How Does a Phone Validator Help Me Get More Leads?
Looking for our phone validator tool? Check phone numbers here.
No matter how you get leads, you’re most likely losing leads to invalid numbers, disconnected numbers, and phone numbers on the Do Not Call list.
Some customers intentionally give invalid phone numbers because they want your lead magnet, but don’t want marketing calls. Others will hand over their phone number knowing full well that their number is on the Do Not Call list.
But, it’s even more common that customers make a typo on the lead collection form or forget to include the area code. Or they accidentally include their landline vs cell phone. In any case, you still pay to collect these leads, even though they’re unusable without some form of telephone number validation.
There’s no central database for checking phone numbers. So, how do you check if a phone number is real or find out if it’s on the Do Not Call List? Use a phone validator.
A phone number validator recovers these lost leads for you and helps you get more usable leads per dollar.
Here’s how a phone validator makes your lead generation efforts more profitable.
Using telephone number validation for leads
In general, there are two places where you should check phone numbers:
- On lead generation forms, as the customer enters the phone number.
- Once the phone numbers are in your database before your customer outreach teams use the numbers.
Checking phone numbers in real-time on webforms requires a phone validator API. It’s an efficient method for verifying phone numbers before they enter your database. We’ll cover phone verification APIs in more depth in other articles.
Verifying the phone numbers that are already in your database is a surefire way to get more usable leads from the leads you’ve already generated and improve your communication with existing leads.
How a phone validator makes your leads better
A phone validator gets all the associated information for a phone number, so you can use that number for any type of outreach, without wasting time and money calling disconnected numbers or incurring TCPA fines.
In addition to verifying that a phone number is valid and usable, a phone validator also gets:
- Phone line type. If you want to know “what type of phone is this?” there’s no way to tell simply by looking at the phone number. Cell phones, landlines, and VoIP numbers all use the same format. Here’s how to tell if a number is a cell phone: use a phone validator. A phone validator will tell you if a phone number is a cell phone, landline, or VoIP number. This enables you to segment your phone lists by line type so you can perform text marketing and outreach without wasting text messages on landlines.If you have a mobile app, identifying cell phone numbers is critical because landlines can’t be used for text alerts, two-factor authentication, or anything else that relies on text communication.
- Phone carrier. Some text marketing tools require that you supply information about the carrier for the receiving phone number. That way messages can be routed for the best deliverability. Validating phone numbers gets you this information, so you can maximize your SMS delivery rates and get more responses.
- Location information. This may seem trivial. But, if you do any sort of cold calling or phone follow up, it’s best if you don’t call late at night or while people are asleep. A phone validator helps you contact leads when they’re most likely to answer and be receptive to your message.
As you may have guessed from the line type information, the Searchbug phone validator works on any type of telephone number. So, it’s inherently a cell phone validator. No assembly required.
You can validate phone numbers one by one with our phone validator tool.
However, it’s much more efficient to use batch processing if you need to validate all the phone numbers in your database.
How to check phone numbers in bulk
Validating phone numbers in bulk is actually the easy part. All you need to do is upload your phone lists as a .csv, .txt, or Excel file.
Our phone validator will process all the phone numbers, append the information to your list, and return the file as a comma-separated .CSV. The whole process usually takes a matter of minutes, depending on the size of your list. It’s quick and easy landline and mobile phone verification.
The more important part is segmenting or splitting your lists based on the information you get.
Obviously, invalid or disconnected phone numbers can be removed, and those leads can be contacted through other channels (email, direct mail, etc.) if they’re available. The same goes for any numbers on the Do Not Call list.
If you do any sort of SMS communication with your leads, or use phone numbers for a mobile app, you need to separate the cell phone numbers from the landlines. That way you can use the numbers appropriately, without wasting money on non-mobile numbers.
Lastly, if you have offices in multiple locations, it may be best to assign leads to teams based on time zone and area code. That way your representatives can make calls and send SMS messages during all business hours without disturbing customers with a call or text at inappropriate hours.
If you validate all your existing leads and segment your lists this way, you’ll find tons of useful new contacts that you’d written off or given up on because of a simple typo, or because you weren’t sure if the number was a cell or a landline.
A phone verifier gives you the phone information you need about all the leads in your database. So you can make the most of every lead you collect.
