Having a domain name, in addition to company name, is important when sourcing new prospects for ABM lead generation. Although it may be easy to match domains to companies, the data quality of most business files is simply not that great. For that reason, we will often parse the domain directly from the verified email addreess of a client or prospect.
Since most small to mid-sized businesses use Microsoft Office for their administrative task and client data management, it makes sense to have a few time-saving data enhancement formulas in your toolbox. Here's one of our favorites:
The objective: to append our client database with domain names in order to limit prospect email campaigns to 'one per company', improve deliverability and leverage that field for new prospect data acquisition.
The problem: the house file has over 75,000 records representing over 2,000 companies and the account names are inconsistent. Data providers are not matching the domains consistently and accurately and the data append costs money.
The solution: the solution is a formula... while not that impressive, if you have email addresses on your file, then it gets the job done for free.
The formula: all you need is the cell reference for the email address and a new column for the domain. Here's a formula for extracting the domain from the email address, where the email address is in column A, row number 2:
= R I G H T ( A 2 , L E N ( A 2 ) - F I N D ( " @ " , A 2 ) )
Do it once and then just copy and paste for the rest of your file. With this little formula, you can add a domain field to your house file or prospect database in less than a minute. Excel may be a bit old-school, but it's still a fantastic app for small businesses!
What's most important, however, it that you have quality email records to begin with. One spam trap can change a lifetime... well not really, but it's important to run verification on your email addresses regularly to ensure that strong delivery and a good IP reputation.
Programmatic B2B has done extensive research on email verification providers. It's important to note that there are significant differences in process and the accuracy of the results. This applies to consumer emails as well.