Unlocking the power of customer data enrichment [Guide]

You’ve collected customer data, verified and cleaned it, establishing order in your database. However, you’re still not unlocking the customer data insights you hoped for, and this is having an effect on your customers’ experience. If this challenge sounds familiar, don’t worry. Customer data enrichment can help.

As the name suggests, customer data enrichment is when you add enrichment to your datasets to complete and enhance them. One example could be adding a customer’s email address to their data profile, allowing you to send them personalized email offers. This personalization improves the customer experience, ultimately, promoting profitability.

If you’re interested in unlocking the power of customer data, here’s everything you need to know about customer data enrichment.

Understanding the basics of customer data enrichment

The problem with customer data is that you rarely collect everything you need in one go. And this is where customer data enrichment comes in. It utilizes first-party data to continuously improve the accuracy and completeness of your customer profiles.

For example, let’s say I bring in a new lead and because I don’t want them to fill in a long form with 15 questions, I keep it short and only collect these pieces of information:

• Full name
• Email
• Phone number

This information is useful, but if I want to do anything with it, I’ll have to gather more data points. So I could start by uncovering their IP address and personalizing ads around their browsing needs. 

Or, if my business has multiple physical stores, I want to add a customer’s physical location to my database, so I can suggest the nearest store they can visit.

Five types of customer data enrichment

These are the five main types of customer data enrichment:

1. Demographic enrichment: When you’re new to data enrichment, begin enriching demographic data like customer names and job titles because it’s the easiest to collect and provides a good foundation for customer understanding.

2. Firmographic enrichment: If you’re a B2B company, you want to enrich your firmographic data. Firmographic data gives insight into the organization buying your product or service, not just the person. This includes industry type, business size, revenue numbers, and physical location.

3. Technographic enrichment: Technographic data are data points that help you understand a business’s use of technology. So consider running surveys to enrich current datasets and learn more about your audience’s use of technology.

4. Behavioral enrichment: Once your customer is engaging with your brand and you’re collecting behavioral data, start your enrichment efforts by combining page views with video views, ecommerce transactions, and web form downloads.

5. Social media enrichment: It’s also important to combine data points from all the social media platforms you use to interact with your audience to create an omnichannel experience. 

Benefits of customer data enrichment for businesses

These are some of the benefits we see businesses experience after introducing customer data enrichment:

Enhanced customer segmentation

When you’re constantly adding new data points to existing ones, you learn more about your customer, making it easier to spot things customers have in common. You can segment customers based on factors such as physical location, age, income, or behavioral habits. From here, you can personalize marketing around their individual needs.

Personalized marketing campaigns

By learning new things about your customer and importing these data points into a single profile, you gain a completely new perspective on why your customer uses your product or service and what challenges they currently face in their industry. You can then deliver customized messages around this information.

Improved customer experience

Customer data enrichment can also fuel product development efforts. You’ll understand what features customers want you to add, what features they want removed, and what you can improve. Your product development team can use this feedback when developing your application, improving customers’ experience with your product.

Better customer retention

Personalizing experiences and building better customer relationships on both the marketing and product development front naturally boost retention. Customers will feel like you “get” them, and you’ll stand out from competitors.

Data-driven decision-making

As you build a more detailed profile of each customer, you start to understand them better, fueling data-driven decision-making. You always have the customer’s needs in mind and can refer to them when making an important decision.

Emerging trends in customer data enrichment

Here are some trends that we believe will dominate the customer data enrichment market in the coming years:

Artificial intelligence and machine learning

The AI industry will grow at an annual rate of 37% from 2023 to 2030. A major area where AI is improving is data enrichment since several software applications allow you to automate sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, and language detection.

Predictive data enrichment

Some companies are also starting to use predictive analysis to add data points to existing profiles. For example, if you have a few data points on a customer, say, an email address, first name, and address, you can use predictive analysis to predict customer buying habits.

Real-time data enrichment

Many CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) will add data points to customer profiles as soon as you import them into your database. This way, you don’t have to go back and update your database all the time.

Cross-channel data enrichment

Cross-channel data enrichment refers to using data from multiple sources to create an omnichannel customer experience. For example, if your customer bought something from your website, you could use this data to run relevant ads on Facebook. The best part is that you don’t have to do this manually. A CDP can automatically build a cross-channel customer profile, allowing you to create a more personalized customer experience.

Unlock the power of customer data enrichment with Lytics

Customer data enrichment promotes personalized customer experiences and data-driven decision-making. This boosts profitability as every interaction a customer has with your brand is a good one. If you’re interested in unlocking the power of customer data enrichment, consider the Lytics CDP.  Lytics will collect and manage your customer data in real-time while building cross-channel profiles. This gives you a 360-degree view of customers, making it easy to create personalized experiences.