Anyone in Sales or Marketing will tell you that the best part of a sales event is the event itself! Maybe you met some interesting prospects, or had a customer willing to commit to providing a reference for your company? Maybe the junior sales rep got over-served and is questionable to return to the office next week? An instant water-cooler topic for Monday!
Anyone in Sales or Marketing will also tell you that the worst part of any sales event is the follow up activities: the real work that justifies having the event. Yes, I am talking about the data entry and analysis of the lead list. If you are lucky, someone else has typed all of the business cards from the fishbowl into your CRM. If you are even luckier, there aren't typos, and you have some real winners in the mix. But how do you know?
There is only one way to find out. Someone needs to manually process each and every one, answering the following questions:
- Did we get valid email addresses?
- Are they real email addresses, or throw-away "burner" accounts?
- What company do they work for?
- Is the company big enough for us to care about?
If you have ever done this, you will know it's not something that you would miss doing after the next event. To quote Peter from the classic movie, Office Space:
"Well, I wouldn't say I have been missing it Bob!"
At Gigasheet, our mission is to make working with data easy and accessible to everyone. Since email addresses are such a common data type, we thought a free Email Verification Enrichment would help take the pain out of Sales and Marketing activities. That way you won't ask to get hypnotized to forget work completely.
Gigasheet Enrichments read data from a column and append data from other sources alongside that column to help do your job. Previously, we offered Cyber Security related enrichments for tasks like geo-locating an IP address. This is our first of many new enrichments. Please let us know what you think about our free email verification tool!
Introducing Gigasheet's Free Email Verification Enrichment
Keeping with the Office Space theme, let's answer the Bob's question: "What would you say you do here?"
Email Verification helps you quickly clean and verify email lists by delivering the following 4 Columns:
- Format - Is the email address formed correctly? Emails must have one "@", no spaces, and data before and after the "@" character. Valid email addresses will be labeled "Correct" and malformed email addresses will be marked "Incorrect".
- Domain - What is the domain of the email address? This splits off the part of the email address after the "@" and returns the domain of the email address.
- Alexa Rank - The Alexa rank is a global ranking system that ranks millions of websites in order of popularity (the latest ranking is here). The Email Enrichments looks for the domain in the Alexa Rank and returns the ranking. If the domain is not found, the value 9999999 is applied.
- Disposition - This returns 3 values based on the Domain:
- Organization - The email address belongs to a company, school, or other type of organization that has a registered domain
- Free - The email address is from popular free email tools such as Gmail, yahoo, iCloud etc., and is likely a personal email address
- Disposable - The email address is from a known disposable email address provider. This likely is not the lead's primary email address
Each of these columns will be named with a dash appended to the original column name. Here is sample output using some sample data. The column named "Email" contained email addresses and the 4 columns to the right were added.
Email Enrichment in Action
Now that we covered the basics, let's put this to work on some sample data. Here is a list of our favorite Star Wars and Harry Potter leads in our instance of Salesforce. It looks there are 668 leads in our CRM that need to be worked.
Loading the Data to Gigasheet
There are 2 ways to get this data into Gigasheet from Salesforce.
- Export the report from Salesforce as an Excel file or as a Comma Separated Values (csv) file. Load the data into Gigasheet.
- Directly connect your instance of Salesforce to Gigasheet using Data Connectors and sync reports either manually or on a schedule.
We will cover our Data Connectors in more depth in another blog, but think about how amazing it would be to just log into Gigasheet and have the latest report ready to be analyzed? This can be done today! You could even apply a Saved Filter to the data and have the report just the way you like it in seconds.
Regardless of how you get the Salesforce data into Gigasheet, let's walk through how to apply the enrichment and answer our 3 questions above.
Apply the Email Enrichment
Applying the Email Enrichment literally takes 3 clicks. Never has analysis of an email list been so easy!
Click on the "Email" column (click 1) and select Enrich (click 2)
The Data Enrichment menu will appear with the "Email" column already selected. Gigasheet identifies this as a column containing email addresses and will have pre-selected "Enrich Email". Click Enrich Data (click 3).
And just like that, magic happens, and the Email Enrichment produces four columns of data about your email address list. These will briefly be highlighted in blue, to indicate that these new columns are now added.
3 clicks! That's all it takes to enrich a list of email addresses using Gigasheet.
Easy Email Insights
Now that we have loaded the data and applied the Email Enrichment, it's time to analyze our lead data and determine the quality of our leads. A process that was once manual and painful, is now automated and easy in Gigasheet. Our 4 questions are answered below:
1. Did we get a valid email addresses?
To quickly answer this question, group data on the "Email - Format" column by clicking Group and selecting "Email - Format".
This will show us groups of "Correct" and "Incorrect" email addresses. It looks like out of our 668 leads, 648 have proper email addresses and 20 have malformed emails. What makes them bad? Let's click the down arrow on the "Incorrect" email addresses to view the list of bad emails.
As we can see, there are several reasons why an email is "Incorrect":
- Moaning Myrle is missing "@" character
- Bill Weasley has a space in his email address
- Ginny Weasley has 2 "@" characters
- Hugo Weasley has no domain at all. It just stops after the "@".
These are all email addresses that we are going to want to exclude from our marketing efforts.
2. Are they real email addresses, or throw-away "burner" accounts?
In order to answer this, let's go ahead and add two columns to our groups. To do this, click on Group and in the pop-up window, add "Email - Disposition" and "Email - Domain" beneath the existing "Email - Format" grouping.
The Disposition will tell us if the email address is issued from an Organization, a Free email provider such as Gmail, or from a known provider of disposable email addresses. The second grouping by Domain, will just roll these up so we can see how many we have from each domain.
The results show that of our 648 correct email addresses, 330 are from organizations, 292 are from free email providers, and 26 are likely disposable emails.
Click the arrows to expand each group and view the domains, to see examples of each sending type. For example, we can see that in the Free group, Gmail is by far the most popular domain. And in the Disposable group, there are only single addresses from each domain.
Based on this quick analysis, we can definitely eliminate the 26 disposable email addresses from our marketing efforts, and likely the 292 free email accounts as well. Our organization wants to focus our time and energy on the organization accounts.
3. What company do they work for?
By expanding the organization accounts group, we can see a list of the domains of all the organizations in our lead list. It looks like we have some big companies to target! Let's add some aggregations to our data to see what we have.
- Click on a value in the "Email" column and add an aggregation for Count, to count the number of emails per organization. This will match the numbers in ().
- Click on a value in the "Alexa Rank" column and add an aggregation for Average to return the Alexa rank of that organization. Since all values in the org have the same rank, average is the way to display the ranking.
Now we can see the count and Alexa rank of every organization in our list.
4. Is the company big enough for us to care about?
The Alexa rank is a global ranking system that ranks millions of websites in order of popularity. Let's say we work for a company that only wants to target enterprise deals. We can then filter our lead list using the Alexa rank as a proxy for company size. We are going to only focus on the top 100 Alexa ranking sites. To do so, add a filter by clicking Filter, selecting "Email - Alexa Rank" and adding the condition for less than 100.
And voila! Now we have our focused target list of leads to follow up on. It looks like there are 8 organizations in our list that have a top 100 Alexa ranking. Watch out Admiral Rancit, you will be hearing from us very soon.
Simple, Yet Powerful
To wrap it up, we started with a list of 668 leads from our Salesforce CRM. We quickly eliminated the riff raff and created a targeted list for our sales and marketing teams. The Gigasheet Email Enrichment tool works in 3 clicks, and we found easy insights from simply grouping and filtering the data. And we haven't even mentioned the best part!
This is completely free for you to use today! Sign up and try it yourself.
That is, of course, assuming you haven't already quit your desk job!
The ease of a spreadsheet with the power of a database, at cloud scale.
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