How to Use Data Validation to Protect Your Databases
Keep Your Databases Clean by Stopping Bad Data at the Point of Entry
Having bad data in your databases is bad for business on all fronts. Just about every operation relies on your data in some way.
Good data management and regular data cleansing help keep bad data from causing problems. But the best way to ensure that your data is clean is to validate that data at the point of entry.
In some areas, validating data as it’s entered is challenging. However, validating customer data as the customer fills out forms is entirely possible. It’s actually easy to automate the process so it’s entirely hands off.
There are a lot of possible reasons that customers enter invalid information. Sometimes it’s an honest typo. On lead magnet and tripwire forms, sometimes the customer just wants to access the information or discounted offer without submitting their real email address. A customer might forget the area code when they enter a phone number.
In any case, bad data isn’t always entered maliciously. But the mistakes can still cause you problems if they get into your database.
I’ll show you an easy way to validate customer data in real time. First, let’s talk about why you should validate information as customers fill out online forms.
Lead Magnets and Trip Wires
Since lead magnets and trip wires are designed to build a contact list of prospective customers, getting correct information is critical.
Gathering 1,000 email addresses can hurt and not help if half of them are no good. Every company I speak with has bogus email addresses in their databases such as asdf@asdf.com or screw@you.com for example.
Invalid email addresses can crush your email marketing efforts, and drive down key metrics like cost per acquisition and average customer value. Also, as you can see from my made up email addresses, some insult could come with that injury.
Sometimes the bad email addresses aren’t even entered by real people. Bots and spam traps can cause the same marketing issues that fake email addresses cause. But they can cause even bigger problems.
If you send too many emails to spam trap email addresses, your IP address or business email can get blacklisted, which causes email deliverability issues which can be challenging to correct. It can also wreak havoc on your insights and analytics and cause your bounce rate or invalid addresses to spike. This can even cause your campaigns to stop or get throttled.
So, real-time email validation for the forms on your lead magnet and tripwire forms spares you a ton of trouble. I’d even say it’s necessary for an effective marketing funnel.
Credit Card Forms
The biggest issue with allowing invalid information to be entered on credit card forms is credit card fraud.
Obviously, this is a pretty big issue. While a lot of e-commerce companies rely on their credit card processor to stop credit card fraud, much of it could be prevented with real-time data validation prior to submitting for approval thereby lower credit card processing fees.
Often, a person trying to commit credit card fraud won’t have all the information about the actual owner of the credit card. So they simply enter whatever information they have when completing the credit card form.
A system that prompts the customer to correct any invalid entries immediately deters fraudulent attempts without even putting the credit card through a processing system.
Additionally, validating email and phone number information prior to or during credit card entry ensures that you have valid customer contact info. This way, you can reliably contact customers prior to processing payments if there’s a problem or something fishy about an order.
It’s virtually impossible to establish any exception rules for sending an order to a customer service agent instead of processing it — such as unusually large orders or orders with a separate billing and shipping address — without some kind of data validation on your data entry forms, because customers can easily circumvent these exceptions by entering irrelevant or bad data.
So, without exception, validating data at the point of entry makes e-commerce safer for both sellers and the customers.
Phone Numbers
The thing about phone numbers is that they’re incredibly vulnerable to being bogus. Spoofing, faking, VoIP, forwarding, temporary numbers, prepaid cell phones, there are just so many ways to create a bogus number that looks real.
Another thing about phone numbers is that they’re extremely easy to validate. You can even get quite a bit of detailed information about phone numbers. This information helps you get better results when you use these phone numbers for sales or customer service.
First, phone numbers can easily be verified as valid. You can also discover:
- If a number is reachable.
- If it’s a cell phone, landline, or VoIP number.
- If it’s been ported to a new carrier.
- The MMS Email address (deliver text via an email client).
- If a number is on the Do Not Call List.
These additional pieces of information can make the phone numbers you collect more useful to you. For example, if you can segment your phone numbers into landlines and cell phone numbers, you can avoid sending SMS messages to landlines.
Verifying phone numbers is also tremendously important if you use reverse phone number lookup to complete information about customers.
Reversing phone numbers is also a good practice if you only require people to enter their name and phone number on your data collection form. Verifying phone numbers can tell several things such as if they’ve been ported, valid, or active phone numbers. It doesn’t tell you if the number actually belongs to the person that entered it in your information collection form.
A Reverse phone lookup can often tell you who owns the phone numbers you collect so you know you’re either reaching the right person when you reach out to your contact list or have the most accurate information in your database.
Recycled and Reassigned Phone Numbers continue to rise. There were 37 Million Cellphones Reassigned in 2014 alone. If you don’t check for reassigned (ported, name change, moved) numbers on permission-based calls, it could get expensive, especially if you’re doing any outbound robocalls. TCPA class action lawsuits are on the rise, prevention is key.
Abandoned landlines are regularly purchased by carriers and converted to mobile numbers. If you’re conducting outbound calls, it’s best to validate the numbers before they hit your database.
As of the latest figures from 2014, reassigned and recycled numbers are up over 16% from 2007. So if 37MM numbers were reassigned in 2014 we can conclude that more than 5 Million numbers are reassigned annually.
Validating Information At the Point of Entry
Checking information as it’s entered into your collection forms is relatively easy.
The most important thing is that the check is transparent. It shouldn’t negatively impact the customer experience or add any additional steps to your checkout or sign up process.
The best way, maybe the only way, to do this is with an API.
If you’re familiar with APIs, you know that you’ll need to add some code to your site to get the API to work. However, most API providers give you a plug and play section of code that a web developer can add pretty quickly and easily.
The API can be configured so that it automatically checks information through a data validation service when a user submits the form. This way your site will prompt the user to correct any mistakes before allowing them to proceed.
APIs are pretty flexible. You can use them for data entry fields in apps as well.
Depending on the information you gather and what you use your data for, you’ll need different capabilities.
There are data validation APIs for validating phone numbers and email addresses. These weed out most typos and intentionally invalid entries in web forms.
Other APIs can find missing contact information and initiate investigations. These keep low quality leads out of your databases.
Of course, you can do all these things without an API. But the process isn’t integrated. You’ll be letting a lot more bad data into your databases.
Data management and database cleansing can be challenging and more time consuming after the data has already entered your database. It’s still possible but you’d have to either use a Batch Data Cleansing service and then import that into your database or use an API after the fact.
Validating information at the point of entry will save you a lot of time and money. This is especially true for e-commerce stores and anyone else who collects data using lead magnets and trip wires.
How do you protect your databases?
Take a look at these phone verification API’s and this email verification API to see how you can protect your database from bad data before it happens.
