What is data enrichment and how does it work?

Data is the lifeblood of business—it’s used in marketing, sales, and customer support. Every decision that company leaders make to enhance the growth of their company is based on data.

For organizations to gain valid insights, they must have immediate access to customer information, and they must be certain that the data is accurate and up to date.

In today’s data-driven world of sales and marketing, data enrichment is essential. Companies are seeking data enrichment services to guarantee that they are getting the most out of their data.

We’ll cover what data enrichment means, when you need it, and why it’s important for your marketing and sales teams.

What is data enrichment?

Data enrichment comes from combining first-party data with disparate data from external sources. For every business, enriched data is a valuable commodity; it transforms your raw data into usable, informative insights. Many brands enrich their raw data to help with their decision-making processes.

How it works is simple: Data enrichment tools pull data from various online sources, providing you with a reservoir of high-quality customer data. Those tools will then append the customer profiles in your CRM with missing information from its database. Basically, data enrichment fills in the gaps, giving you reliable, accurate insights into your prospects, leads, and existing customers.

When does your company need data enrichment?

For companies to stay ahead of the competition, data enrichment is crucial. Let’s look at four examples of when data enrichment is most beneficial.

1. Your database is overflowing

The greater your database, the better—in theory, at least. The more data you have about your potential consumers, the higher your chances of closing a sale. However, if your database is full of incomplete data, things can quickly become more problematic as it grows larger.

When you have too much incomplete data, you run into a signal vs. noise problem, where the excess of information starts to have negative impacts. Even if you start with flawless data, it tends to deteriorate at a rate of around 30% every year.

This is where data enrichment comes in to help you get rid of data inconsistencies and gaps. Data enrichment is becoming increasingly important for more efficient data processing and more targeted campaigns.

2. You’re running an account-based marketing (ABM) campaign

When running an ABM campaign, success means taking an intelligent, data-driven approach when making purchase decisions. Targeting the right people with the right content is what ABM campaigns are all about.

No amount of personalized content, segmentation, or other marketing tactics will compensate for the inability to reach the proper decision makers or companies without complete and accurate data. Data enrichment is the most effective technique to ensure that your leads, prospects, and existing customers have the most accurate and up-to-date profiles possible.

3. You rely on inbound sources

Optimizing inbound forms is a tough balancing act, and every marketer knows it. The amount of form submissions you get is inversely proportional to how much data you want to collect. As a result, every new field you add to a form reduces the number of submissions. You must also provide enough data to your sales and marketing teams so that they can prioritize the best leads with the right information needed to connect with them.

Similarly, for businesses that rely heavily on events to generate leads, acquiring all of the information needed to maximize follow-ups frequently ends up outside of their control. Most events choose which data points your customers must supply, and those data points don’t always correspond to what you need for an effective follow-up.

You don’t have much control when it comes to what information your leads choose to disclose, regardless of the source. You have limited options for preventing leads from submitting personal, generic, or false information in your forms from most providers. There are also many times when your customers will make genuine errors when filling out the forms.

Data enrichment helps your marketing team make the most out of the information they collect from inbound sources.

4. You’re expanding your services

Some of the most difficult tasks you can undertake are expanding your product offerings and targeting new segments. You must be confident in your approach when venturing into a new space. You can reduce your risks and help ensure the success of your new marketing campaigns by accumulating more detailed, accurate information about your target audience through data enrichment.

Why is data enrichment important for marketers?

You can use data enrichment for a variety of purposes, and it has multiple valuable applications. There are a few campaign-specific issues that data enrichment can solve.

1. Better segmentation

By focusing your efforts and personalizing your content and outreach, segmenting your customers will yield a significantly higher return on your marketing initiatives. Your campaigns can unearth new opportunities and provide significant growth potential as your personalization efforts get better. Data enrichment helps you to construct accurate segmentation categories with an enhanced focus.

Assume you wanted to advertise your fintech product’s marketing content to all the heads of technology at financial institutions with over 100,000 customers. You will waste a lot of time and effort reaching out to the wrong targets if you don’t have the data you need to identify the right businesses and the right people to approach. You will also likely miss many opportunities you should have prioritized if you don’t have the data you need.

2. Advanced lead scoring

Your sales and marketing teams will be able to set clear goals by evaluating and ranking their leads. Lead scoring, if done improperly, will reduce the effectiveness of your lead generation campaigns. Lead scoring becomes considerably more difficult when you have limited information to go on. You can reliably assess in-depth client profiles, but scoring partial profiles usually ends up being mostly guesswork.

Data enrichment helps transform partial customer profiles into complete ones, allowing you to score leads in a meaningful and precise way. Together with data enrichment, sales and marketing teams can discover the most important data for lead scoring.

3. Enhanced personalization

Customers know that their information gets shared with marketers. While they may have mixed opinions about it being used for outreach, they do expect a company that genuinely wants their business to do their homework and take smart, targeted approaches. However, it’s not simply about matching expectations. Knowing how to get the attention of the customers you’re trying to reach, as well as proving that you already recognize their pain points, can make or break a sale.

Data enrichment allows ambitious marketers and salespeople to go even further with personalization by understanding more details without having to ask for them or waste time searching for the information they need to be confident in their outreach.

4. Data compliance

Data enrichment can also help ensure that you remain compliant with data privacy laws. Regulations like the CCPA and GDPR limit what categories of customer data can be held and for how long, as well as what marketers and companies can do with it.

Data enrichment can aid in maintaining compliance with GDPR rules and other legal obligations, ensuring that your data is not only correct and complete but also fully compliant with privacy laws. Continuous data enrichment will ensure that your data remains valuable even if regulations change in the future.

Lead qualifications with data enrichment

Finding new leads and converting them into customers is the fundamental purpose of marketing. Marketing is all about generating leads, which are then handed over to sales teams in order to convert those leads into customers.

Sales teams, however, frequently determine that some leads are unusable—unqualified prospects who are unlikely or unwilling to make a purchase—after a few follow-up calls. This is usually the start of the futile blame game between the two departments.

That’s where lead qualification comes in. Because traditional lead qualification techniques are slow, data enrichment serves as a catalyst for speeding up the overall qualification process, resulting in more, better leads for your sales team.

Increasing form submissions with data enrichment

Conversion rates are influenced by the amount of information requested on inbound forms. These forms can be simple, asking for a name and email address, or they can ask for more personal details. Most marketers limit the number of form fields as a corrective measure if they have a high-traffic landing page, but no one is submitting their information to forms with too many fields.

Marketers will typically ask additional questions on their signup forms to learn more about a potential lead. While these questions may be useful to marketing and sales teams, there’s no guarantee that your lead won’t leave after seeing more questions than they want to spend time answering.

Data enrichment allows you to make the form as simple as an email address and a name while still providing you with additional information without having to ask your leads.

Improving conversions with data enrichment

Marketers are putting more effort into keeping their databases up to date. Unlike ordinary data, enriched data potentially holds an endless amount of information, allowing for more efficient decision making. As a result, marketers can rely on data enrichment to enhance their campaign strategies.

It’s time to take your prospecting to another level through data enrichment. Add data enrichment tools to your tech stack so that you can master the data-driven aspects of lead generation and scoring, customer segmentation, and ad personalization for your next campaign.

Ready to step up your marketing game? Get started with Lytics, and see how you can start meeting your marketing goals faster.