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Lead Verification with Automated Phone Verification provided by OnVerify

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Business means sales, sales means leads. Almost every kind of business needs and does marketing. Internet based marketing is today’s least expensive entry, measurable and quick results oriented marketing method.

When a business does Internet based marketing, users are  presented a landing page to give a quick idea of the offer. On that page(s), business tries to convince the user to act. Depending on the offer, user asked to download, buy, comment. In any case, business needs user information to convert the user to lead or a customer.

On Landing Page(s), simple forms are used to collect user data, that will help business to contact the lead for follow-up. As this is Internet world, letting the user to enter the data in free format, will result irrelevant and meaningless data. So the entered data is checked against some formatting rules like, email, address, city, country and most importantly phone number.

Two most important data on lead collection forms are; email and phone number. They are the only means to contact the lead. E-mails can be verified by sending a confirmation code and asking the user to confirm it. But the phone numbers other than format checking cannot be verified without actually calling. This is where OnVerify.com can help the process beneficial and automated.

 

Let me explain the idea a bit more detail. Think again, a big marketing campaign is done, several people came to the Landing Page, they are offered something that cannot be turned down, the business got several bits of data about their customer, but they have some contact numbers that are not working.
Here we come to our solution; OnVerify.com. OnVerify.com provides Automated Phone Verification service to clean up that kind of data and make it real information and valuable sales lead.

 

Rather than calling the leads manually later, call them automatically at the time of offer, without a staff, without an investment. A true value added service to complement Performable.com’s already great set of lead generation and management tools. The result is a clean Lead Information.

OnVerify.com provides all the infrastructure as a service, integration is done using simple HTTP API.

To summarize the whole flow:
1. Marketing campaign will bring leads to Landing Page.
2. Landing Page will explain the offer, and motivate them to fill in a form
3. When Form is submitted, together with other controls, and automated phone verification call will be done over OnVerify.com. This is a call to announce a pin on the phone, and lead has to enter the pin in the form
4. If pin is right, lead will be marked as verified.

An automated phone verification demo is located at: http://www.onverify.com/a/demo

 

 

 

 

 

Can Call In Phone Verification be an Alternative to SMS/Phone Verification?

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Dear Friends,

Nowadays I am thinking of form of “real contact” verification methods. By “real contact”, I mean phoning, text messaging, forcing customer to act for a phone call or sms, rather than getting a reply to e-mail.

E-mail confirmation and verification is good indeed, but just for validating your further communication channel; not for validating and verifying that you are contacting with a “real” person.

Phone Verification (automatically) calls given number, plays prerecorded script. In the script there is a need to announce a password or pin to access a secure page or complete a transaction. Costs to merchant, your customer pays nothing.

Reverse Phone Verification is a step to make Phone Verification a little more complex; it’s again an automatic call, but password or pin is not announced, rather is gotten on the phone. Your customer need to enter “pin” or “password” on the phone. A callback is fired to your web site. Again costs to the you, your customer does not pay anything.

SMS Verification, is another method of delivery of the pin/password to your end user. You send out an SMS (Text message) to your customer. Well, your customer need to provide some personal mobile number. Usually merhants pays all, but in some cases, customer may be billed by his operator. Delivery may be delayed due to operator, mobile phone coverage, and some other issues. But it’s worldwide, and really cost effective.

In Call In Phone Verification, your customer need to call a local/domestic/toll-free number  from the registered phone (number). Your customer either gets a “pin” or “password”, or enters the pin. This will cost to the business, and may also cost to the end user.  This method lowers your automatic verification costs. Providing a local phone number, you limit your customer base to be local in a way. The advantage over the SMS Verification is that your customer does not have to provide his mobile number, he may register and call from any phone number.

There are several ways to automatically verify your customers using phone calls or sms. I tried to summarize them, and I think “Call in Phone Verification” is really a good alternative to “SMS Verification” by means of cost, easy of use.

Let me know what you think

How to Send SMS from your website using OnVerify.com

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SMS, which is abbreviation of Short Message service, is the most commonly used feature of a mobile phone after the phone call. Although it’s limited to 160 characters, sending an sms text is very popular in several cases like;

  • A phone call is not possible
  • A phone call will cost more than sending an sms message
  • It’s more fun to send sms text rather than talking at that time.

There are just a few samples for individuals use sms text to communicate.

But if you own a web site, adding an sms service to your site, can be cool, and cutting edge. Also adds another form of communication with your customers, and your web site.

Some of the examples of sms service at your web site can be listed, but not limited to:

  • Customer Verification with SMS message
  • Notification of special events/products/discounts via SMS text
  • Notification to your self about some cases at your web site
  • SMS Text Marketing of your opt-in lists (You cannot just send sms to any number without a prior approval)

Samples continue.

There are several sms service providers in Internet world. But at OnVerify.com, we provide the easiest solution with standard features, at a competitive price. You don’t need to write long sms software to send sms text from your web site.

Firstly you need to open a free account at OnVerify.com. It’s free, gives you $0.25 credit when you complete Phone Verification process automatically. Then get your userid and apipass from documentation or profile page, and paste the code below in your favorite php editor:

$f = file(“http://www.onverify.com/sms.php?userid=youruserid&apipass=apipass&msg=test&number=number”);

That single line of code will initiate a sms text sending from your web site easily. Let me explain the parameters:

userid=youruserid, this is the userid you get from onverify.com,  we need to recognize you

apipass=yourapipass, this is the api password you get from onverify.com to authenticate you

msg=test, this is the text message we will send to the mobile number. remember to urlencode your message before feeding it to here.

number=number, this is the number we will send sms text message to. It must be in international numbering format; country code + area code + number (like 18581234567)

On return, you’ll have a single line. Which is a numeric code, that you may want to check.

switch($f[0]) {
case “2”:
echo “username or password is wrong”;
break;
case “3”:
echo “balance is not enough”;
break;
case “4”:
echo “number wrong”;
break;
case “6”:
echo “ip restriction”;
break;
case “7”:
echo “dublicate vid”;
break;
default:
if ($f[0]>100) echo “sms is queued”;
}

Let me explain. At first step we send to request to OnVerify.com’s sms service. We get a numeric code from that page, which can be 2,3,4,6,7 or >100.  each meaning something.

2: username or apipass is wrong. please re check and compare them with OnVerify.com

3: balance is not enough. OnVerify.com works from positive balance. But don’t worry during the tests and integrations. Just drop us an e-mail to support@onverify.com. Ask for more credits, and explain your project. We are more than happy to help

4. number wrong. Yes it must be in international format. Which is country code + area code + number

6. restricted ip. You can limit the server’s ip that the calls with be initiated from

7. dublicate vid. This is used for callback firing. At the end of sms sending we fire a callback to your system explaning the status of the sms. (sent, unsent, cost, etc)

Sending a SMS text is asynchronous at onverify.com. Which means, when you initiate a sms sending, OnVerify.com will return you immediately if this call is accepted or not. Later, it will notify you with sending a request to the callback url that you set at sms text message initiation step.

In this article, I tried to show how easy it’s to send sms text message to any phone using OnVerify.com’s services.  In order to send sms text, you dont need to setup/develop big sms software, just use the sms service feature of OnVerify.com