The Lead Generator's Handbook

How to optimize leads with identity verification and completion

“Every sale has five basic obstacles:no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust”

Regardless of your role in sales and marketing, there’s a good chance Zig Ziglar’s observation resonates with you. Plus, as a con-sumer yourself, you know the factors you consider before making a purchase.

So how do you find those consumers who do have the need, money, hurry, desire and trust to purchase your product or service?

Smart lead generation.

Lead generation is the core of your business. But it’s not as sim-ple as generating an inquiry. Successful lead gen happens when you gain a full picture of consumer identities—optimization that’s much easier with the help of a data partner.

A data partner with robust identity resolution capabilities—namely verifying the accuracy of data and completing missing in-formation—will bring the most value to lead optimization efforts.

Specifically, a partner will verify, score and complete inbound leads coming to you via form, phone, email or transaction, which enables you to:

• Gain access to the complete view of the consumer, includ-ing their buying behavior

• Optimize conversions by improving the speed to lead

• Save money by reducing time spent on poor quality leads

• Deliver more personalized messages to drive higher con-versions

Further, identity resolution via verifying and completing leads needs to happen quickly, given the rate at which leads are bought and sold. If you’re on the buying side, receiving information in real time helps you engage with top leads before the competition, which improves customer conversions. Speed also grants you the power to remarket to inbound prospects while they’re still in the decision-making process.

In this handbook, we’ll examine core identity resolution processes. You’ll gain a clear understanding of what ID verification and com-pletion are, why they’re imperative for successful lead gen and how to make sure you choose the right data partner to provide these services.

61%61% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge.Source: Hubspot

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Identity Verification, Defined

Inbound qualification and scoring will lead to a dead end if pros-pects aren’t who they say they are, or if they’re not qualified to buy. ID verification indicates the accuracy of a lead’s information by assigning a score, usually calculated using a two-step process:

• The data partner tests the validity of the information based on a variety of complex data algorithms. Is the telephone num-ber 10 digits, for example? Or does the email address include the “@” symbol followed by a legitimate domain?

• Once the data partner deems the information valid, they test it against a full identity graph—a comprehensive source of linked consumer data, including name, address, email, phone number and defining attributes, that serves as a source of truth. Sure, the 10-digit phone number is a valid format—but does this specific phone number actually belong to Mr. John Smith?

After these tests are completed, the data partner will return a score that indicates validity of the identity and the information provided by the consumer.

Some partners weigh scores depending on what criteria is important for your lead generation efforts. For instance, if you’re a digital marketer, email might be the most important field, so you can customize the weighing of scores to reflect the validity of that information.

ID verification is your lead gen solution if you:• Already have leads with identity information

• Are primarily interested in scoring leads

• Are primarily interested in profile-building

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How ID Verification Supports Lead Gen

The more verified identities you have, the easier it is to weed out the “no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust” crowd. With verified identities, you can broaden your lead gen capabili-ties, enabling you to:

• Reach top tier leads faster. Immediately verify top inbound leads and provide real-time customized and relevant offers, personalized to their preferences. Segmented messages are the key to increasing conversions for outbound engagement.

• Improve conversions. When ID verification scores detect in-accuracies, you can eliminate underperforming leads, saving time and money. That way, you’re only sending high-quality leads to top representatives.

• Reach leads at the moment of engagement. Top-tier data partners offer ID verification solutions that include real-time enhanced intelligence—gender, age, income, buying power—which helps you create smarter, more timely marketing mes-sages at the moment of engagement. These messages apply to individual consumers as well as groups of consumers who share similar attributes.

• Send more personalized messaging. Some ID verification solutions are able to supplement your lead information (name, address, phone, email) with demographic and behavioral at-tributes. These might include home ownership, length of res-idence, presence of children and many others—information

that enables you to segment and target consumers with more personalized offers.

• Implement more informed customer acquisition strate-gies. Simply put, you can glean information from inbound en-gagements to find more prospects that resemble your top cus-tomers. If your best customers’ defining attributes are income and home value, for example, you can target more consumers with those characteristics.

• Understand customers’ propensity. Yes, it’s possible to know a consumer is in the market for something before they even indicate interest. Armed with intelligence about their life-style and frequent purchases, you can target messages based on the purchase they’ll likely make soon.

Attributes are various pieces of information that help paint a broader picture of an individual and add more con-text to the core identity data. Common attributes include:

• Home and auto ownership

• Income

• Marital status

• Number of children

• Wealth score

• Age

• Gender

• Buying power score

Attributes also help you identify individuals who buy cer-tain categories of goods, like apparel, technology and more.

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Thorough identity completion solves these issues. It en-riches consumer contact information, building a deep profile of attributes, allowing for more streamlined phone conversations and form completion.

How It Works

The data partner takes inbound consumer identity data and pro-vides—preferably at sub-second speed—a comprehensive, up-to-date identity that fills in holes of information from their identity graph. You can even improve your outbound reach by maximizing interactions with the same consumers across social media, email, paid ads and other channels.

Even if a consumer makes a purchase using different contact in-formation than what you have on file, the ID completion process identifies all contact points, increasing lead attribution by as much as 20% or more.

In addition, ID completion helps you keep data current by provid-ing updated, complete contact and profile information—even as consumers move, change their name or email address, or pro-vide partial or incorrect contact information.

ID completion ultimately provides insights into attribution, identifying which consumers interact with your brand on multiple channels, including offline. After all, in-store shoppers come and go without identifying themselves, and they may be interacting with your brand on social media, email and apps as well. ID com-pletion bridges these gaps, helping you better understand the way people engage with your brand.

ID completion is your lead gen solution if you:• Have fractional identities you want to update and enrich

• Want to maximize engagement with inbound phone leads

• Want to optimize form conversions

• Have old and/or incomplete consumer records

Identity Completion, Defined

There’s a problem with lead forms. If they’re too long, very few leads—less than 15%—convert. But if forms have only a few fields, you end up with sparse contact information that lends little value.

Inbound call centers struggle, too. Representatives have to work harder to drive conversions when all the information they have is a lead’s phone number. Without a complete profile of information linked to that phone number, call centers can’t offer faster, more personalized service to potentially valuable customers.

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How ID Completion Supports Lead GenWhile identity verification validates the information you provide, identity completion corrects and fills in missing information—an ideal tool for real-time lead engagement as well as CRM and data cleansing initiatives.

ID completion helps you improve inbound lead engagement at the moment of contact, expanding your capabilities to:

• Reach top-tier leads faster. Similar to identity verification, completion lets you immediately identify inbound consumers and make sure you’re not flooding their inbox with irrelevant information. You can target consumers with customized offers that result in faster conversions.

• Resell leads at a higher rate. By having updated, accurate, complete information, Infutor found that lead resellers can make four times more for leads with ID completion.

• Improve attribution. Which campaigns are working for you? Which channels are highest performing? Gain a more accurate picture of your campaigns’ success by identifying updated or new points of contact for existing customers, like alternate email addresses and phone numbers.

• Maximize lifetime value and reduce churn. Maintain con-tact across all channels and consistently keep pace with your changing customers to improve overall brand interaction, in-creasing customer loyalty.

• Keep up with changing information. Consumer information changes all the time. A data partner with robust ID completion programs will keep up with changes and help you continuously recognize consumers, providing a better customer experience.

• Expand omnichannel targeting. Meet consumers where they are—across all devices and channels—even if they’re us-ing multiple email addresses. A good data partner will be able to provide multiple email addresses during completion, creat-ing more robust profiles.

How quickly identity data change in the U.S.

2.3 million couples wed every

year in the U.S.

17% create a new email address

every 6 months

Move an average of 11.4 times in

their lifetime

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Choosing the Right Data PartnerNot all data partners’ identity resolution capabilities will align with your lead gen goals. As you explore your options and engage can-didates in data evaluations, your final decision should depend on which partner best optimized your data.

To start, be sure to provide details and clarify priorities specific to your use case so data partners can cater to your goals. Then, ask these initial lead gen-related questions to your potential partner:

• How frequently do you update data? Speed to lead is es-sential if you want to get in front of your competitors and get in touch with customers at optimal moments of engagement. You partner should be updating their data constantly.

• What are your data sources? You’re looking for quality data that fuels your lead gen efforts. Where available, authoritative and deterministic data is the best option. (Probabilistic data—which is based more on propensities—is valuable, but you may need more authoritative data to make pass/fail lead decisions.) Authoritative data is directly sourced, for example, from local property records, telephone company records and purchase transaction data. Data corroborated by multiple authoritative sources prior to being tied to a consumer’s identity is also con-sidered deterministic.

• How do you protect privacy? Security is paramount when-ever you’re dealing with extremely sensitive data—like social security numbers. Make sure your partner has an ironclad se-curity plan that includes file encryption for this kind of data.

When you receive feedback after a data evaluation, it’s important to know that a low ID verification score doesn’t necessarily mean your vendor has bad data. Rather, it could indicate valuable intel-ligence about an individual, like a name or address change. This helps you better understand your customers and even further segment them based on these changes.

To back up your lead gen initiatives, your ideal partner will be able to check off the following boxes for identity resolution:

Massive identity graph with 250 million+ consumers

Daily updates

Decades of deterministic consumer identity assets

Instant access to billions of consumer phone, email, demographic, automotive and property records

Unique, permissible access to additional trusted third-party sources

Phone carrier and financial resources

Flexibility on scoring configuration

Sub-second average response in real-time

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WHY INFUTOR?

Infutor is the expert in Consumer Identity Management, 100% fo-cused on enabling brands to know everything they need to about consumers, to instantly make informed marketing and risk decisions.

Our experience linking trusted data sources results in solutions that identify, verify and score inbound consumers, on demand, with as little as a single identifier; link customer data; update/add missing identifiers and enhanced attributes; and enable increased digital campaign reach through higher onboarding match rates.

Infutor gives brands a secure, privacy compliant foundation to im-prove inbound engagements and outbound marketing reach, and to minimize fraud and collections risk.

The Consumer Identity Management Experts

(312) 348-7900infutor.com

One Lincoln Centre, 18W140 Butterfield Rd, Ste 1020Oakbrook Terrace, IL 60181