Data validation is an essential step in ensuring that your email marketing efforts are effective and reach the intended recipients. 

The data validation tool cross references both the F24 know history of an email address and performs a series of diligent steps to ensure your data is as clean as possible. The Force24 data validation tool is possibly the most comprehensive email validation tool available as the quality of your data has a massive impact on your success.

By activating the Data Validation tool, you can assess the quality of your contact data and make more informed decisions about your communication strategies.

Important facts about data validation

 

Data Validation checks every hour for any new contacts added to the Marketing List

Data validation handles batches of approx. 1000 every hour. For larger audiences please be patient.

 

Data validation consumes 4 credits for each record validated

Data validation does not guarantee a zero bounce rate but will dramatically improve your delivery rates

 

Important Info

Data Validation runs every hour.

Data validation handles batches of approx. 1000 every hour. For larger audiences please be patient.


Activating the App

How to Set Up the Data Validation App 

On the left-hand side menu, click on App Marketplace, which can be found at the bottom of the menu.

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Scroll to and click on Data and click.

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Look for the Data Validation option and click to activate the tool.

 

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Click on the Data Validation option to install the app.

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Once your app is running you will see the status change in the app marketplace frame

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And you will be able to see the app running and how many credits you have used in Active Connections section below

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Using Validated data

What happens next?

Once the app is running it will have created 6 new marketing lists for you, to find these lists in your account you can click here

These are automated lists that will be always running to help you understand your data better, whenever a contact record is validated it will automatically be assigned to one of these lists to help you manage your sends better, you can find these lists in “Your Data” found in the left-hand menu.

  • Delivery Confidence Score Lists
    • Data Validated - Very High Risk, Do not send
    • Data Validated - High Risk
    • Data Validated - Medium Risk
    • Data Validated - Low Risk
    • Data Validated - Send
  • Do Not Delete – Data to be Validated
  • Data Validated - Typos

 

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 The app will also have created a series of fields on your contact records. You can see these fields by going to the Account settings page -> Contact Extension Fields

The tool will also create three CE fields:

  • Data Validation – Delivery Confidence
  • Data Validation – Result
  • Data Validation – Valid

 

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The data validation confidence is the score assigned to how confident we are you email will be delivered. Typically a good email address is 50+

The data validation result will contain information about the category we believe the email falls into – such as a typo, high risk. Very high risk etc.


Selecting contacts to be validated 

Any data you want to be validated, should be added to the Do Not Delete – Data to be Validated list.

There are 4 ways to do this

Automated smart lists, you can build a query in an automated smart list to add new people or people matching a criteria to be validated and set this to constantly look at your data and assess if they should be validated or not. 

We recommend this approach and here are some sample queries you can use in your automated smart lists to add contacts.

 

All new contacts with no email open history here.

Continually check contacts that have not opened an email in the last 60 days or have never opened an email and have never been validated before here. 

 

Once you have built your query in the contact search, you can save the query and use it in the automated lists feature

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Then select the query from the dropdown and use clear and set to use the exact query you have just saved

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Data upload, when you upload data via the data upload feature you can select that the contacts are automatically added into the list for validation.

Access data upload here

https://platform.data-crypt.com/data-upload/add

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Journey builder, do this automatically by building a journey. i.e. every time new contact is added, the journey adds that contact to the Do Not Delete – Data to be Validated, which will perform the data validation and move the contact to one of the following lists. 

Access journey builder here.

 

Example journey - Validating all new leads from form fills before engaging. 

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Using a start audience like the ones suggest above in the automated lists section or as below:

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Contact Search is where you build manual once of queries for your data to yield a list of contacts to manually add to the list.

You can use example queries like the ones below,

All new contacts with no email open history here.

Continually check contacts that have not opened an email in the last 90 days or have never opened an email and have never been validated before here. 

 

 

To move contacts to the list simply click the Marketing lists button at the bottom of the search results

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 The select the Do Not Delete Data to be Validated, from the drop down, hit auto distribute and then confirm

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This will move all of your contacts into the validation list and these will be picked up for processing.

How Much Will It Cost?

Data Validation consumes 2 credits for each record validated. You receive 500 free credits each month, with the option to contact your account manager if you need to increase your credit limit. Credits are provided at the beginning of each month, and any unused credits will not carry over to the next month.



Understanding The Data

The tool automatically creates a number of lists which can be found via the menu on the left-hand side under “Your Data”.  These lists segment the validated data to help you decide which contacts are safe to send emails to and which should be handled cautiously, corrected, even removed.

 

 

Delivery Confidence Score Lists

After activation, the tool will begin analysing your contact data and assigning a Delivery Confidence Score to each contact. The score determines the likelihood of successful email delivery based on third-party data and algorithms. It segments the contacts into lists, based on their delivery confidence scores

    • Very High Risk: Delivery confidence ≤= 25%
    • High Risk: 26% - 50%
    • Medium Risk: 51% - 75%
    • Low Risk: 76% - 99%
    • Send: 100% confidence in successful delivery

Typos

It also creates a typo list where it flags any contacts with potential errors or issues, such as a typo in the email address (e.g., @gmil.com instead of @gmail.com).

You can manually work through this list to amend any obvious typos.

 

CE Fields

The data validation will also create three CE fields. These field will populate once the contact has been through data validation:

Data Validation – Delivery Confidence

This is a % score (see above)

Data Validation – Result

  • Valid – Data indicates a delivery +/or engagement event associated with email address. You can and should send to these.
  • Neutral – indicates that there have been no hard bounces, delivery or engagement event associated with email address
  • Risky – email address is risky to send to, due to previous suspected hard bouncing.
  • Undeliverable - email address is undeliverable due to hard bounces, syntax, invalid domain, or an invalid recipient issue.
  • Typo – email address may have a typo e.g., @gmil.com instead of @gmail.com

Data Validation – Valid

  • True
  • False