SBR Consulting

Our client owns a powerful contact database that supports their business development portfolio by serving as lead. 

Although their contact base is robust and easily accessible via a CRM system, they recognized that a significant chunk of it needs to be updated and refreshed to resolve below issues and provide full business value to their operation:

• Identify and remove obsolete contacts
• Verify email contacts for validity
• Enrich contacts with phone number for easier reach
• Reflect on changes in contact details (change in employment, etc)

To answer our client problem, we have come up with an approach to develop and run a one-off consolidation and enrichment project:

1. Manual data profiling and cleansing to make it easily digestible for the email URL retrieval algorithm (e.g. removing Ltd, GmBH, etc)
2. Used Google API for URL retrieval - this provided satisfactory results and is free of charge; it required some programming to automate the task for the algorithm
3. Based on the number of unresolved URLs, we used paid online service (Hunter.io & Rocketreach.co email finder) to retrieve URLs for additional companies    
4. Set of contact names enriched with email URLs and were processed by Hunter.io service to retrieve email addresses. Email addresses were validated by the same service. Validated addresses should not bounce when used for emailing
5. Before submitting the results for upload into our client’s CRM system, we have reviewed the data to ensure correct format and provide cleansing and consolidation
6. As end output, SBR received text files with resolved and unresolved contacts

• 16 000 contacts have been reviewed, updated, and investigated to be enriched.
• 63% of contacts have been enriched successfully with email addresses obtained by us. This has been considered highly successful, considering that the contact list was old (some contacts gained >5 years ago, hence a significant amount of name-company pairs become obsolete).
• Out of the remaining 37% we have identified invalid contacts to keep the database clean

Further improvement of results possible by manual workaround only ( one by one checking of LinkedIn profiles), which is an option with questionable ROI.