If you're currently not reaching your customers through SMS, it's time to start doing it. SMS has plenty of benefits over other channels, including being more personal, offline, instant, and cheaper. But, if you already use SMS marketing, you should know about mobile phone validation.

Mobile phone validation is a critical aspect of effective customer data management, just like an email address or physical address validation. As mobile phone usage is growing by the day, with about 5.27 billion unique mobile phone users globally as of 2021 and a growing rate of the number of 2.3% per year, phone validation is becoming more crucial than ever before.

Knowing that you're reaching out only to mobile phone numbers that are in use can truly make a difference in the success of your SMS marketing campaign.

Phone Number Validation Explained

First things first, let's give a definition to phone number validation.

As the name might suggest, it literally means verifying and validating your customers and audience's mobile phone numbers. Using a phone validation service, you send an SMS or voice message to the user and instruct them on how to validate their phone number. This can mean that the user might have to type a code back, enter a link, or respond to your message.

If the users take the action that you're asking them to, this is a clear sign that the mobile phone number is still in use, and your SMS marketing text will make it in front of the eyes of your customer or a potential buyer.

HLR lookup services have the same purpose. They help you validate your customers' phone numbers and offer you insights about the telecommunication services provider. Using such services makes it easier for your business to exclude wrong numbers or those numbers that are no longer in use.

6 Reasons to Validate Mobile Phone Numbers

When planning to run an SMS marketing campaign, there are many steps to take to ensure the best results, from understanding your audience to crafting an engaging message. But, one crucial step in the process is to verify the mobile phone numbers of the customers you are planning to reach.

There are many good reasons to check the validity of the mobile phone numbers of your audience that simply make business sense. Some refer to saving resources or not wasting them, others refer to offering an improved customer experience. Either way, this will benefit your business.

Keep reading below to find out the reasons why mobile phone number verification is now more critical than ever before!

1.More Mobile Active Users Than Ever

You're probably wondering why your business should care about the growing number of mobile phone users. Well, you should care for two good reasons:

More diverse offers from telecommunication providers

First of all, as it is with any other industry, a growing demand leads to more competitive services offered to consumers. This means that telecommunication services providers create more competitive offers to attract customers to use their services. And, for your business, this means that more customers can switch from one provider to another more easily and frequently, making your database less reliable unless you verify the list of phone numbers as often.

More consumers to reach

As mentioned above, there are currently over 5.27 billion mobile phone active users, and the numbers are growing considerably. So, with such a large base of potential prospects to reach, it simply makes sense to ensure that your text messages meet their purpose and help you reach that audience.

2.You'll Have a Clean Database

Let's start with the obvious. By verifying your audience's mobile phone numbers, you can eliminate those phone numbers that are no longer valid or in use.

Having a clean database means that you won't have to worry that your SMS marketing campaign won't have the results you're hoping for. You can decide at any time to send an SMS text to your customers or prospects to inform them about whatever you want them to feel interested in. You can reach out to them about a new product, your latest offers or simply invite them to your business location or website. In other words, having a clean database means having a reliable and valid database.

3.Improved Customer Experience

We've already mentioned some of the benefits of using SMS marketing to reach your customers and prospects. But now it is time to stress this idea more.

SMS is a communication channel that comes with great benefits, especially when you compare it to other media. More precisely, using SMS to reach your customers, for marketing or sales purposes, comes with benefits like:

It's instant
It feels very personal to customers
It is smartphone friendly
It doesn't require an Internet connection
It's cheaper

All these reasons should be more than enough to help you understand why it's essential to have a clean database of mobile phone numbers to send your texts to. All these benefits translate into an improved customer experience for your buyers because: they instantly get updates from you, even when they don't have their data on, won't struggle to see your text on their phones, and will feel closer to your business.

4.You Won't Waste Money

You know what they say, "every penny saved is a penny earned." In other words, in the business world, when you properly manage your financial resources, this directly impacts your profit numbers at the end of the month or year. When it comes to using SMS to reach out to your customers, the story is no different. The surer you are that you're investing your money correctly, the clearer it is that you're managing your financial resources wisely and adequately.

So, by making sure that you only send your text messages to valid mobile phone numbers, you make sure that you don't waste precious financial resources of your business. It simply doesn't make business sense to waste your money on an SMS campaign that will only reach half or even less of the customers you were hoping to reach.

So, make sure that before you invest in an SMS campaign, you first check the validity of the numbers you're planning to send your texts on.

5.You Won't Waste Time

In the business world, time is as important as money, and other resources are. So, why use time crafting a message for customers or prospects that will actually never receive your words? You can use this time to focus on more critical business tasks instead.

When you validate the phone numbers in your database, you make sure that you don't waste precious minutes sending text messages to phone numbers that will never receive them and will never actually hear from your business.

Once again, it makes sense to check if the numbers are valid so that you don't waste time on a campaign that will not bring you the results you are hoping for.

6.You Can Use the Info for Other Purposes

An SMS marketing campaign isn't the only reason why you should have a clean and updated database. Knowing for sure that the phone numbers you have in your database are valid and there actually are recipients to see your texts is an essential thing to know for many other marketing and sales purposes.

More precisely, you can use these verified and valid phone numbers of your customers and prospects to:

Send SMS order updates for improved customer experience

After placing an order online, all customers are eager to learn updates about the products they've just spent their money on. Sending SMS order updates will improve customer experience by instantly updating your customer about what's new about their order. An SMS order update can tell customers various things, including that their order was received, confirmed, sent, delivered, or returned.

Contact customers for personalized offers

One day, you may remember that one specific audience group has shown interest in one of your products/ services. And, you may decide to send a personalized offer to these people to attract them into buying your offering. But, without number validation, can you be sure that your customized offer will genuinely make it to the right pair of eyes? Not really, because you don't know for sure that those phone numbers are still valid and in use.

You can confirm transactions

Knowing that you have your customers' valid mobile phone numbers is also essential to help your buyers confirm their transactions. More precisely, whenever a customer orders something on your online store and pays for that product/service online, you can send them an SMS text notifying them that their payment was confirmed and the order is being processed. More precisely, you may use these phone numbers to check with the customer if they are really trying to make a payment on your website. This helps your business gain more authority, and customers will appreciate that you notify them of the confirmation of their payments. It can also benefit you and your customers by increasing security.

You efficiently deliver goods to the right customer

Without valid phone numbers, your business may also experience challenges when it comes to delivering goods to customers. After all, how can the delivery guy contact your customer if you don't provide them with a valid phone number? Needless to say, an uncompleted delivery will be your business's fault, not your customer's for not telling your business that they've changed their number.

So, valid contact data, like mobile phone numbers, are essential to provide your customers a smooth buy and delivery process.

You can help customers to reset their passwords

Your customer is reaching out to you for help as they can no longer log in to their account on your website. How do you help them? You guide them through the process of changing their password. But, on the way, one of the steps, for security purposes, requires your customer to introduce the unique code you've just sent on their phone number. Finding out in that exact moment that your customer has changed their number for a long time now won't leave the best and most professional impression.

How Can You Verify Customer Mobile Phone Numbers?

You're probably scrolling through a vast database of phone numbers and wonder how you could ever finish checking the validity of all those numbers you have in your database. Well, you don't even have to worry about that because there are certain services that automate all this work for you and give you an answer within seconds.

Mobile phone number validation and HLR lookup services are tools that automate these tasks. So, by using such services, you spare your business and employees from hundreds of precious minutes of calling or texting each customer to check if there's an answer coming back.

Number validation services is a perfect solution for your business if:

You want to keep your mobile database clean and updated.
You don't want to waste money, time, and other resources on SMS text that don't reach recipients due to mobile numbers out-of-use.
You want to make sure that a specific number belongs to a particular mobile provider.

Bottom Line

Mobile phone number verification is a critical step in a successful SMS marketing campaign. Verifying the validity of your mobile number database has plenty of benefits. It helps you save money and time, ensure you'll get the wanted marketing and sales results, and have a reliable database you can use when you have something important to announce to your customers. Also, knowing that the mobile numbers you have in your database are valid and in use is beneficial for other business purposes that aim to provide your customers with excellent customer service.

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