GroupBWT
Cell phones vs Landlines in all Business Directories of the USA
Since the very emerging of GroupBWT almost 10 years ago, we’ve successfully completed hundreds of web scraping projects of different size and we may confidently state that there is no such business directory we haven’t scraped over this period of time.
Needless to say that the most desirable information is the phone number of a potential prospect. The question is, what brings the most value: the Cell Phone or a Landline number? We’ve prepared comparative statistics of Cell Phones vs Landline numbers available on the Internet for the US market.
Our research shows there are about 100 million of phones available in the US business directories, and only about 18% are the cell phones. Based on the feedback of telemarketing companies, who are the strongest fans of Data collection & extraction, the Landline contacts are no longer bringing any value for strategy enforcement.
GroupBWT, instead, is sure that the Landline connections with the customer still perform in 2019 and not only because of a quantitative advantage over the Cell phones. The 21st century is all about technologies but not all people have found themselves in it. Moreover, for some businesses, implementing & customizing the use of Cell Phones as the communication channel is very costly in terms of the difficulty of organization structure. Each business is specific, each business has it’s own goals and policies, thus we strongly believe that both Cell Phone and Landline contacts deliver pretty much equal benefits nowadays.
Nevertheless, if you’d like to test both and see what works the best specifically for your business, we know how to effectively distinguish cell phones and landlines with 100% accuracy. But that’s for the whole different story.
Based on our experience, the richest source of contacts is, of course, the public directory. Having done web scraping for more than a decade we would like to touch upon one more important aspect of this topic: Is it better to purchase a ready contact list or scrape a custom one? Each one decides for oneself what is better, but here are a few facts that we believe are persuasive enough to be assured that the purchased list of contacts is not that effective and valuable as the customly scraped contacts:
- The list would never be full. Listings are often not updated, and either contain the businesses that are no longer existing or don’t have the businesses that have just been registered.
- These are the general lists that are used by many and you never know who else tried contacting these numbers before.
It’s worth remembering that even though it’s cheaper to purchase a list the price is always proportional to the quality. When you refer to the services of the web scraping companies like us you get a custom approach dedicated specifically to your business needs, ensuring delivery of a valuable data set in the desired volume, in the convenient format with the ability to update the data on your demand.
