Phone Append – What is it?

In this week’s blog, we want to talk about appending phones.  What is it? Phone appends are simply taking a file of customers you may currently have and attaching a phone number to that person.

Many businesses have reasons for doing this.  Maybe they want to do a telemarketing campaign to customers who have done business with them in the past.  Offer a special promotion or other offers for the upcoming year.

Appending telephone numbers to a current or existing list can be very useful. There are several ways to append phone numbers to your file.

  1. Regular Phone append:  Attaching phones to existing name, address, city, state and zip.
  2. Reverse Phone append:  Attaching customer address, city state and zip to a customer phone number.  (all you have is the phone number, but need the rest of the information for your customer).
  3. Cable phone append.  Address only with city, state and zip.  We then attach the name and phone number.

In all the above cases, one must keep in mind that you will not achieve 100% matches.  Generally, match rates vary due to the age of the client file and the type of phone append you are doing.  Regular phone appends can garner up to a 60-65% match rate.  Reverse phone appends can achieve 30-50% and cable appends generally feed back 15-30% match rates.  Given this, you are charged or should be, for the matches only.  There are minimum order amounts, so you need to keep that in mind when you are thinking about the appending process.

Next week, we’ll talk more about how the process works, the matching logic and other interesting facts that will also include information on how the Do Not Call legislation with the FTC correlates to this process.