Successful companies learn pretty quickly not to put all of their metaphorical eggs into one marketing basket. Maintaining a consistent supply of good-quality leads means constant refinement of your marketing mix, whether that be through testing and improving your marketing messages or trying new marketing channels.
An investment in data enrichment is one of the highest-value changes you can make to your marketing efforts. Data enrichment is exactly what it says: It means expanding on the data you already have to fill in the inevitable blanks and tell you more about existing and potential clients. Armed with that knowledge, you’ll have cleaner, more complete contact records and better insight into service relevance and timing, allowing you to prioritize follow-up more efficiently. So let’s take a look at five common ways door and window companies reach out to potential customers, and how enriched data from Spokeo can help you get more return on your efforts.
1. Maximize the Value of Referrals
Referrals are some of the best leads you can have, but often your customer doesn’t give you a lot of information to work with, perhaps just a first name and phone number (“Here, call Ron and tell him I sent you”).
If you validate a referral’s phone number or email using Spokeo for Business, you can confirm whether the contact details are current and reduce the risk of calling the wrong number or sending information to an outdated address. In some cases, address history or household context signals may also help ensure your team is routing the opportunity appropriately. The goal isn’t to profile the individual, but to reduce friction and improve first-contact accuracy.
2. Get the Most Out of “We’re Working in Your Area”
Approaching other homeowners in an area where you have a job lined up, or underway, is another traditional technique that yields good results. The fact that a neighbor is using your company constitutes “social proof,” or evidence of your legitimacy, even if the prospects don’t personally know that neighbor.
But blindly knocking on doors or sending out a shotgun blast of emails or physical mailers isn’t necessarily the best way to generate additional sales. Instead, use Spokeo for Business to search each physical address in the area. That search will give you the name and contact information as available for the homeowner (who isn’t always the resident), as well as insight into the home’s age and how long the current owner has held it. That gives you the information you need to prioritize some homeowners over others based on length of ownership (new owners looking to upgrade what they bought, long-time owners freshening a property for sale).
3. Take the “Cold” Out of “Cold Calls”
Presumably, there are people who genuinely like doing cold calls and appreciate the challenge. For the rest of us, well… Google “call reluctance” sometime and see how many hits you get. Still, unless you’re in the fortunate position of having all the leads you can use, cold-calling has its place in your marketing mix. It typically doesn’t generate a lot of leads relative to the time and effort expended, but it’s better than no leads.
That said, you can reduce your sales team’s stress and improve their results by “warming up” those calls with Spokeo. Searching the name, phone number, or home address will show the kind of rich detail, for every household, that we’ve already discussed. Whether you do your cold calls by phone or in-person doorknocking, it means you can concentrate your efforts on those homeowners who fit your desired customer profile, own their homes (no renters!), or for whatever other reason (length of ownership, for example) are more likely to be receptive to your offer.
4. Turn Low-value Inquiries into High-value Leads
Your website and social media accounts can all be leveraged to drive traffic and inquiries toward your sales and marketing teams. And on the outreach side of the coin, email and text-messaging campaigns, pay-per-click, and social media advertising can all generate useful leads.
But those leads often come in the form of low-commitment inquiries, providing relatively little of the information you need to sell effectively. You may have little more than an email, a phone number, or even, in some cases, just an online username.
A quick search on Spokeo for Business can take any of those things, even a pseudonymous username, and, where available, return a suite of information about the person making the inquiry. It’ll give you everything you need to identify the ones who match your ideal client profile, and to weed out the tire-kickers. With that data in your pocket, you can make an informed decision about who to follow up with, in which order of priority, and how to reach out to them.
5. Refine the Targeting of Your Bulk Phone/Mail/Advertising Programs
Arguably, the biggest area Spokeo for Business can help with is refining how you target your marketing programs, from letter mail done in-house to extensive, multi-phase advertising campaigns through search or social media.
First, bulk-searching your existing client database using Spokeo gives you a fuller picture of your existing clients and can help weed out old or inaccurate data so you can create better profiles of what your ideal prospects look like.
With that, you can then refine your audience segments based on service interest, geographic reach, and campaign performance data. You can also segment your campaigns effectively, targeting them by price, product range, or selling point, depending on the prospect’s profile (choosing to focus on aesthetics, security, or energy efficiency, for example). Once you have those profiles, you could use an AI marketing tool to help you craft hyper-targeted campaigns and messaging.
The search will also furnish you with lots of options for reaching the prospect, including validated contact channels such as updated phone numbers and emails (where available). With that, you’ll be able to choose an outreach or advertising method based on which will be most effective, rather than being constrained by the data you have.
A Note About Responsible Outreach & Data Use
Contact enrichment should be used to improve accuracy and reduce wasted outreach—not to profile or target individuals in intrusive ways. Only contact people when you have a lawful basis to do so (such as existing customers, referrals, inbound inquiries, or opted-in lists), and comply with all applicable telemarketing, mail, and privacy regulations.
When using AI tools alongside enriched data, avoid uploading personal identifiers into third-party platforms unless proper safeguards are in place.
Getting Out Ahead of the Competition
No matter which market segment you focus your efforts on or which marketing methods you use to reach prospects, having access to enriched data will give you an advantage. These five examples just scratch the surface of its potential: It’s a highly competitive industry, and tools that improve operational efficiency and customer experience are worth evaluating.
That’s definitely the case with Spokeo for Business, which combines ease of use, ease of management (the Dashboard gives managers oversight with minimal effort), and moderate pricing through our usage-based subscription tiers. Contact our team to learn how Spokeo for Business can support contact validation and data quality workflows for your marketing operations.
Sources
Coursera: What is Social Proof and How to Use It?