Adam Parks (00:08)
Hello everybody, Adam Parks here with another episode of Receivables Podcast. Today I'm here with two good friends that have a lot of information for us. You know, this whole industry has been talking about digital collection strategies for a long time, but I have yet to have a conversation about the gasoline you got to put into the engine to make those strategies run.
So today we're gonna talk about email addresses, we're gonna talk about phone numbers for text messaging campaigns, and how you can start to empower your campaigns. But before we get into that, let me introduce my guests today. I've got Evan Roth and Justin Kalman joining me from IDI, a data company with a lot of information to share today. But before we jump into the meat of our discussion, Evan, starting with you, could you tell everyone a little bit about yourself and how you got to the seat that you're in today?
Evan Roth (00:59)
Absolutely. So before I joined IDI, I spent 27 years in the third party collection industry. I was the senior director of operations for an agency out of Buffalo, New York. was a, IDI was a vendor of mine for many years. And actually Justin was the one that reached out to me and told me a little bit more about the company and the opportunity that they had. After several months of...
contemplating, look to join the company and the rest is history from there. It's been a great ride.
Adam Parks (01:32)
Well, it sounds like you're coming into this
with the practical experience of operations and having actually had to send these messages before, which is going to give us some great perspective today. Justin, for anyone who has not been to a conference in the last few years and had the pleasure of getting to know you in person, can you tell everyone a little bit about yourself and how you get to the seat you're in today?
Justin Kalman (01:52)
Yeah, absolutely. Just like Evan from Buffalo, New York, born and raised and actually out of high school. My first career was the collections world. So started out as a collector at NCO back in 2004 and worked for a few different agencies over the years, was a collector for about 10 years total. Actually went back to school. I got my degree. I ended up at a.
in a sales gig in a totally unrelated industry outside of the collections world where I was for a few years, which gave me a great blend of experience because I knew the collections world. Then I kind of dipped my toes into sales, got some experience there and then ended up finding out about IDI back in 2017. It kind of fell into my lap, just through a mutual friend. Ended up hearing about the opportunity. They flew me down to Boca, you know, to meet with the leadership team. They decided to make a move on me, which was
I'm very thankful for that. was really a life-changing thing that happened. And now here we are almost eight years later, eight years in April, I'll have been with IDI, which doesn't feel like that long. It's been quite a ride and no regrets. It's been an awesome experience.
Adam Parks (02:55)
Well, Boca is not a bad place to be. I graduated college like two blocks from your headquarters. So hopefully I'll catch you down in Boca. But for anyone who's not familiar with IDI, can you guys tell us a little bit about what you do there?
Justin Kalman (03:04)
Absolutely.
Absolutely, I kind of take that one on. So skip tracing data solutions. I mean, that's really our forte. So our leadership team, our system architect are really the members of the teams that built two of our major competitors out there. So there's been a lot of history among our team and there's a lot of commonality when you talk about the skip tracing world. So in terms of who IDI is, mean, we're not reinventing the wheel with skip tracing. There's a lot of similarities, whether it's us or our competitors, but we do feel that we have.
very efficient solutions, have some competitive advantages and some world class data to bring to the table as well.
Evan Roth (03:42)
Yeah, working with the different agencies that I've worked with in the past, I'll tell you, I've worked with all the different companies and, you know, when IDI came to us several years ago, you know, we did a lot of analytics and reporting to understand the differences between the different competitors out there and, you know, thought IDI was ranked the top out of all that we've tried. And again, that's why we brought them on, you know, so many years ago and have been with them and still with them on the previous company today.
Adam Parks (03:42)
Well, word class data. Love it.
Well, I think that brings us right to our core topic for today is I want to talk about the fuel that drives these digital strategies. And so just to kind of set the stage here a little bit for our audience, you know, email and the TransUnion 2024 Debt Collection Industry Report said that
know, email is being adopted at a faster rate than text messaging. My hypothesis is that that's because there's a lower barrier to entry into sending emails than there is into getting your short code in place. And for anybody with a short code to send out text messages, you know exactly what it is that I'm talking about, the ridiculousness that goes into that process. Now, when we talk about digital communications and we talk about these strategies, there's really two...
pieces to the strategy. There's the actual sending and the development of trust through the channel in which you're sending. And then there's the data which is driving where are you actually sending this message to? And with the average consumer having four to five email addresses, I have quite a few more and using specialized email addresses for specialized purposes becoming a lot more common. And even your hide your email and we'll talk about some of that stuff later.
You know, finding good email data is becoming an essential part of the process. And by the time that we see an account and charge off the email address originally given to the creditor may be no good. And what can we do as an industry to really improve that? So as two guys that are actually sitting there on let's call it the flow of data that is driving this digital communication engine,
What are you guys seeing in the marketplace in terms of email capabilities and email needs for the debt collection industry?
Justin Kalman (05:53)
You can take that one to start, Evan.
Evan Roth (05:53)
Yeah,
that's fine. first of all, it's the biggest thing right now, as you mentioned, everybody having multiple emails, know, people having multiple emails for all sorts of different reasons. You know, we see a lot of customers using emails for just, you know, their spam purposes and purchasing purposes online. We see obviously business emails, which is a prevalent, which is very prevalent in the industry. We obviously also see the personal emails. So
Our information that we receive, we believe, is some of the best out there available. However, we do supply multiple and we do obtain multiple different emails for customers. That any one of them could be an email used for any purpose that the customer may have been using it for, for whatever purpose necessary. We have multiple different vendors that we obtain email information.
Obviously, one of the most important things are to validate the emails, which is a key piece for our customers and so forth. And as we continue to evolve in this space, we continue to look at different avenues to help validate, quantify, and make sure we have quality emails and information for our customers as we're selling that data.
Adam Parks (06:51)
So as you put the email addresses together, how do you prioritize them?
Justin Kalman (07:06)
Thank you.
Evan Roth (07:10)
So go ahead, Justin.
Justin Kalman (07:11)
Yeah,
I would say, mean, for us, I mean, we rank the emails based on, you know, different factors and, know, in terms of like when one of our sources reported that information is a pretty heavy one that we're weighing. So, you know, we're going to have like a little bit of a recency bias when it comes to an email address, but we have, you know, different types of sources. I mean, one of the ones that I think is pretty interesting and unique for us is we work with a partner that does like marketing type campaigns.
still do like online surveys or contests or things like that. So they're getting basically self-reported information from the consumer where they have to go in and they have to provide a valid email address to be able to get the response in order to get, know, whether or not they won the gift card or, whatever the contest might be. that is a big driver of some really unique information for us. And of course, we're going to be able to determine, you know, how recently they use that email address or how recently engaged in that type of campaign. And, you know, I think that
Obviously the recency of when they use that email is a pretty big one to be able to prioritize and rank that email, if that makes sense.
Evan Roth (08:07)
And we do use a probability score kind of internally to supply the emails to our customers using obviously, as Justin said, kind of the last date while we don't supply a date, but the last date internally to figure out the algorithm of what the probability of the quality of the email.
Adam Parks (08:24)
Recency feels like it would be a major factor in the quality of that email address and knowing that a consumer like me is going to have multiple email addresses at any given time. It's not to say that one is right and one is wrong. It feels like it's a little bit less about right and wrong and finding the right one at the right time for the right purpose. I honestly can't think of anybody I know that's got only one email address on their phone right now.
Evan Roth (08:45)
Right anymore. Yeah, that's a, that's the thing, right? I, know, I think the average right now is anywhere between three to five emails for a consumer. Uh, and obviously making sure that we're, we're supplying the one that the consumer uses, you know, most often, uh, is obviously the challenge in itself. But, uh, as long as we're, comfortable with knowing that we have at least an email, the right email for a customer in some cases, rather than, you know, years ago where it's kind of a shot in the dark and you're hoping you're emailing the customer and not somebody else.
We do feel comfortable with the emails that we least supply. Is the customers at some point in time here being used by being used?
Justin Kalman (09:22)
But I would expand a little bit on the validation piece as well, because obviously an important part of that consumer potentially opening the email address is that it lands in their inbox. And so a big challenge is if it goes into the spam, you know, the likelihood of them opening that email is practically zero. And in order to kind of mitigate that risk, it is definitely very important to validate those emails. You know, there are providers out there that can determine if that email is going to bounce back on you ahead of time.
Justin Kalman (09:48)
proactively and that'll basically prevent you from emailing that because if you hit a certain threshold where you email so many of those that bounce back it automatically puts you into like a spam category with like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, know, whatever that provider is. And I've also heard that the carrier set up emails that are specifically to detect spam as well, where if you email them so many times your domain automatically gets blacklisted and put into that spam bucket. So it's extremely important to make sure that you have a mechanism to kind of mitigate that type of risk as well.
Adam Parks (10:05)
Well, that brings us into a discussion around email domain authority. And what does that ultimately mean? And so we talk about some of the data that's coming in, but now that the data is coming in, we also have to concern ourselves with the outbound communication channel. And you definitely will get flagged quite quickly. And I know a lot of people think that like, I could just go buy a million emails and then I'm going to send them all out at once and see what happens. Yeah, no, that's generally not, I've never seen anyone be successful with that methodology.
and I've done a lot of email campaigns through the years as a marketer. So I think that there's some challenges there in terms of how that engine is going to run. And some organizations have really spent a significant amount of time building out the domain deliverability team, or the email deliverability team, which is very focused on domain trust. And there's a lot of things that go into domain trust.
Like you mentioned, how many times am I getting hit with the spam? How many times am I being manually reported as spam instead of actually getting through to that consumer? Because Google does actually account for that within the platform. And it's funny because when we talk about email addresses, think about it from this perspective. When you're emailing a Gmail account, you're emailing a Google customer. And when I say that, yeah, Gmail is free. But anything that's free in this world, if you're not paying for it, you are the product. If you're not paying for the product, you're
are the product. And I think that's very, very true. like these email services, especially the, the free email services that are ultimately reading those consumers emails and using that to display advertising for them, they want to protect them from spam because they want them to continue to use the free email service so they can continue to read those emails. And I think that's something that often gets overlooked as to why they're so strict about it and how
Looking at some of the deliverability tools like MX Toolbox and some of the other tool sets that
really can help you better understand how your domain is being viewed. If I'm not mistaken, it's like there's like 32 blacklists for email addresses. Am I somewhere in that range? And if you find yourself on one of those blacklists, like it's over. It's almost like if you get caught violating Google's SEO rules, if you get caught violating the SEO rules, you just disappear from Google search. Like you're just, your company just doesn't exist anymore in any way, shape or form. Like your website's just gone.
So there's a threat level there for not incrementally testing that. Now, Evan, from your perspective as someone who's actually been sending out campaigns through the years, any tips for the audience on how they might approach growing their email campaign strategies?
Evan Roth (12:46)
I think the most important thing is, we kind of mentioned earlier, is validating the emails the best way possible. The companies that we've used in the past to be able to validate emails to understand which ones are typically bouncing back, which ones are going through, which ones typically are just invalid email addresses in general. So you can narrow down your platform, your strategy, your list of customers that you believe will be able to get that email.
Evan Roth (13:13)
And then on top of that is just having a strong management database to be able to monitor the open rates and so forth and understanding from that doing additional analytics to your point of what domains work, which one domains did not work, and building a strong strategy. And we talk about even AI and Omnichannel and so forth. You can put all those things into play with text messaging and so forth. The emails are no different.
Evan Roth (13:39)
quality analytics and monitoring system around the email and the quality of it using the databases to be able to do that is a key and is an essential piece. know, we talk about a lot of companies are supplying emails, know, a lot of, you know, the companies I've worked with in the past, you know, supplied the emails to us, really, and that was the only way they were going to send an email out. Well, there are companies out there that don't supply that email.
Evan Roth (14:07)
And those are the ones that are reaching out to IDI to gather quality data from us to be able to email the customers. And we need to make sure that we are giving them the best quality information to build their structure around.
Adam Parks (14:19)
I would encourage those that are getting the email address to still go through the validation process prior to outbound sending in whenever possible and to look at additional email addresses because the probability of actually getting through to people increases exponentially. But if you took out a loan from a fintech using a particular email address, now you're getting a lot of emails from them, you may migrate to another email address. And I think that's part of this
kind of frequent migration. And I can't remember the exact statistic, but consumers are changing their emails. And I want to say it's like 300 % more frequently than they change their phone numbers.
Evan Roth (14:55)
And just touch on that a little bit more, as you were just mentioning. We obviously send out email campaigns to our customers and for prospects. And one of the most important things, we have a whole team of people that are doing that validation period, the process internally. So when we send them a list of 5,000 emails to potential customers that we want to obviously engage with.
Justin Kalman (14:58)
Thank
Evan Roth (15:19)
They're going through and doing that filter process internally to determine what volume we are actually filter, we are actually going to send that email to, know, and that can, and we'll see typically anywhere between 30 to 40 % removed through that validation process, you know, before we even send that email. I mean, there, you know, besides the expense to it, but the risk is the compliance risk as well. So, you know, we want to make sure that we're,
we're doing that internally and always suggest that anybody that's using any emails to do the same.
Adam Parks (15:49)
Domain reputation is non-refundable. So like once you screw it, it's over. Like there's no easy way to do it. And you know, one of the things that you had just mentioned a few minutes ago was about using different domains to outbound. And one of the strategies that I've found to be useful through the years is subdomains. And by using the subdomains, know, email.adamparks.com instead of just adamparks.com can give you a little bit of subdiffusion in terms of.
Evan Roth (15:55)
Correct.
Adam Parks (16:13)
building those email addresses because even once they've been validated, I may want to send the first communication from a sub domain to protect my primary domain from potential risk. And so like, again, this is just me nerding out a little bit because I like email and you know, I kind of get into the kind of get into this a little bit. But I think it's an interesting way to look at it. And that's why I say like, if somebody's got a million emails to send out, don't send out a million, send out a thousand, look at your results. Tweak your content.
Justin Kalman (16:39)
Absolutely.
Adam Parks (16:41)
to another thousand. And so just as much just as important as the validation of the email address itself is evaluating that content and evaluating a content library and running a B tests and testing what communication worked, what communication didn't work. It's funny, I had a
I had a guest recently, Rebecca Henderson, who works with Velocity Investments. And one of the things that she said about the email campaigns of the law firms that she's managing on behalf of Velocity was that the emails that went out that didn't ask for money were the most successful emails campaigns that were outbounding for them and that they had these massive lifts. And then she was talking about, really, and I'll link that one below here, but they were talking a little bit about the email isn't a way to collect
So you have to have a portal to tie back to. So like the email is great and we can get an email outbound to them, we can get a communication, but that communication needs to have a call to action that moves that consumer down a path to where they actually take an action, because they can't pay you through an email, right? Not in any kind of a legal sense. Like it's just, that's kind of a no-no. So, and really the technology doesn't exist for it to this point. So you have to move them into a portal. So what's that experience look like and how frictionless can you go from their inbox
to their credit card, or to their debit card, however they're making that payment, ACH, whatever. But how can you go from, contacted you to I paid you in the least amount of time? Have you seen any groups that are leveraging any strategies using that email data to kind of improve this flow of process?
Evan Roth (18:11)
You know, have I seen it? Well, only speaking from experience. know, emails for us were two things. Either driving people to a portal, as you mentioned, a payment portal to let them self-resolve. And I'll touch on that in just a second. And the second one is to drive inbound. You you want the emails, kind of like, again, a letter. It's a different version of a communication.
Adam Parks (18:14)
Okay, fair.
Evan Roth (18:32)
And the main goal is to drive the imbalance to allow your agents or to allow that self portal to help resolve the debt itself. The interesting thing is, and again, agencies are only open so many hours. And what we were seeing in a lot of cases were customers were not able to reach us from an eight to five or an eight to eight timeframe. And customers needed that self portal to resolve their accounts after hours.
Adam Parks (18:45)
Yeah.
Evan Roth (18:57)
I mean, you think about even during the day, people are at work eight to five. You think about after work, they're helping their kids with their homework or they're doing, you know, going out and doing football practice, basketball practice and all those other things. There's extracurricular activities. They're not able to really even sit down and take care of certain accounts or start looking at their bills till, you know, 10, 11 o'clock at night. And, you know, you need those portals to be able to do that. so, or they don't even look at their emails until later that evening and they go, you know, I got to take care of this.
There's a lot of different reasons that the email communications and an email strategy needs to be put in place. again, going back to the quality of it is key. you know, we've from experience, we saw a huge amount of volume once we started using it, go to our web portal and do self resolve just through that. Or, you know, we've used different chat bot is another one. You know, let them call in and let the chat bot communicate to the customer to help them resolve an account as well, which
Evan Roth (19:54)
A lot of people are really starting to see, and we just heard it from the RMAI conference, a lot of people are starting to really get into the chat bot process to help gain revenue.
Justin Kalman (20:03)
I'll say there's a big.
Adam Parks (20:04)
If you haven't, if you haven't seen it
actually interviewed one of those bots. Yeah, I interviewed one of those bots on this podcast and we had a whole conversation with it about resolving my debt. I gotta say it was a pretty cool. Yeah, it was pretty neat.
Evan Roth (20:08)
You have?
Justin Kalman (20:10)
I that.
really cool technology. I saw that one. Yeah.
Evan Roth (20:16)
Really, really cool technology. It's come a long
way, just even the last year. A lot of these companies have really started to figure out how they can make it so interactive and so communicative that in some cases you can really hardly tell the difference between the bot and the person. It's quite impressive.
Justin Kalman (20:33)
Just wanted to add one
thing too. There's a big cost savings opportunity as well. mean, Adam, we know how expensive it is to physically mail letters. So I think more and more agencies now are exploring sending out validation notices via email. So that's a huge cost savings opportunity there.
Adam Parks (20:46)
I always make the joke when it comes to delivering physical items somewhere, shipping anything, whether it be through the mail or whatever. I always say if you need it to get there, use FedEx. If you want it to get there, use UPS. And if you don't give a shit, send it through the US Postal Service.
Evan Roth (21:01)
That sums it up. That sums it up well, actually.
Adam Parks (21:03)
I mean, I hate
to be that way, but I'm a very realistic person.
Evan Roth (21:08)
Yeah, where the email is the guarantee at least to at least get it to them, right? And again, going back to quality of it, you know you at least get it to them and you have more, much more analytics in regards to an email than you do on a regular email. You know, you can know if somebody opened it and so forth, if they clicked on a page and so forth. there's much more reliability around the email campaigns.
Adam Parks (21:12)
At least you know.
I got a returned holiday card yesterday. from our holiday mailing in like early December, I got one of the cards back yesterday just to speak to the efficiency of the US Postal Service. Go ahead, Justin.
Justin Kalman (21:29)
Just a couple things too.
Evan Roth (21:32)
I'm sorry.
Yeah, fair
enough. I love it. That's great.
Justin Kalman (21:42)
Yeah, it's
why I speak a little bit more to that. You know, we're talking a little bit about domain names and we touched a little bit on like business domain names, but you know, if you don't intend to do a campaign to their employer domain, it's important that you have some sort of mechanism to filter out those type of domain names as well. So just something to be aware of, cause you don't know. mean, it's possible even your clients providing you with the email that they gave them that actually is their employer and you may still not want to engage with them there. So, you know, obviously the, the common sense way to kind of mitigate those is to look at the common.
Justin Kalman (22:10)
consumer email categories like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, then weed out the ones that are potentially like a Bank of America dot com or something like that. And the other thing too I want to mention, which is a little bit off topic, is there's a lot of value into those corporate email domains as well. So in the legal space, we know how expensive it to acquire employment information, like liquidated judgment or whatnot. I have had a number of clients that have had success in locating employers.
Justin Kalman (22:37)
just by taking a look at the email addresses and looking at the domain names that are not the common Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail. And sometimes that's a really cheap lead in an employer as well. So just a little off topic, but something that may be of value on the legal side.
Adam Parks (22:50)
That's a really interesting I like and I think that's my favorite thing about talking to you, Justin, you've always got another way to get to the solution. Like it's you know, where you're trying to go to and you guys have so many different data sets and you know, such experience around it that you can generally show people these different roundabout ways to getting to a better end goal solution. And I think I think I'm gonna call that one of Justin's nuggets there because that's a that's a good one. I like that approach.
Justin Kalman (23:13)
Take it.
A little outside the box, I guess.
Adam Parks (23:16)
Look, it's a little bit outside the box, but it is a very expensive piece of data when you're trying to buy, you know, place of employment information and finding easier ways to execute on that or to identify it, I think, adds significant value to an organization. Now, from an email perspective, you know, we've kind of talked about feeding the fuel, but
Justin Kalman (23:33)
Absolutely.
Adam Parks (23:39)
The other thing that I wanted to at least try and cover in our last few minutes here was talking a little bit more about text messaging. And so for those that have actually got their text messaging campaigns going forward and knowing that consumers, especially consumers in debt tend to move phone numbers a little more frequently. I think I've had mine since like, I say it's 25 years now. And a lot of us are like that where your phone number is kind of like your social security number these days, but that's not everybody. So what kind of solutions and things have you seen in place to...
assist in a similar way for these text messaging campaigns to dive in and really find that right number to reach the consumer.
Justin Kalman (24:16)
Yeah, I mean, you know, the challenging part is to know, you know, the number that was provided by your client. Is that still their cell phone number? You know, and, you know, one thing that we can potentially do for our clients is, you know, they can provide us a batch file of X amount of records at once where they provide us with that last known number for that consumer. And we can basically return to them to let them know you already have what we think is the best cell phone number for that consumer. That matches the top record in our database or.
Justin Kalman (24:46)
here's the number that we do believe is the best cell phone number for that consumer at this given time. So, you know, I think that, you know, being proactive and trying to determine whether or not the data you already have on hand is the accurate data for that consumer is pretty important. You don't want to dismiss what the client provided you.
Adam Parks (25:02)
I think that's great advice for everybody listening, gentlemen. And I really do appreciate you guys coming on, spending a little time with me, sharing your insights. Any final words for our audience today?
Evan Roth (25:15)
No, no, I appreciate the time here. I appreciate this. Email obviously is a huge topic of conversation, so this was a great topic to discuss. And obviously, we'd love to build off of that and see where the future holds for that. We continue to explore different avenues and different vendors to improve our quality of data. this was a great discussion to lead into that. So thank you.
Justin Kalman (25:39)
Yeah, we
really appreciate it. Adam, thanks for including us.
Adam Parks (25:41)
Absolutely. For those of you who are watching, if you have additional questions you'd like to ask Evan or Justin or myself, you can leave those in the comments on LinkedIn and YouTube and we'll be responding to those. Or if you have additional topics you'd like to see us discuss, different things about data, there's so many different topics we could cover here, you can leave those in the comments below as well. And hopefully I can get these gentlemen to come back at least one more time to help me continue to create great content for a great industry. But until next time, gentlemen, thank you so much for your time and attention today. I really do appreciate you.
Justin Kalman (26:06)
Thank you.
Evan Roth (26:09)
Appreciate it. Take care. Have a good one.
Justin Kalman (26:09)
Appreciate you, Adam. Thanks so much.
Adam Parks (26:11)
and
you as well. And thank you everybody for watching. We appreciate your time and attention as well. And we'll see you all again soon. Bye everybody.
Evan Roth (26:19)
Take care.
Justin Kalman (26:19)
Bye.
