For any web-based business, online contact, enquiry, registration and purchasing forms are often the lifeblood of their business, delivering details of potential customers to the sales team. Optimising this form to reduce the number of people who don't end up completing the form is therefore essential to extract the highest value from the website.

The more data you ask for on your form, the less likely people are to fill it in. Equally, there is little point in having someone fill in the form only for you to find that they have entered invalid details, either maliciously or accidentally. If someone enters their contact details incorrectly, you have no way of getting in touch to correct them.

The key therefore is to enhance your forms with a range of data capture and validation tools:

1. Postcode lookup. This is key if you need an address from your customers, e.g. in your shopping cart pages. Allowing people to auto-fill your address fields by entering only their postcode not only requires fewer keystrokes and ensures you get fully valid addresses, but also presents a more professional image of your company.
2. Address lookup without postcode. If someone is ordering goods to be delivered to someone else, e.g. as a present, they may well not know the postcode. That's why our postcode lookup solutions also include a free-text address search option, allowing fully valid address details to be found using building, street and town details instead.
3. Email address validation. Email details are key to any online business, which is why it's so important to get them right. Many forms take the approach of forcing you to enter your details twice, but by using our real-time email address validation you can ensure the address is correct while still only requiring the customer to enter it once.
4. Telephone number validation. If you make your highest value sales after talking to the client on the phone rather than just email, make sure you get the right number! Our telephone validation service ensures that the number is associated with a valid telephone exchange. We can't promise they'll pick up though!
5. Mobile number validation. Taking the telephone validation theme one step further, for mobile numbers we can validate the full number via the mobile networks.
6. Telephone number capture. If someone chooses not to enter their telephone number, what do you do? If you require them to enter a number you could be rejecting an otherwise good lead. Our telephone number lookup service lets you add a telephone number automatically using the data from the phone book, so you never need to go hunting for a number again.

Within the Online Lead Generation market competition is fierce. When operating in this competitive market it is essential to set the leads your company supplies apart from the competitions offering. This is where Data8’s lead verification services come to prevalence. Data8's data capture and verification tools ensure you are collecting valid contact information every time.

Data8’s services are highly beneficial in the lead generation field as they enable you to ensure the data you capture is accurately verified and correct thus ensuring your leads are of the highest possible quality:

• Postcode Lookup Service - Captures and Validates the Postal address to Royal Mail Standard.
• Landline Telephone Validation- Confirms the telephone number provided is within a callable number range.
• Mobile Telephone Validation- Checks the mobile number exists and can even check whether it has been used recently, which network it is on and even which country the number currently resides in.
• Email Validation – Checks the email address is in a valid form syntactically and checks the email domain exists and can accept messages.
• Telephone Number Checker – Provides a telephone number from a Surname and Address.

All of these services are provided using our web services API. This allows the services to be fully integrated into any website. The services can be customised to meet your individual requirements and results are returned in sub 1 second.

We provide a wealth of tutorials, sample coding and even drag and drop facilities for ASP.NET. In addition to this we have a team of developers who will be happy to help with any integration queries you may have.

We're exhibiting our comprehensive CRM data quality product at TFM&A at Earls Court 2 on 23rd & 24th February - come and see us at stand D32.

With fast and accurate data entry tools including postcode lookup and telephone number lookup, data validation including telephone number validation and email address validation, and comprehensive data cleansing services including address standardisation, deduplication and data suppression, our Total CRM Data Quality product is the ideal addon for any CRM implementation.

Data8 offers a no strings attached 30 day free trial of our postcode lookup service. Once registered for our free trial you will have the ability to download our Integr8 Postcode Lookup application. You will also have access to our developer’s documentation and code samples. This information is used to fully integrate our postcode lookup tool into your website, software or business application. This documentation will also allow you to customise the solution to fit your specific needs.

Unlike some of our competitors within our free trial you are provided with access to the full UK dataset not one specific postcode or local postcode area. This allows you to evaluate and demonstrate the solution in a real format.

As you will have access to our full API or downloadable software you will have access to look up an address from an postcode and from a partial address. Data8’s advanced fuzzy matching logic allows you to successfully source an address from a partial or incorrectly spelt address.

One of the problems companies face with on-going data cleansing is the time and resource to manage the project particularly if it is for a large customer database. Ultimately organisations can fall into the trap of only processing their data annually, instead of cleansing the data in line with marketing activity. This then results in wasted mailing costs on inaccurate customer data. At Data8 we work with many organisations to make the data cleansing process seamless ensuring you always have access to the most up to date customer information.

Using our secure webportal Data8online, with our webservices technology you can completely automate the data cleansing process. You can schedule files to be processed on a certain date ie in 7 days time process your data for TPS screening, or screen monthly for goneaway and deceased files.  The results can be completely integrated into your own application ensuring accurate customer information is made available across the organisation immediately.

Alternatively Data8online is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and processes on average 100,000 records per hour.  It comfortably handles files of around 1 million records empowering organisations to process data out of office hours so daily schedules are not affected. A free data audit is produced indicating any data anomalies so you can clearly see your return on investment and when you make a purchase the data is made available immediately.