real time email and phone verification

[Portland Real Estate]

I was talking to one of our agents the other day about the frustration of bad phone numbers and bad e-mail addresses and it occurred to me that there must be a better solution to this problem.

The one solution I know that other's here have implemented is to send an e-mail verification with a clickable link to verify the e-mail. The problem with this is that we risk losing the user if they have to switch back to their e-mail account and/or wait too long to get the e-mail.

A new solution is real time verification technology.

1) Real Time e-mail verification... this can check the address for validity in various ways (ie does the domain exist). Here are two of the leading vendors for this:

http://biz.freshaddress.com/
http://www.towerdata.com/
http://www.fraudlabs.com/demomailboxvalidator.aspx

2) Real Time telephone verification... this will call the number and verify using a PIN code.

http://www.telesign.com/
http://called.in/

I'd be curious to hear what others think about the viability of implementing either of these. Particularly, how do you think users would react to telephone verification?

[u2man]

Not sure about the calling system....I tracked bad #s for 2 years and it's about 30% for my market. We just accept that and move on. We have closed these bad #s also. Try it if it's not to evasive.

The bad emails never get assigned to a agent....they bouce back from the initial auto-responder.

[metaylor9]

I agree with u2, I think you should just accept it and move on. It is just part of working internet leads. I think if you tried to implement something like this, especially the phone # thing you would see your leads reduce dramatically. I would rather invest time and money into improving my systems to increase the % of leads I convert rather than policing a few that don't want to leave valid info.

[Mitch]

I'm with Mike and U2man. We get about 10% - 15% of our leads with bad email addresses. Many times we can see that it's just a typo. If they have a phone number we will call them. We don't discard a lead unless we know it's a bad phone number and bad email.

25% of our sales come from leads with no or bad phone numbers. I would recommend to have a great drip campaign geared toward getting that lead to give you their phone number.

We also do have a confirmation email that goes out. About 50% of our leads will confirm their emails, but many of our sales come from leads that didn't confirm. As stated above. Get em, check em and if you can't do anything with them, just move on.

[Portland Real Estate]

Although it's unfortunate; I guess I lean towards agreeing that we just need to live with the fake info. As a consumer, I can see myself getting too annoyed by having to verify a phone number that I leave the site.

For those of you who have other agents than yourself working leads, do you as the administrator assign drip campaigns to leads or do you expect the agents to manage their drip campaigns?

[Mitch]

When I first decided to expand my business, I knew that I was going to have to do something different. This is the only business I have owned where I'm not directly involved in generating my revenues.

With that said, when I developed my 100MPH system, it was developed with the understanding that most Agents won't do what is needed to do to be successful. This of course is the reason most Agents fail.

Once I recognized this, I decided that I would take control of all aspects of the business including drip campaigns, follow up programs and then building my software to do as much of my system for the Agents as possible. I figured the more I did for my Agents, the more chance I will have to be successful.

The results are that it worked. I don't rely on any one Agent to do all that is needed....our system does that for us. This allows the Agents to do what they do best, go out and sell homes.