What is lead verification?

Any person who is interested in purchasing what you have to offer is a lead. There are many different classifications of leads, sorting them into cold, warm and hot leads, among others.

The important thing is that leads can come from a variety of sources: your website, social media, phone conversation, face-to-face conversations and others.

The lead verification process (also known as the lead validation process) is the process of making sure that the information provided by your leads is accurate. In other words, that their contact information is accurate and they are genuinely interested in what you have to offer and sell.

Lead verification makes sure that the people you contact are people who are worth your sales and marketing efforts. In other words, the lead data is correct, the email is properly formatted, the leads are not duplicated, and more.

Why is lead verification necessary?

Introducing a lead verification process in your sales and marketing efforts is crucial, no matter the size of your business and who you sell to. Here are the main reasons why a lead validation process is necessary.

Saves time and money

With no invalid leads on your list, your sales team won’t waste time doing outreach to people who are a poor fit. When you only reach out to verified leads, you don’t have to spend hours dialing the wrong numbers or sending emails to the wrong audiences.

It improves your email marketing efforts

If you acquire a number of emails through lead generation, you’ll reach out to them to make some sort of an offer. And if those emails are invalid for one reason or another (outdated, misspelled, disposable, etc.), this poor lead quality hurts your email marketing metrics.

If you don’t verify leads before sending out emails, your spam complaint rate goes up, your email deliverability goes down and your sender score suffers too.

Improved conversion rates

Reaching out to verified leads ensures that you’re contacting people who are actually interested in purchasing. These are all high quality leads that don’t use temporary email addresses, fake phone numbers, and other tricks that lead to wasted time.

The lead verification process protects your brand

Verifying leads makes sure you are perceived better in the eyes of your potential customers. You can use lead verification services to ensure you’re reaching out to legitimate sales leads only. If you spam people who are not interested in what you’re selling, they could consider you an amateur who does not know what they’re doing with sales and marketing.

Lead validation services help you stay compliant

Lead verification ensures that you’re not going against legal frameworks such as GDPR. When you verify leads, you can check in just a few clicks whether they opted in to receive communications from you. Otherwise, you risk huge fines if you end up sending unsolicited emails to the wrong addresses.

More accurate analytics

With lead verification, you prioritize lead quality and you get better analytics in return. For example, you can’t judge the success of your email efforts if 30% of your emails go to bad leads who are not moving your sales metrics. With a targeted list that has good lead information, you get a clear-cut vision of your analytics.

Reduced bounce rates

If people enter fake or outdated information in your lead capture form and that goes to your list, you inevitably end up sending emails there. The result is that your bounce rate goes through the roof.

Improved customer experience and satisfaction

When you use lead verification services, the customers you end up reaching out to are going to be happier that you’re calling or emailing. Or at the very least, they will be less annoyed.

How to do lead verification the easy way

No matter how you generate leads and whether you want to email them or make phone calls, there are a few easy ways to verify their information.

Email verification

If you have a list of emails that you built or scraped (and hopefully not purchased), you want to validate those emails before sending anything out. When you send to the wrong email addresses, you don’t just waste time – you harm your sender reputation. Even when you have legitimate lists of emails to reach out to, your sender reputation could be preventing you from reaching the primary inbox.

At Bouncer, we verify email addresses for businesses large and small. Here are some of the many email types we can help verify:

• Misspelled emails (those with bad syntax, e.g. missing an “@” sign or those with a typo)
• Outdated emails (emails that no longer exist because they were deleted)
• Disposable or temporary addresses (addresses that prospects make just for the purpose of signing up with a business)
• Spam traps (addresses designed to attract spammers)
• Catch-all addresses (role-based or general email addresses that you should not send emails to)

Bouncer does all of this through bulk email verification or our real time API for validation. Simply add the API to your website and every time a lead enters their information on your lead form, the API validates it immediately. This verification system eliminates fake leads right at the source.

When you verify leads with Bouncer, you get high email accuracy, a low level of unknown results, high speed of verification, great price per validated email… And the first 100 emails are free.

What are you waiting for? Give Bouncer a try today and validate your first 100 emails completely on us!

Lead data validation

Lead validation goes beyond emails many times. Depending on your sales setup, you could be collecting countless bits of information on the leads you generate or purchase. Some of the information you could validate while generating leads includes:

• Phone number
• Company location
• Company size
• Company industry and niche
• Person in charge
• And other relevant details

There are databases that can help you with lead verification so you can make sure this data is up to date and correct. For example, ZoomInfo, Lusha, Uplead, and others. Besides lead validation, they can also help you with enrichment. When you have some information in your CRM but you don’t have everything, this lead generation and enrichment software can add the missing pieces.
 

Best practices for your lead validation process

No matter the lead validation services you choose, there are some general tips that can help you to make your data more accurate.

Use a mix of lead validation methods

Lead verification is not a set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing. To keep the bad leads at bay, you need to have constant validation efforts. Use a mix of real time verification (through an API such as Bouncer’s), bulk email verification, phone verification, and data validation.

It may sound like a chore, but after the initial setup, your verification process will run on autopilot and save you time and money while improving your conversion rates.

Segment your leads

Once you’re finished with lead generation and verification and you have a list of quality leads, don’t lump them all together. Instead, segment your leads for the best sales and marketing results. Some segmentation criteria include:

• By persona
• By industry or niche
• By company size and location
• By potential budget
• And others

Good leads today may not be good leads in a few months

You may want to save time and do outreach on an email list that is a few months old. In reality, these are unverified leads because email lists decay every month. People leave jobs, get fired, move to other departments, and stop using an email address for various reasons.

While they may have the correct format, you should still run some verification processes to make sure they are up to date, especially if the lists have been sitting for a few months.

Wrapping up

Lead verification may sound like additional work on top of already complex sales and marketing operations. However, it’s not optional – it’s a necessity if you want to make work easier for your team, as well as unlock additional revenue from your existing leads.

At Bouncer, we can help validate your emails quickly, accurately, and at a very low cost compared to industry standards. And the best part is – you can validate your first 100 emails for free.

Grab your free trial today and get started with Bouncer!