The average response time for a text message is 90 seconds, compared to the 90-minute average response time for email. This stat, among many others, is why mobile messaging has become an integrated and critical part of marketing campaigns.
Still, most businesses aren’t seeing results given their limited access to accurate phone information. Large customer databases can become outdated in just weeks or months. Sending alerts to 100,000 consumers may seem highly effective, but when thousands of the targeted phone numbers are routed to mobile networks that no longer service the intended recipient or are undeliverable because the recipient’s phone was off, roaming or could not receive SMS, the campaign’s potential reach plummets. Further, most customer databases contain numbers that are incorrectly formatted (e.g. landline numbers listed as mobile), and lack the information required to route the messages efficiently to the subscribers who have ported their numbers to a different operator.
Target audience – how to reach the right customer, with the right information at the right time to boost ROI – is the driving force behind effective marketing campaigns. Without an accurate customer database, enterprises are simply throwing a message at a wall and hoping it sticks, wasting precious time and resources.
So how are smart marketers dealing with these challenges? One solution is through phone number information services, which provide detailed information about numbers in a database, to inform mobile message outreach. These help marketers determine whether numbers are accurate, current network operator and country, number type (mobile or landline) and the live status of reachability and roaming. Depending on the goals and extent of any given campaign, tools such as portability check or number verification can be used to raise a campaign’s effectiveness.
Portability Check
Mobile number portability enables consumers to keep their phone numbers when switching network providers. For the user, receiving and sending calls and texts looks the same on a ported number as it did on the original network. The backend, however, is more complicated. An SMS sent to a ported number that’s routed to the original carrier, not the new carrier serving the subscriber, may not be delivered or need to be rerouted.
A portability check validates a phone number by searching portability databases in the country from which the number originates. This determines whether the number is active, who the current service provider is, and whether the number belongs to a mobile or landline phone. Checking a number’s portability optimizes SMS routing, and knowing a number’s current carrier is key for ensuring a message is delivered.
Number Verification
Number verification takes the portability check a step further. By combining a number’s portability status with live data, number verification goes so far as to determine whether a phone is on or off, if it is reachable at the current moment or roaming, and in which country the subscriber is roaming. Number verification works best when an immediate response from the consumer is vital to a campaign’s success. Knowing the deliverability status of a number in real time can help marketers determine the optimal time to send a message so that it receives a response. Ninety percent of people read their text messages within three seconds of receipt, (Dynmark), and marketers with real-time, live data about their targets’ mobile use, have the opportunity to leverage that responsiveness.
Number verification can also help fight fraudulent activity by pinpointing the location of a user’s phone. If a company suspects a fraudulent credit card purchase, for instance, the company can cross-check the location from which the transaction occurred against the location of the registered phone number to determine whether the activity was truly fraudulent.
Benefits to the Organization
Using portability checks and number verification to guide customer communications fills the void between sending a message and ensuring that the message reached its destination in the most efficient way. Verifying customer databases for number accuracy and validity makes targeting more effective by revealing the right moment to contact – and doing so in a cost-efficient way.
By using these approaches for every campaign and every mobile phone number database, an organization that was seeing a 50 percent delivery rate for every 100,000 messages it paid to send can instead pay to send 50,000 messages and expect all of those messages to be delivered.
