What is Data Enrichment (+ Why Marketers Should Use It)?

It’s no secret that there’s an abundance of data out there and how valuable this is to businesses. Companies now spend a lot of resources collecting the data of customers and potential customers to improve targeting and nourish leads.

But it’s not just about gathering as much data as possible - it’s also important to ensure that it’s of the highest quality. This process is known as data enrichment and is a key component for marketers to achieve success in their campaigns.

What is data enrichment?

Data enrichment is the process of combining a number of data sets to fill in missing details and improve the quality of the data you have to work from. It’s a solution-based approach to merging information that may have been collected from a number of different sources, including online forms and sales calls.

Enriched data has a number of benefits, including:

Keeps data up to date
Saves time through automation
Helps you generate the right questions to ask customers
Prevents accidental duplicate contacts

Learn more: Why Marketing Data Management Remains a Huge Headache for Marketers

Data enrichment tools

Like many areas of modern marketing, data enrichment is made a lot easier by using the right tools. Automating the process allows you to deal with large volumes of data and ensure there’s no human error when inputting information. Deciding on the best data enrichment tools for your company will depend on the business insights you’re looking to generate, your budget and the compatibility with other software.

Linking data enrichment tools to customer relationship management (CRM) software is a common method of getting the most from datasets. Associating the right data to the relevant account can be achieved by linking them through a common factor, such as company name, mailing address or website domain. While the setup process can be time consuming, once in place it can update contacts regularly, guarding against data decay.

Lead enrichment

With multiple data sources feeding into your CRM, you’ll have enriched data on all your contacts, resulting in better lead scoring and account scoring models. These methodologies, which give you a score for each lead based on points allocated via a set of criteria, enable you to easily determine the leads that are qualified and ready to be converted.

Shortened lead capture forms

Long lead capture forms can put off prospective leads, but in the past the cost of making them more concise meant prolonging the buying cycle. Now, you can create forms that only ask for must-have information, safe in the knowledge you’ll be able to fill in the gaps further down the line through the data enrichment process.

Customer data enrichment

Data enrichment leads to a better customer experience with your company, helping to improve everything from personalization to detecting red flags. The insights and conclusions drawn from your database will inform how upsell and cross-sell opportunities are approached, so data quality is of the utmost importance. Identifying business signals in real time means targeting customers most likely to churn and tackling issues to make sure they’re getting the most from your products or services.

B2B data enrichment

Leads in a B2B sphere should be approached differently to those you’re nurturing on an individual basis. While you must still use data when targeting a company as opposed to people, the process is more nuanced and peppered with additional steps. This makes B2B data enrichment just as important as in the B2C case, in fact it might be even more vital, as having multiple contacts at the same organization can cause confusion and overlap.

Enriched data for B2B must focus on your target profiles, which may vary from business to business. In one organization, you may be trying to work with a marketing manager, while in others it could be an entrepreneur. Match the criteria of your data with your profiles to ensure it’s relevant and organized in a way that is both structured and readable, otherwise a large database will fail to fulfil its full potential.

Data enrichment is an ongoing process

Approaching data enrichment as a one-off task that needs to be completed will mean you get a single snapshot of your contacts, which doesn’t reflect their evolving situations. To remain relevant, your database must keep track of changes to names, addresses, product portfolios and all other business developments. Putting a solution in place that automatically enriches data whenever there’s an update with your contact will give you the confidence to trust your database, knowing it’s working to meet your aims.