The Importance of Quality Call Data for Campaign Success

Hundreds of businesses conduct high volume outbound calls for their sales and marketing campaigns, and campaign managers understand that proper planning and implementation is key to success.

As a campaign manager, you may already have the most sophisticated predictive dialler system, with the most advanced call management software and a team of the best call agents ready to front your campaign, but if the contact data you’re using isn’t appropriate or valid you’ll be limiting the success of your campaign.

The phrase “Your dialler is only as good as your data” is more relevant than ever in today’s data driven world.

A quick web search for marketing lists reveals a myriad of data providers, all claiming to produce contact lists of the highest quality, with sophisticated targeting options, and a guarantee that you’ll be contacting the right people for your campaign. But even the most reputable data providers will supply telephone numbers which are disconnected, unavailable, or even completely invalid.

Even if you obtain your own contact data via an opt-in process, such as a newsletter signup form at an exhibition or online, you need to be certain that the numbers you’re calling are valid and working before they can be fed through your dialler. This is why a data cleansing process is compulsory for any successful campaign.

There are various companies that provide data cleansing services. And the level of sophistication varies. Some services will conduct a live network check, rather than simply matching against a database, giving an up to date assessment of whether telephones are connected and will ring when called. For mobile phone numbers, the same is possible, with an ability to establish whether the user is abroad, and whether their mobile is switched on.

Conducting these checks when you have a large set of contact data can dramatically increase efficiency and operational costs. For example, validating numbers for an SMS marketing campaign will ensure messages are not sent to invalid or unavailable mobile numbers, or numbers that have been switched off for a long period of time. On a large scale this significantly reduce the cost of conversions.

Data cleansing and validation has many applications and any good campaign will involve some kind of data processing to maximise the efficiency of diallers and and the return on investment.