Direct marketing services firm V12 Group debuted a revised consumer database that includes mobile data.

The result of a year's worth of work, the V12 Mobile Phone Database currently has 61 million triple-verified mobile records, according to the Red Bank, NJ-based company. The launch comes soon after V12 inaugurated DM360, a Web-based service that melds email and direct mail for localized direct marketing.

"Our clients are starting to see a surge of phone numbers being provided at point of sale and, as a result, their match rates were falling off," said Jeff M. Berke, executive vice president of sales and marketing at V12.

"A lot of those phone numbers they were getting were mobile numbers, which blocked their ability to match the number to a person, which would enable them to market using purchase behavior," he said. "That is the biggest driver for this."

Leveraging V12's database of more than 215 million U.S. consumers will help address this issue, per the six-year-old company which offers consumer data, data append services, email marketing, data processing, modeling and analytics and marketing database services.

Introducing the mobile phone channel to the consumer database, V12 will offer consumer data that includes every major touch point, including postal address, email and mobile and landline phone numbers.

The V12 Mobile Phone Database is said to be verified weekly and compiled from credible sources, the company claims. Four million records are added each month, with data relating to consumers ages 18 and up.

"We're using the same data verification process for adding this channel that we use for email and postal [addresses]," Mr. Berke said.

"So we pull data from a myriad of sources and we look for the two identical, matching inputs that we then triangulate with our consumer database and a national third-party database," he said.

Append depend
The applications are many.

For example, marketers can reverse append to mobile numbers provided at point of sale to boost match rates.

Also, users can append mobile data to their customer database to develop touch points such as SMS text messaging, collections and skip tracing.

However, SMS is in the next phase since this file is not opted-in.

"Our phase two for this database is SMS messaging and from that we'll have to opt in all these records," Mr. Berke said.

"We believe you can use some of these other channels for opt-in to receive SMS communications from companies," he said.

"As an example, we can send you an email with an offer if you opt-in for SMS messaging. We'll give you a better offer if you opt in for email and SMS messaging."

So if the database is not available for use in sending permission-based SMS messages, what utility does it have?

"It is effective for the ability to verify or clear an existing mobile number on a database or to append to an existing customer database as a means to improve the match with postal information or other marketing channel information," Mr. Berke said.

"Admittedly, we're still in the learning process ourselves as it relates to what the SMS messaging vehicle for marketing purposes will look like," he said.

"Once the industry clearly fleshes out the standards, we will use those to build a delivery platform that exceeds all guidelines or legislative requirements for the use of SMS for marketing."