking this approach. Even in the appeals section personal protective equipment (PPE), apron, coveralls, etc are found in the first listing.

Website themes and homepage content subliminally convey the intent of a business entity. These are small changes to be made but making a series of minor changes could change the big picture too. The emails forwarding to the current customer base with hoping for the wellness of customer and brand eagerness to standby them through tough times like this will create goodwill.

Without sensitivity in these times, a business will look like Evil Corporation no one want to associate with.

Also Read: 4-ways to amaze your Clients with Interactive Emails and Increase Engagement

Tried and tested

The corona has also affected online trends. Keywords that were once getting website on first search pages have lost their charm. In this uncertainty of b2b lead generation, data mining and data analysis tools are useful like never before. What business intuition cannot predict data analysis of customer behavior and SEO tool can predict. These customer insights are crucial in times like this when stable sources of leads and sales are unstable.

Emails appending, data scrubbing, address search,data scraping, and data verification are all tools as disposal. The quarantine and lockdown have altered customer behavior. These are shown through online trending topics, twitter trending, etc.

Using data gathered through these tools can help businesses to include the keyword in their content which will increase their visibility of the online stage. With people relying on the web for news and updates on corona, correct utilization of data mining services works wonder. If b2b leads are not generated as per expectation online presence will surely increase. That too will be beneficial in the long run.

Exploring the unexplored

B2b leads and sales have tools a serious hit during corona times. Already established marketing channels cannot tap into the lead generation. As corona holidays are over. New leads on old channels are dried up. Unexplored marketing channels can be explored. Never had your business presence on Esty,  it’s time to do so. Never held a business account on VK, it never too late. These new exploring will open gateway for new customer base and new business opportunities. What is not in demand in your current client base can be in high demand for new clients. The customer outreach program through an online discussion forum could be done. Many broadcasting sites are present to which are not explore with a marketing point of view, that can be done. Take this time to explore other channels for advertising. It will take time to return to the normal course of life and with free time in hand online world is safe to explore for people. While they do their part you can do yours too.

Value the bird in the hand

While hoping for the best in new leads it may be possible that it takes time. The loyal customer stronghold should be safeguarded first. The current customer database can be used to identify the high-value clients and sales strategy focused on them. The high-value clients offered with discounts, premium membership benefits, and exclusive offers will respond positively. The clients still ordering during corona times should be valued. Once someone made a purchase they can be pitched for other purchases or reorder. It takes time to develop customer relations. A loyal customer base should always be cherished.

Every b2b is different. What can work for SAAS cannot work for an e-commerce b2b. Keeping that in mind, these five ways are generalized for all b2b. It’s up to you that you choose the way that keeps your boat afloat. The corona times have been tough and right now circumstances are grim. Opportunities can be found in the darkest of times if we remember to turn on the light. When staying homes can save lives, staying in-game can save the business as well.

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How Digitalization is transforming the Business of B2B Industry Data

‘Digital transformation’ is a term that implies to structure the organizational, operational, and technological foundation of your business to create a seamless and robust experience. The future belongs to those who will be able to transform their businesses digitally as far as the B2B industry is concerned. It is high time that businesses move themselves to the digital age. This will completely change the way how businesses are running today. The customer experience will be enhanced and transform the way clients interact with the organizations. Organizations will have to upgrade themselves and use professional services like data mining services, data scrubbing, data verification, b2b lead generation, data appending,  web scraping, etc. if they want to stay in the game.

Going digital benefits not only the clients or businesses but also its stakeholders. According to a study, the companies who have successfully mastered digital transformation have seen nine per cent more shareholders returns than their peers. Also, there was five times revenue growth than their counterparts. These stats show why digital transformation is needed for the inclusive growth of an organization.

Digital Transformation involves the usage of digital solutions to streamline processes and improve overall customer experience. In the early days, digital transformation was restricted to improving efficiency. But now the focus has shifted to making the client experience better. But there is no one type-fit recipe that suits all for digital transformation. B2B digital transformation will vary from business to business. Every organization will have to restructure their processes in a way that works best for them.

However, every organization would be required to update its systems, find digital solutions, and create a cohesive internal and external channel experience. The digital transformation under B2B varies from that of B2C as the latter requires reorganizing its selling channels. B2B organizations prefer to restructure to sell directly to their clients through e-commerce channels. This eliminates any need for middlemen, thus saving a lot of cost and time. We have seen how digital transformation is done in organizations and how it varies from one business to business, but one thing that is required across all businesses is a strong culture and change in the mindset of the team.

In this technological era, customers and clients would want simple and easy digital solutions. Therefore, they will move to companies that provide such seamless experiences and leave those who are have not transformed digitally. When it comes to B2C companies, they have already undertaken steps to digitally transform to some extent or plant to do so shortly. But B2B companies are always slower to adapt to new trends, including digital transformation. The reason behind this is that the environment for B2B is very complex, and they have to negotiate with the vendors and influencers. Also, they have many moving parts and longer deal cycles. On the other hand, it is not quite the same for B2C companies that make it easy for them to transform.

Many of the B2B companies do not go for digital transformation as they do not see any potential gains out of this. Digital transformation is possible only when there is full commitment from the board. This may mean a complete cultural shift in some companies. B2B organizations should focus on the financial benefits of digital transformation so that they try to digitalize their business. Those organizations that do not participate in the transformational run would find themselves at great risk of getting left behind.

Companies looking for digital transformation should be aware of the fact that merely using the new technology would not fetch anything rather would be a waste of time, money, and other resources. To be successful, digital transformation should specifically focus on customer needs.

The best business practices in digital transformation consider the needs of the customer and how they can be met with the technology for a seamless experience. A true digital transformation facilitates customers to seamlessly find information digitally and employees to have access to the right information in one place. That is why it is said that digital transformation requires external as well as internal restructuring.

Here are some domains where B2B companies can do better to benefit from digital transformation.

Improvising on customer satisfaction

The key features of digital transformation are profitability, customer satisfaction, and speedy access to the market. B2B companies can put in efforts to qualify, bid, and win in renewing a deal. Industry based B2B companies are keeping customer centricity and satisfaction at priority. A perfect balance between digital and non-digital or analog is required to plan the strategy. In general, companies increase the customer-satisfaction score by improvising operational performance through speedy and simple interactions. This cuts down almost half of the costs but enhances the experience of the customer with the company. Employees’ of the company or business also get satisfied as there exists a one-to-one connection between customer and employee, which adds to employees’ work performance.

Ensuring Digitalisation at a strategic level

Companies that outperform have digital strategies at the core that are designed to gain competitive advantage. But most B2B companies do not have a digital strategy. Lack of digital strategy means that the focus is never anchored in customer satisfaction and often suffer from insufficient investments. According to a study, only 9 per cent of B2B companies accepted that digital strategy is their top priority. The majority of B2B organizations just make use of technology in their processes which is not sufficient. To be successful, companies need to embrace an inclusive digital strategy.

Also Read: B2B Customer Retention Strategies – How To Retain Your Best B2B Clients

Utilize data efficiently

B2B companies should use advanced analytics to improve their processes that help in giving insights about the customers. They should make use of tools that aid in marketing and sales understand what offers, products, and services are hitting the right note. This is where tools and services like address search, data appending, data scrubbing, data verification, and mining come in handy. A company should be able to know when the customer opened their email and how long he/she took to read that email and what action they took after that. This will help the organization to empower their sales and marketing team and would help to increase their sales and revenue.

Also Read: Ask Me Anything: 10 Answers to Your Questions about Telesales and Telemarketing

Connecting end-to-end processes for effective decision making

The major cause of failure of B2B companies is that they fall short when it comes to connecting automated processes to the front end. They have been very good at automating the back office. This non-coordination between front and back office is the reason they fail in presales activities. Successful B2B companies use automated decision- support processes and other tools and services like b2b lead generation, etc. to link all their processes with customer, sales, and order data. This helps them generate a comprehensive view of the customer across the business. This integrated network gives the sales and marketing team access to all the client service, support, and other information they need to service their clients.  

Creating a culture of innovation

The majority of B2B companies take a long time to move from concept to implementation of their digital initiatives. This results in losing a competitive advantage. To avoid this, they can use rapid prototyping processes that foster innovation and enhance customer satisfaction. Companies that outperform deploy dynamic development practices and rapid experimentation. They work actively with third parties and use events like digital hackathons, etc. to shorten their learning curve. Some of them use Minimally Viable Products (MVPs) to speed up their process. These fast test-and-learn development tools facilitate innovation and show the company’s ability to cater to all types of customers and clients.

Overhauling and restructuring of the organization

There are a lot of organizational challenges that can be a hurdle to a company’s digital initiatives. Factors like lack of transparency, inward-facing processes, confusing roles of the teams, no prioritization from the top-level leaders are the reason why implementation of digital initiatives fails. To achieve a successful transformation, a complete overhauling of existing systems should be done. This is what Successful B2B companies do. They restructure their organization in a way that aids in digital transformation. These companies are willing and able to dust off their metrics and strategically decide on the measures and incentives that will help them get the results they want. This is not achieved by creating a more complex and several key performance indicators. Instead, just reviewing how the company measures progress and creating a few metrics can get the job done.

Provide a consistent experience

There are numerous channels used by B2B buyers to purchase. These channels are field sales, online stores, etc. Most of them are generated through b2b lead generation. According to research, a B2B buyer on, an average, uses six different channels to decide on the purchase. Using so many different channels takes time which the B2B companies can take this to their advantage. However, taking advantage means having strong cross-channel integration. And that is where the majority of B2B companies struggle. They have disintegrated selling models that make it tough for the clients or the buyers to move seamlessly from face-to-face interactions to the online environment whereas successful companies have a single point of access to all the transactions for their clients. They do it by restructuring their customer-data processes.

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‘Catch & Release: How it is not a Closing Strategy?

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.

This is why you would like to be on the right side of data and base your insights on standardised and verified information. Take the guesswork and noise out of generating B2B leads and cut the clutter with proven data mining techniques! Go fishing in the sea of the right audience!

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Landing a new customer isn’t easy. It is similar to tread onto the unchartered territory of the sea and landing a big catch. Check it out!

Landing a new customer isn’t easy. It is similar to tread onto the unchartered territory of the sea and landing a big catch. Check it out!

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LinkedIn: The latest Social Media Super-hero to B2B Businesses

Your business is as effective as your marketing strategy. We live in an era where businesses that are able to showcase themselves are thriving. Monopoly and oligopoly are increasingly becoming extinct phenomena. Every business is under cut-throat competition and bracing is the only way out. Marketing strategies are evolving rapidly and constantly. Marketers come up with new terms and tools almost daily. Gone are the days where buyers contacted the sellers to seal the deals, now is the time of direct outreach with the help of lead generation and data mining. Customers are now treated as supremely as possible and sellers leave no stone unturned to incentivize the buyers in order to convert them.

Now the logical question that must be coming into your mind is: what social media has to do with marketing and lead generation? Well, social media is used by marketers as a prominent tool to generate leads, building brand awareness and direct outreach.

So maybe the purpose of different social media platforms is to connect the people across the globe, it has several other long term implications or usages as well; with lead generation being one of them. Nowadays, people are so “out there” i.e. people are using so many different social media platforms to express their views, ideas and agendas. This led marketers, identify the potential of social media platforms as an excellent tool for lead generation and information gathering.

Also Read: 10 Ways Guaranteed to Help your B2B Lead Generation Efforts

When we talk about the B2B space where the customer band is already very refined and narrow, LinkedIn emerges out as a clear winner in the game of lead generation and social outreach. Thus, we can call Linked-in as the latest social media superhero to B2B Businesses.

Now, before we dwell further into HOWs and WHYs let’s get few things straight by looking into these stats:

97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing.

According to a recent poll, 91% of marketers claim LinkedIn as one of the authentic sources to find quality content.

Out of every 3 professionals in the world, one can be found on LinkedIn.

90% of LinkedIn users can also be found on Facebook.

92% of Fortune 500 companies use LinkedIn for hiring and content marketing.

93% of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn to be the best place for finding quality leads.

65% of B2B companies have acquired a minimum of one lead from LinkedIn so far.

LinkedIn generates more leads for B2B marketers than Facebook, Blogging and other social media platforms.

LinkedIn is the most trusted among all the other platforms for lead generation for B2B companies.

89% of B2B marketers have included LinkedIn in their advertising and marketing matrix.

Now that’s called some number churning. Right?

So why is LinkedIn, the modest and strictly professional social media platform garnering so much attention from the B2B marketers?

LinkedIn is an Excellent tool for Content Sharing:

LinkedIn is a rising star when it comes to content sharing with its popularity only going uphill each day. LinkedIn has over 600 million users and yes we can say that it’s a huge audience. LinkedIn is used by professionals and this fact increases the credibility of the content shared on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is thus an excellent tool for content sharing. All large to small scale companies are now using LinkedIn as a medium of sharing content and attract prospects.

LinkedIn is a complete Ecosphere for all types of industry professionals:

LinkedIn is used by all types of industries irrespective of their domains. We can, therefore, call LinkedIn a complete ecosphere where all types of industry professionals co-exist. Obviously, this makes LinkedIn an ideal platform to share ideas and go beyond the limitations of a particular industry-type. A lot of business professionals share their ideas on LinkedIn, making it a perfect place for a B2B marketer. B2B marketers are always hunting for like-minded people and prospects and LinkedIn makes this task easier and time-efficient.

Also Read: How B2B sales have evolved in the past 10 years

LinkedIn is the best tool for lead generation:

With LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator lead generation task becomes fairly easy and smooth. It’s a premium feature offered by LinkedIn where you can find leads by applying various available filters such as industry type, job title etc. LinkedIn is the only social media platform that provides a feature like Sales navigator. B2B marketers find this feature too enticing to be missed out on. So, LinkedIn is quite popular at generating leads with the help of sales navigator.

Also Read: B2B Lead Generation: A Complete Guide

LinkedIn provides relevant information about leads:

LinkedIn provides relevant information about leads as it contains personal as well as professional information about them. Since LinkedIn is a professional social media platform, leads often showcase their skill sets, job experience and other information which could be crucial for any marketer. Therefore, LinkedIn is an excellent tool for information gathering and lead prospecting.

LinkedIn as a brand-building tool:

We are already in a market full of gold and the only to shine is to become a diamond. Brand building is quite difficult at this time as new companies are born every day, every hour or maybe every minute on a global front. LinkedIn can be used as a brand-building tool because of its wide outreach and professional attitude. LinkedIn restricts unnecessary advertisements and allows the company space to breathe in. Companies use LinkedIn to build a brand name for themselves.

Now that we have answers to our WHYs let’s understand:

How does LinkedIn become Social Media Superhero to B2B Businesses?

LinkedIn offers Advanced Search and ad targeting functions:

With LinkedIn’s advanced search and ad targeting functions, you can filter leads on the basis of job title, industry type, demographics among others. When you have a premium LinkedIn account, you get to enjoy many salient features offered by LinkedIn to facilitate and grow businesses online. B2B marketers use LinkedIn for a variety of purposes like lead prospecting, lead generation and content sharing.

LinkedIn lets you become part of various Groups:

LinkedIn has a compelling feature called groups. You can join relevant groups in order to remain posted about the latest trends and developments in your business. You might as well create your own group to position yourself in the market and generate leads. LinkedIn’s group feature is one of the most widely used by B2B marketers and the best part of this feature is that it is free!

LinkedIn even lets you save your searches!

LinkedIn lets you save your searches and go through it to gain useful insights. Whenever you use the advanced search feature, LinkedIn also allows you to save them for later. Now the B2B marketers will only have to create an advance search permutation once and then use it again as and when required. So the save searches option saves quite some time and energy of the B2B marketers.

LinkedIn lets you publish Content:

LinkedIn allows you to publish content on their website. Many companies especially the B2B companies use LinkedIn as a content sharing platform. LinkedIn is responsible for driving traffic with the help of content posted on their website. So LinkedIn is used even by the fortune 500 companies as a medium to share content.

LinkedIn offers features like Inmail and Sales Navigator: So why is LinkedIn, the modest and strictly professional social media platform garnering so much attention from the B2B marketers?

A salient feature offered by LinkedIn is the Inmail. Inmail is a premium feature that lets you message people who are not in your contact list. With the help of Inmail, you can directly connect with your prospect without their accepting your invitation to connect. B2B marketers most often use this feature to connect with leads. Along with Inmail, LinkedIn also offers Sales Navigator which is an excellent tool to find and generate leads. Advanced search option is encapsulated in the Sales Navigator feature.

Conclusion

Thus, we can say that LinkedIn is undoubtedly the Superhero to B2B Businesses. LinkedIn provides many features and lets you connect with your targeted leads very easily.  The team of data experts at BizProspex collect B2B leads using online professional platforms such as LinkedIn, CrunchBase,  and numerous other trustworthy online platforms. This makes our list building service, skip tracing services, data appending, data scrubbing, web scraping services, email appending, email data validation, email verification, email address validation, data verification, address search, data mining services much more effective for your purposes. B2B Lead generation is, therefore, a crucial task. We at BizProspex, let you find quality leads as we are well experienced and qualified for this mammoth of a task. B2B companies use LinkedIn for a myriad of purposes. We let them make a smooth transition when they are looking for generating leads through LinkedIn. To know more about us and what we do, you can contact us directly.

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How B2B sales have evolved in the past 10 years

Like every other thing, the Internet has also drastically changed the way B2B businesses sell to each other. Change is fuelled by the infusion of technology and digital media at every step. The customers are more informed and educated than they had ever been and like to get substantial customization and personalization.

Gone are the days when the salespeople used to be the primary source of reliable information. There is a great expansion in the way and extent to which the buyers are doing before making their final decision. Plenty of information is available over the Internet and buyers are acquiring this information from multiple sources. Many B2B researchers are millennials and 71% of them begin their research through generic google searches.

Studies have shown that nearly 57% of the buyers make their decision even before the supplier’s sales representative could participate and try to influence. For that reason, the sales team for every business has to adapt to a proactive approach with innovative ideas to reach out to the buyers and build trust among them.

It goes without saying that the efforts need to be over digital platforms to extend to the present-day buyers. The sales team has to come up with more online interactive tools to embellish their relationship with the buyers. These changes have completely transformed the face of b2b sales in the past decade.

Drift in b2b sales trends in the past 10 years

With the beginning of the second decade of this century, the charm of the traditional methods of b2b sales was already at its decline. Methods like cold calling were not giving the expected returns on investment. However, these methods were still extensively used by businesses. Tools like messaging and emails were gaining popularity.

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

Soon businesses started realizing the importance of web searches and social media, a tool that was reconstructing the framework of b2b sales. Customers were approached through social media connections and relative advertisements on their most searched pages. An increasing number of higher authorities were taking purchase calls based on social media referrals. This was the transit phase that did not last for a much longer period.

Within a couple of years, social media became one of the most prominent platforms for b2b sales. The youngsters getting to the important positions to decide the purchases for the businesses were information hungry and started using the Internet as the primary source for research. To accommodate this change sales teams start using digital tools that are faster, interactive, and engaging.

These developments lead to the present-day B2B sales structure where at least half of the B2B buyers are millennials. Instead of reaching out to the customer and intruding their spaces, now the sales teams were drawing in the customers by registering their presence 84% of these young decision-makers use social media to finalize their purchase decision.

Presently, new content/information-rich tools like blogs and educational videos are boundlessly used to attract the customer. For 58% of the B2B buyers, blogs are a vital information source for initial learning. A large number of them also seek to learn from video content. This calls for experts to perform search engine optimization and ensure that your content ranks o47686-2n the top of the searches. The approach calls for a strong integration of b2b sales and marketing. Most of the job is done by the market and the customer is more than 90% convinced before entering the sales funnel.

This modern b2b sales framework has almost changed the trend from an outbound approach to an inbound approach. The companies are giving more emphasis on bringing in the customers to their territory and converting as many as possible.

Outbound vs Inbound

The transformation in b2b sales in the last ten years is extreme. If the two ends of the decades are considered independently, one can easily notice the difference. Let us understand it by comparing the methods used in each approach and the reason for its failure/success in the present day scenario.

◊    Methods

The traditional approach requires the salespeople to connect to the customers through conventional means like cold calling, emails, direct mails, trade shows, and others. It would take several tries for them to make the customer at least hear them out for what they are offering. Those who could convince the customer to lend his/her ears would also get a lukewarm unsure response. With that response, the number of converted customers would be extremely less than those who have been approached.

On the other hand, in the current approach, sales and marketing need to operate in collaboration. The communication is initiated by the customers’ end. They realize the problem and the need for an efficient solution. The search for the solution begins online. Here the B2B leads and marketing team needs to ensure that you are found in the search with a very convincing and easy to access a website. Many tools such as blogs, social media, videos, permission-based emails, and many more can be used to elevate your chances of being found. This encourages the customer to connect to you and ask for details. He/she should receive educational emails detailing what you offer. This builds trust in your brand and increases the chances of conversion multiple folds.

◊    Why one failed and the other worked

The traditional approach is intrusive in nature and often fails to provide a personalized experience to B2B customers. The customers who might have interest do not feel valued and also feel interrupted by constant calls and emails. The method is expensive and most of the time does not yield the desired results. The return on investment is low and you may have to quit if the expenses overrun the budget.

Talking about the modern approach, it intercepts the potential customers instead of interrupting them. As the interaction begins from the customers’ end, they are certainly interested in your products or services. This helps you provide more relevant and helpful information with a greater extent of personalization. With numerous contacts of the customers, you have valuable assets that can be used in the future. The investment is nearly 60% lesser than the conventional method and the returns on investments are higher and continue to grow in most cases.

At this point in time, the B2B market is dominated by young people who like things to run faster and with greater efficiency. They are ready to change to incorporate the evolution of technology to improve and evolve the market. They have brilliant innovative ideas for B2B sales and marketing to take the businesses at the top and maintain their places. While most of the companies have adapted to these changes, there are still a few who deny to cope up with and struggle in this turmoil. These trends have made the market uncertain the graphs are no longer linear. There are turns and twists and they continue to be like that. It is important for businesses to accept the trend and adapt to the transformation.

Also Read: Crafting the Right B2B Sales Process, and B2B Sales Negotiation Mistakes to Avoid

You can have better insight into our services, expertise at what we do and business-ethics by visiting the following links-

1.

Skip Tracing Services

2.

Data Mining Services

3.

Data Appending Services

4.

Web Scraping Services

5.

Data Verification

6.

Data Scrubbing

7.

Address Search

8.

Email Data Validation

9.

Email Verification

10.

Email Address Validation

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5 Tips to build a killer Email Marketing list and grow your Business

by murtazaamin | Apr 14, 2020 | Data, Email verification | 

If you are into online marketing then email marketing is one of the best forms of communication with your customers. It is also the best way to grow your business and boost your sales. Although social media has been another great way to get the attention of your customers but email marketing is still the best and the cheapest form of digital marketing channel. It is also widely used by businesses all over the world. Numerous studies support this contention for example- according to a study by Adobe, email has an ROI (Return on Investment) of $40 for every $1 spent.

To make the best use of email marketing you first need to have an email list. After that, you need to have a website or a landing page. Make sure you make signing up easy by adding a signup button or link on the homepage of the subscribe forms on your website. Then you must choose an email marketing service. Other services that can be used are email appending services, email data validation services to help you gather the correct data for the list. Once you have got all of that you need great content, offers, etc. to benefit from email marketing. Here is a list of tips and techniques to create a list and boost your sales and grow your business.

Also Read: How to measure ROI through Email Marketing

Strong email content

To attract people, you need to create remarkable email content. The content should be different and every email campaign sent should not be promotional. The recipients should be interested in gaining some valuable information from the mail which will be helpful for them shortly. Make sure to add a visually clear call to action (CTA) in every email campaign to encourage more sales for the business. Different types of emails that can be sent are as under:

Event-based email: Host an event at your business place and invite the customers of your city through mails. The event may be an educational seminar, offer based or demonstration of new products of your company.

Product or Service Information based: Send bulk emails at once and let the customers know about your service and product information. You can also highlight the updated features to attract them about old as well as new products and services of your business.

Emails containing newsletter: Send email newsletters comprising of all kinds of information of the business along with promotional material. You can also provide hyperlinks to your business blog, online shop and social media platforms.

Promotion based email: Let the world know about upcoming sales or special deals of the business. You can also offer coupons and free shipping services to boost CTR and revenue.

Promote offers through social networking sites

In the present scenario, social media marketing is mandatory to keep up your business. Social media provides a platform for both customers and businesses for interaction. It is a potential goldmine of new customers. Social media marketing platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. can be intimidating and queries can be generated by both parties. However, certain points should be kept in mind for effective business advertisement on social networks:

Choosing an apt platform: Since the count of social networking sites is increasing every day, sharing the content on the right platform is vital for the success of the business. You need to create accounts on the platforms that your target audiences use the maximum. This will help you set up the links faster. The choice of the platform also depends on the nature of the products of your business.

Encourage involvement: To promote business, interaction and engagement of customers are required. Host content that people like to read and ask queries. Researching the target audience can help figure out their likings and areas of interest.

Share visual content: Sharing videos attract more audience and help convey the ideas and features of your business more efficiently. Visual content stands out as people scroll through their feeds. Create interesting and narrative videos to get the best reviews from the people. You can also use Pinterest to promote gated visual content.

Build a community: Filter viewers who are loyal, engaged and interested in the business. They are more likely to repost content, like posts and become customers.

Add branded hashtags: Use your bio space and hashtags to promote location-specific accounts and add hashtags. Hashtags can be standard or customized ones for your business.

Prioritize your email list

Segmentation of email lists should be done to send out blast emails group wise. Consumers demand more personalized emails therefore, it is required that you segment your mailing list. To increase productivity, categorize the list and make groups in such a way that campaign emails should target those accounts that have recently made a purchase or opened an email account and are new subscribers. Also, do not make every email promotional as this does not fulfil the purpose of segregation. Segregation also helps boost your click-through rates. According to some studies, it is found that welcome emails generate 320 per cent more revenue as compared to promotional emails.  

Create a blog

A web-blog serves as an online journal or information based website for your business. Creating a blog not only provides online exposure but also builds brand awareness and establishes trust within the target market. Some benefits of creating a blog include:

   Boosting Search Engine Optimization

It helps you increase your rank on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. It also allows you to gather subscribers. You can also upgrade information to more actionable email campaigns over time. This inexpensive and effective tool enables you to insert relevant keywords that consumers use to search the types of services or products offered by the business.

   Opportunity to share business links

This is yet another benefit of blogging as it allows others to share a link to your blog. This aids exponential growth of business with multiple sharing platforms. Visitors can tweet or share a direct link to the blog. One can also email the blog to a friend.

   Develop and strengthen relationships

A blog helps you develop and enhance relationships with new and existing customers differently and interactively. It also helps build trust with the target audience. A comment section below the blog content allows people to write reviews about the product and services. This also helps you follow the visitors’ posts and respond to their comments directly.

   Connect people to your brand

A critical part of marketing is brand awareness. A blog post will allow you to engage with existing and potential customers easily and effectively which is not possible through other outbound marketing techniques. It also gives you a chance to show interact with your customers in a more personal manner. A blog post may contain the vision, standards that your company stands for. It may also include the culture and ethics that are followed in your business,

Also Read: 10 Things Google Loves to See on Every Website! Does your Website have them?

Ask for feedback and customer reviews

It is critical for your customers as well as your business to take feedback from people. You can always improve your services or products from the feedback you get from the customers. Also, people love to offer advice, feedback and criticize the information that interests them. Youngsters also have a strong preference for businesses that are keen to listen to their reviews and work on them over those who don’t. You should have a form on certain sections of your website that asks visitors about any questions they may have about the products, services, etc. You can also add a live chat tool that facilitates interaction between visitors and your employees. This can also help you get the email addresses from people who have stayed on your website for a considerable amount of time. Thus asking for reviews or feedback gives a big boost to traffic on your website and also to your sales.

Wahdata (Email verification solution) is a sub-division of BizProspex (pioneer of Manual Data/CRM Cleaning services). You can have better insight into our services, expertise at what we do and business-ethics by visiting the following links-

1.

Skip tracing services

2.

Data appending services

3.

Webs scraping services

4.

Data scrubbing

5.

Data verification

6.

Data Mining Services

7.

Address Search

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How data appending companies are set to gain from the Covid-19 pandemic?

Let us face it; the world is facing a tough time amid the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, and so are the businesses around the world. Every business is feeling the covid impact and is struggling to stay afloat. While the lockdown has brought the market to stagnation, data appending companies are seeing opportunity in these rainy days. Battling the covid-19 effects, the data appending services are amazingly gaining popularity.

Many studies and surveys have established from time to time that 50% to 75% success of promotional campaigns for b2b business is based on the consumer data store. Inaccurate and inadequate data can fail the very purpose of the campaign, let alone closing sales deals. Nearly 43% of businesses fail in their objective to reach and convert target consumers due to bad data.

The statistics mentioned above emphasize the necessity of maintaining data hygiene for all businesses. A well-designed and well-planned data appending solution help you to stay connected with your contacts with no quality compromisation. It upgrades your consumer database by proper data segregation, elimination of passive data, filling in the missing fields, and final data verification and authentication. It boosts the b2b lead generation and helps in achieving sales targets.

Data appending for b2b business

In the present day and age, consumer data is the key to every business. Researchers and analysts have an essential job to thoroughly know and understand your company’s product and its orientation and identify the target consumer. Data appending companies offer services to create and manage your consumer data effectively.

Online consumer databases and access to it is the wealth for businesses. It includes information of customers like name, contact details, physical address, email ids, and more to contact them and get more conversions. It is a good bet to begin the process of your data appending solution with the existing customers’ data. Often this data is obsolete, especially in b2b businesses as the details tend to change faster. Data appending services identify the non-responsive information and scrap it. With the help of data mining services, it also helps you identify the target audience and gather data of more potential customers to increase your reach to the prospects.

Nearly 25% of the companies do not follow a planned strategic approach for customer data management and are more likely to lose to their competition. Data mining services for scrubbing and appending data helps in b2b lead generation in many ways.

◊     Better quality and quantity of information

Data appending services provide you with rich information about the prospects, including the basics name, address, phone number, along with other details of business verticals that help to pitch your services.

◊      Clarity in data

Data collection and management is prone to errors. There can be typing mistakes, redundancy, and inconsistency and obsolete data, etc. Data appending helps in rectifying these flows and provides you with an up-to-date and relevant database.

◊      Waste reduction

Having a long list of contacts is what you need to reach out to your prospective clients. However, not all are responsive to your calls or emails. It is crucial to identify such passive contacts and eliminate them.

◊      Better segmentation

Segmentation is an important aspect where data appending helps b2b businesses. It helps the sales team to pinpoint the most valuable customers and increase the conversion of anticipated customers.

Data appending companies are on the rise in the present time of crisis

With the above discussion, it is clear that data appending is vital for b2b businesses. After identification of contacts and target companies, it is the third most sought method to manage customer data for b2b companies. Now the question arises, what is making this aspect of growing despite an overall slowdown in the market? How is the data appending companies are to gain from the covid-19 effects and this dispiriting market condition. Following ideas would explain the anticipation of growth in these services.

◊      The need of the hour

Due to covid impact, all businesses are shutting their physical outlets and move to the virtual market of the Internet. Statistics show that nearly 90% of the brick and mortar market is under padlock. Methods of reaching out physically to your existing and prospective consumers are no longer feasible.

In such a scenario, the only way to keep your business alive is to contact the clients and prospects and offer your services through online media like emails, social media, etc. The more clients you can establish contact with, the more likely you are to boost your business after the market returns to normalcy. Data mining services can significantly provide you with quality information to increase your customer base and increase the chances of conversions. These conversions will not only help your business sustain the present conditions but also provide the necessary boost post lockdown.

◊      Its time for profiling and segmentation

In the quest of rapid growth and completion of daily operations, businesses often tend to overlook the analytics of their products and customers. The coronavirus effects have given time and opportunity to the companies to breath and formulate the ideal customer profile and segregate them. It has also become inevitable as the covid-19  impact has changed the preferences and needs of the consumers. It has established new normals for life and has completely transformed the market. B2b businesses compulsorily need to recognize the profile of the customer that fits your end-objective, classify them, and target them to cope up with these changes. The task is essential for all industries and has increased the demand for data appending significantly. Already more than 65% of the companies are found to see an increase in MLQs by improving their profiling and segmentation practices, and the figure is supposed to go higher with the present developments.

◊      Data scrubbing is inevitable

Data appending is not only appending the data of new prospective customers. Identifying outdated and incorrect information is an integral part of the process. In the present scenario, when every small and big business is trying to survive with online or remote operations, the online customers’ databases are also flooded with information. When you are scraping the data and loading it in your local files, it is highly possible to download the data that is either not accurate or not useful for you. In either case, data appending is a must to scrub the data and create suppression lists. It will help you to focus on the valuable customer data and avoid wasting your resources and time on the unproductive ones.

Also Read: How Can Businesses Best Leverage Data scrubbing?

◊      Lightweight strategies are more likely to work

Data appending can seam a costly affair. However, it also offers a lightweight approach. These strategies were typically used by small and upcoming businesses to fuel their initial sales. With the help of advertising and low-cost models, you can achieve a solid customer base. While this is usually the case with small businesses, it is going to be useful for all businesses in the present time. Every business is losing its clientele and is struggling to meet the expenses. In such a situation, lightweight strategies of data scrubbing can remarkably boost your sale and boost your confidence.

In a nutshell, data appending for b2b business is not just cleaning and building contact lists but also a tool that can take your business to new heights. It includes strategies which can push you much ahead of your competitors. In the current time, when downwards is the only movement seam for every business, data appending can help you stay atop and rise swiftly once the conditions liberate.

BizProspex offers data mining  We are a young bunch of bustling data enthusiasts. We specialize in everything data. BizProspex has a solution for all your data needs. We offer all the data mining services such as Data scrubbing, Data scrubbing services,  data appending, Data Appending services, email appending, email appending services,  data scraping, skip tracing, skip tracing services, phone appending, CRM cleaning, Data verification,   Data scraping services , web data services at a very competitive price. We also offer the first 100 leads for free. In case you don’t like our work, we offer a no questions asked 120% money-back guarantee too! Contact us now and let us do the trick for you…

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Why is skip tracing the Key to Preventing Frauds?

Most businesses operate on trust with the debts and credits being an integral part of their functioning. However, this also exposes you to the risk of frauds that can leave you in great financial devastation. Many businesses have even gone insolvent because of bad debts. In recent times similar incidents have happened with well-established banks. Fraud cases like these have left their existence in jeopardy. These incidents often occur when the debtors go missing and do not payback. In such situations, if you can find the debtor, the potential of getting paid is increased several times. Skip tracing services do precisely the same for you.

Skip tracing is a process of locating a missing person who is trying to hide to avoid paying back the debt. The missing debtor or the debt seeker is the person of interest and is called the skip and the process of locating the skip is called skip tracing. Skip tracing services are among the most critical components in any collection environment. Many surveys have revealed that nearly 40% to 60% accounts of the consumers in the collection industry do not have point-of-contact information. The above fact necessitates the need for the development of skip trace skill sets in your employees to reduce the devastating effects of missing debtors.

Growth of skip tracing is an essential tool to prevent bamboozlement

In yesteryears, it was relatively easy for the debtors to leave the town or the country and default on their financial obligations. This way, they were able to avoid collection attempts and leave no option for their creditors but to skip trace them. Traditional methods of skip tracing were manual. Surveys have shown that 38% of the collectors take over two weeks to pinpoint the subject. In the present time, collectors have a wide range of resources at their disposal. You can implement technologies and use databases to find the right party contact.

A typical skip tracing process contains three primary phases. Whether you want to confirm the credibility of an individual or business or trying to trace a missing defaulter, the best practice is to break down your search into the following steps.

From Visually.

Categorizing the person of interest

The first step is to take the information by the subject. The subject often gives this information at the beginning of the deal. Using this information, you establish the essential identity of the subject.

Search refinement

Next is to verify the information collected in the first step and ensure that you are looking for the right party.

Information gathering and tracing

Having the necessary data, you can proceed to find detailed information about the subject from different databases and resources and find your person of interest.

Information from phone number databases, automobile records, GPS data, social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.), web searches, loan applications, job applications, property documents, public record databases, bank records, etc. can be used to locate the person of interest. Most of these databases and information sets are available electronically and can be accessed using data mining services. Nearly 95% of collectors agree that these latest technologies and databases have improved their search for the right-party contact significantly.

Several surveys conducted indicate that an average of 83% collectors who have their employees trained in the data mining services and skip tracing can locate their skips in just a few minutes. They can find the real-time location of the debtors and contact their friends, relatives, neighbours, and colleagues to find their information and verify. The new age skip tracing services has tremendously accelerated the process and has become a primary tool to find the defaulters and prevent frauds.

How skip tracing helps in preventing and resolving frauds?

Information about the individuals is the most vital resource to control and prevent frauds for the businesses who deal with credits. Skip tracing is an excellent way to gather maximum information about the person of interest. Earlier, skip tracing used to be a tool to find the missing debtors. However, in the present day and age, it is used more proactively. Businesses are using these tools to gather information before sanctioning the credits to assess the credibility of the debtor. These tools are also useful in judging the possibility of the repayment of the amount. This helps in curbing the possibility of frauds and increasing the likelihood of locating the defaulters for recovery. Skip tracing has become an inevitable part of many industries. Here are some ways skip tracing helps in curbing the fraudulence.

 Information in a cost-effective way

Information is the key to curb cheating cases. Skip tracing uses the newest technologies to gather data more accurately and quickly. This saves a lot of time and money for the tracers. Information like location, activities, address, email address, contact number, etc. can be found on the internet using social media without nearly no financial investment. This helps in verifying the information submitted by the subject and helps in early identification of the people who are trying to or can possibly conduct a fraud. You can remove such people from your organization or do not recruit them in the first place.  Social media accounts are also a fantastic way to get in touch with the people related to the missing person and enquire about his/her location. When so much information is at your fingertips and can be accessed within no time, it becomes easier to find the defaulters. This also discourages people from attempting frauds.

Establish the need for private investigation

Conducting a private investigation or hiring a private investigator to look into your business’s matter can be expensive. If you have your employees trained to skip tracing, you will be able to handle frauds without making that investment. Also hiring professional skip tracers can be more productive and less expensive than private investigators. This lends a high helping hand for businesses that are running on limited liquid resources and deals in the lending and collection industry.

Access control and performance enhancement

In the modern business environment, business frauds are not limited to debt defaulters. Businesses are working with unique assets like confidential information and valuable data. These assets are vulnerable even within the company. With skip tracing, you can implement better control on the accessibility and search criteria. Also, it helps you find the right-party with greater accuracy. You have better control over your search and are more likely to track down the right person. It enhances the performance of the entire collection process.

Help in data scrubbing

To prevent frauds and efficiently find the deceivers, it is essential to have accurate and precise information. Often scams go uncovered or unresolved due to inaccurate, redundant, and ambiguous information. Such information is misleading and takes you nowhere in your investigation about a person. Misinformation about a person can lead you in wrongly believing the authenticity of the person. This can increase the chances of frauds instead of preventing it.

One of the crucial aspects of skip tracing is data scrubbing. It refines your databases by monitoring, flagging, and scrubbing the data. This can be done for data related to individuals as well as businesses you are working with and helps you achieve results more economically and accurately in much less time.

Assist in serving court documents

Frauds often lead to lawsuits which require you to present or confirm the identity and address of the person(s) involved. With skip tracing, you can get trusted and precise information and can personally serve it to the court. This can considerably speed up the trail and increase your chances to get the losses repaid.

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

We at BizProspex have 5 plus years of experience at providing Data scraping services, email address search, Email data validation, email address validation, email verification, data scrubbing services, data appending, email appending services, data verification, web scraping services and have garnered much trust from some of the most elite clients. Over the years we have perfected the art of skip tracing for our clients. Our clients have trusted us time and again and every time our results have met their due expectations. We have a dedicated and highly specialized team for performing the Skip Tracing. Our methods are agile and communication is one of our key components at providing the best possible results to our clients. If you are looking for the best in class skip tracing service, contact us now!

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What makes WordPress the best CMS for SEO?

Since its advent in the year 2003, WordPress has emerged as the topmost as the popular choice for the CMS. Several businesses are using it as a blog platform too. The WordPress 5.3 had more than 8 lakh download and now powers more than thirty-four per cent of the websites. The WordPress CMS has carved a niche for its own and gained ample credibility in digital marketing.  One of the many reasons behind its abundant popularity is its compatibility with SEO. Many SEO professionals and digital marketing agencies prefer WordPress.

SEO is an acronym for SEO Engine Optimisation and an integral aspect of setting up a website, for, it is the technique that pushes a website further up in rankings. Using WordPress as the CMS ensures that you are already ahead of the curve in digital marketing. Let’s have a look at what makes WordPress the best CMS for SEO and a favourite among the SEO professionals out there.

Comprehensive HTML Markup

WordPress comes with the readymade SEO booster package. While the CMS is written in PHP, it creates HTML pages for a website that are easy to navigate through by search engines.  Several latest frameworks bring forth the advantage of HTML5 that are easily accessible by the search engines.

SEO-Friendly Beautiful and Catchy Permalinks

WordPress comes prepared with SEO permalinks. The permalinks are the links to the keyword-rich posts and pages and act as an indicator for the search engines. A permalink fulfils the user intent and lets a search engine know what the page is about. Besides, the WordPress settings allow you to modify a permalink and make it search engine friendlier. You can always edit it to insert a keyword of your choice and embed it into the URL.

Headings and Tags

The H1 tags and heading tags are one of the many SEO elements that make WordPress an SEO-friendly CMS. Apart from giving web content a much-needed structure, these tell the search engine what the page is about. And it is all automated! One doesn’t need to write HTML tags manually, reducing any chance of manual error and burden of work.

User-Friendly and Eye-grabbing Web Pages

Not only WordPress offers you plugins and themes that make for beautiful and attractive web pages, but also outstanding user experience. A WordPress website is easy to browse through and makes for a breezy experience for a user- resulting in lower bounce rates and improved SEO ranking.

The themes are also power-packed with SEO elements. A digital marketing professional can choose from an array of WordPress themes that are available for different objectives, business and goals. Whether you want to set up a corporate blog for a data appending company or looking to set up an eCommerce website complete with payment options and live project tracking, there are plenty of themes to choose from!

Irrespective of what your goal is, you can find a theme laced with proper HTML markup, basic technical SEO and professional presentation.  The UX of a WordPress site entices the user to stay for longer times and has reduced bounce rates, thereby addressing the nightmare of every SEO professional out there.

Optimisation of Images for SEO

A picture is worth a thousand words and can also be an excellent tactic to fetch rankings. With WordPress CMS, the images can be optimised for size and title tags, leading to better rankings and search results. The Alt Text on images can be used to plug in relevant keywords, which are informative and lets the crawlers understand the content. WordPress Plugins can be used to create automated Alt Text for images, and you don’t need to do it manually!

Images also give a proper structure to a web page, making the content readable and quite enjoyable to scroll through, leading to lesser bounce rates as well.

We all know that Google absolutely hates slow websites.  Well, you don’t have to worry about it when you are using WordPress CMS. WordPress Websites load quick if they are configured correctly. Also, if you can resize the image sizes for better loading speed and performance of the website, several WordPress Plugin can compress the PDF documents and even older images to speed up your website. The CMS has also rolled up downloadable plugins to clear the website cache and clear the old database to reduce the loading time.

Also Read: The Ultimate B2B SEO Guide

Ease of Creation

WordPress started as a blog platform, and thankfully, it retains some of its former qualities even as a CMS.  The platform makes it easier for the content and SEO professionals to post content, structure it and embed multimedia content such as video and images. Besides, WordPress is absolutely breeze to set up. There are hundreds of themes available that can be customised or use as-is.

You need no coding to enable most of its features on to the website. A person without any technical expertise can have a website up and running in no time!

SEO Plug-ins

WordPress has loads of plug-n-play SEO plugins to offer that make it a complete package for digital marketing ecosystem. The All-in-One SEO pack and Yoast SEO are the most common plugins used by bloggers. However, the versatility of WordPress SEO plugins goes beyond them.  

Yoast SEO

It gives you an automated, detailed purview of on-page SEO for web page content along with XML markup and robots.txt. It also gives you instructions (which you can follow or ignore) to improve the content and make it more SEO-friendly.  The Yoast SEO also offers insights into SEO title and meta descriptions.

The WordPress CMS is also compatible with third-party tools such as Google Analytics and Search Console.

Google XML Sitemaps

You can create search-engine-friendly XML sitemaps with this WordPress plugin. It will also notify the crawlers of newly published content on your website.

Google Analytics

The Google Analytics plugin is any digital marketing professional’s dream come true. The WordPress dashboard has a detailed view of stats, traffic, clicks, bounce rate and geographical stats of your website right there!

And this isn’t it!

WordPress extends its ease of usability to other software tools as well. There is ConvertKit for email marketing campaigns and landing page and G-Suite for your emails and documents.

The software tools for data mining and data appending can also be integrated with WordPress CMS easily.  

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

Optimised for Mobile

All of us prefer to search for on-the-go, read on our smartphones and even shop on our hand-held devices. But exactly how many CMS are mobile-centric. WordPress, however, definitely is.

Here’s the industry-wise breakup of mobile-centric browsing and how much traffic industry is getting from a smartphone user.

Since the web is accessed via smartphone more and more, Google also loves a mobile-friendly website – so much that the mobile-friendly websites have a competitive advantage and can redeem themselves in SERPs. The mobile-first indexing is for real, folks!

However, WordPress is a step ahead here as well. It offers plugins like Jetpack for mobile indexing and to create a mobile-friendly version of an existing website.

Comprehensive Security

Google blacklists more than 10,000 websites every day for malware, spamming and more than 10,000 websites for phishing. WordPress used to get a bad rap about its lax security practices, but not anymore. WordPress best security practices secure against the threats of malware and hackers. At the very core, the software is secure and regularly audited by the community of developers for any cracks. Also, you always have the WordPress Security team at your beck and call to guard you against security vulnerability. The team sends out security updates, which are applied to WordPress automatically to stay one step ahead.

Apart from these, you have an array of WordPress security plugins that you can choose and integrate to your website.

Social Media Compatibility

Social media has become an integral aspect of SEO. The boundaries are blurred, and social media platforms are increasingly utilised by digital marketing professionals to gain organic traffic. WordPress plugins such as SumoMe and Jetpack sharing can be used to integrate social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many more with your website.

You can also integrate paid marketing campaigns with the website and track their progress through the dashboard. WordPress also lets you create personalised social media buttons to add that ‘zing’ factor to your blog. You can add social media feed to the home page of your website for more visibility.

Developer Support

The WordPress community support is nothing short of astounding! The exorbitant community and support forums have your back in case you run into an issue.

Conclusion

:

WordPress and SEO go hand in hand. It is one of the best website platforms and CMS out there that is packaged with SEO-friendly tools, plugins and themes. Third-party software and tools for data mining, data scrubbing and email marketing can be easily integrated with the platform. The best part is that most of the plugins and SEO themes are available at no extra prices! Pretty good, don’t you agree?

BizProspex offers data mining  We are a young bunch of bustling data enthusiasts. We specialize in everything data. BizProspex has a solution for all your data needs. We offer all the data mining services such as Data scrubbing, Data scrubbing services,  data appending, Data Appending services, email appending, email appending services,  data scraping, skip tracing, skip tracing services, phone appending, CRM cleaning, Data verification,   Data scraping services , web data services at a very competitive price. We also offer the first 100 leads for free. In case you don’t like our work, we offer a no questions asked 120% money-back guarantee too! Contact us now and let us do the trick for you…

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Salesforce Data.com: Why is it shut down now and what to do next?

Salesforce discontinued data.com, which was reportedly making money for the company by offering qualified leads to the businesses. And if you are wondering and still trying to make sense of what happened, here’s why the leading cloud-based CRM services provider decided to pull the plug on its sales and B2Blead generation component. It seems like the end of an era, but a logical conclusion to a technology solution that has served its purpose and outlived its utility.  

What is Salesforce Data.com?

According to its official website, Data.com is the first complete and native data solution inside Salesforce. Conceived with Dun & Bradstreet, the company scraps off the internet to build a contact list. The Salesforce CRM tools can access this contact list for workflow automation, email automation and marketing automation.

The company offers data mining services and data scrubbing services to businesses to maintain and update this data.  The clean, reliable and qualitative data enables businesses to generate actionable insights and empowers them to stay ahead of the curve. The services of Data.com are classified into two segments, namely Clean and Prospector.

Salesforce Data.Com Clean

The Salesforce Clean boasts of powerful data verification tools that improve the quality of contact and lead data, enrich it further by adding relevant and target-specific details to it. The entire process, right from data appending to data scraping takes place inside Salesforce via Data.com

Salesforce Data.Com Prospector

The Prospector is native to Salesforce and is a tool used to search or filter through the target. Since the businesses are targeting a specific set of customers, the pipeline is much faster, bottlenecks are reduced, and the connection to the customers is more streamlined. The outreach program becomes more aligned to the marketing objective. The Prospector offers you a 360-degree view of sales and marketing processes right within Salesforce.

According to Salesforce, the existing connects within the system will be used to maintain the Data.com towards the end-of-life. Once it is achieved (by 2020), the contact database will be archived and will no longer be in use.

While the licenses of Prospector and Clean can’t be renewed now, these tools are slated to go out of circulation entirely and retire on July 31, 2020.

The journey of Salesforce Data.Com

Data.com came into being with Salesforce’s acquisition of Jigsaw. Even before this collab, Jigsaw was considered to be a quality tool that enabled businesses and sellers to democratise crowd-sourced data from different sources such as tax, mailing records, events or tradeshows. Businesses could exchange their compiled data and make the most of it.

Rechristened as Data.com, the Jigsaw’s democratisation of data appears to feel like more of an afterthought that was on the way to become irrelevant sooner than you might think. The advent of social media, especially LinkedIn, the sellers are getting better at contact sourcing and contacting the person directly without the circuitous routes of a lead generation portal.  Then, there were targeted email marketing campaigns that emphasised on personalisation, whereas data.com provided contacts for mass-mailing and which were company-centric. The businesses, however, moved on to a proved ROI-based strategy where they communicated with buyers and companies that are the perfect fit for their business and services. The ROI-oriented account-based tools and not the ones handing out contacts is the need of the hour.

Since last year, it has stopped taking new customers. However, it is not the only one. Other big data and data mining services providers such as Salesloft’s Prospector, KiteDesk have closed the doors for new customers too. B2B companies and sales reps that relied heavily on contact data provided by the Data.com are still trying to understand the ‘whys’ and ‘whats’, and we help them find out exactly that!

One among the many reasons that Salesforce decided to call it quits with Data.com was to abide by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that brings crowd-sourced data under the scanner. According to this law, “Organisations found breaching the GDPR can be fined up to four per cent of annual global turnover or an amount of €20 Million (whichever is greater).”

It is the maximum fine that can be levied upon the businesses that don’t adhere to most serious infringement yet the basic requirements of an outreach campaign such as having sufficient consent from the customer to use their data. Crowd-sourced data comes without any liability and is often duplicated. Once it enters into a system, it is difficult to ensure its hygiene. Regular CRM data cleaning and various checkpoints are the ways to keep data current and complete.

Besides, there are several data mining tools available in the market as opposed to when Salesforce started. While marketing automation has still a long way to go, the businesses now have a variety of tools outside the periphery of Salesforce while being highly compatible and platform-agnostic. The lack of new features to accommodate targeted and micro focussed marketing campaigns also contributed to its demise.  

As social sourcing the contact becomes the widely-accepted form of lead generation, account-based selling takes the place of mass mailing, stringent laws for outreach campaign come into being, and businesses look beyond the CRM for data solutions, Salesforce has no option but to shut down Data.com

Nonsensical and Irresponsible Data Sanitation Practices

Data.com gained popularity for leading the way forward to the democratic availability of data. However, the idea of ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’ didn’t work out well. There were no sanity checks to the data uploaded, the data scrubbing practices were non-existent, and users could upload any data lists that they want. Experts like Neil Patel have always emphasised on the importance of paying attention to the origin of data rather than building an overloaded system. However, companies often fail to understand the 101 of data quality. Salespeople forget the core principle of their work that it is ever-evolving. People tend to change their jobs, address and email IDs, but the changed details rarely make it to the contact list.

When businesses hire a third-party database, the CRM gets inundated with outdated, duplicated and incomplete data.  So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a sales rep end up wasting more than 546 working hours in a year owing to the bad data in the system.

Lack of regulatory practices

Data.com was cool for businesses before the latter realised its uncool lack and utter disregard for personalisation and data mining services. An outreach campaign to reach out to your customers isn’t about sending the same mail to an odd list of 10,000 people (Fact check: it is spam).  It is about connecting with the customers they want it or the way they would prefer. So, when this data prospecting tool closes down completely, it shouldn’t come as a surprise.  Missing fields, duplicate data, invalid formatting and invalid values just add to the madness of crowd-source data. Here’s just a sneak peek at enterprise lead disposition for businesses, showcasing the impact of poor quality data on B2B lead generation.

The lack of reinventing

Companies, these days, are thriving on data and focus on making a data-oriented system for their business processes. However, it is the quality of data that often gets overlooked.  The email marketing campaigns are now interactive, more personalised and tend to serve a niche target segment. Cold calling or emailing is still relevant, but it is also quality over quantity. If only Data.com had reinvented its practices and had adopted a proactive approach towards email appending and data scrubbing, we wouldn’t be here talking about the downfall of it.

A salesperson making an unintentional typo while entering the details in the system, not following the format, or a customer changing a job – it all leads to unstructured and poor-quality data.  According to this research by Marketing Sherpa, every year, up to thirty per cent of data becomes inadequate and inaccurate. At the same time, businesses do nothing about it but continue to base their business decisions on it.

Bad CRM data leads to higher bounce rates of email, inaccurate details of customers result in poor business decisions, wasted time and efforts. The practice of keeping data up-to-date is rare than you might think despite its criticality.

At times when companies are opening up to nudge-based user personas, buyer behaviour, social listening and predictive analysis, data is what drives them all and quality data is non-negotiable. However, Data.com scored a big ZERO when it came to offering relevant and current data to its clients – the only job that it had.

So, what to do now?

Data.com is gone, and with it being out of the picture, you need to find data appending companies that adhere to international CAN-SPAM regulations and have data appending services in place. A data solution provider that takes the ownership of the data it is provided to you and ensures it is updated, complete and accurate. It should offer value-based solutions such as CRM cleaning, email data validation, email verification, email address validation and scrubbing simultaneously to ensure that the data is checked and looked into for discrepancies at various checkpoints, especially when it enters into the system.

Accurate, verified, and targeted contact data is the need of the hour. Your salespeople shouldn’t spend their time double-verifying email address details off the social media or finding out the right information for a targeted segment when you have already paid for it.