What is Data Enrichment?
Similar to the heart that pumps blood and delivers oxygen to the body, data enrichment supports business operations with essential data for growth. Quick access to accurate data is crucial for successful marketing, sales and customer service operations. Data enrichment is the process of enhancing refined raw data and integrating it into an existing database while extracting meaningful insights for business decision-making.
Enriched data is a valuable business asset that converts data from third-party and first-party data resources. First-party data is gathered from company-owned sources, such as the leads themselves and tracking software properties (including Google Analytics, Google Ads, social media analytics, and more.) Data enhancement arrives from third-party sources and breaks the data into detailed information about the customers. Third-party type of data arrives from external platforms with information on website visitors, prospects and current customers. For example, our data enrichment technology offers accurate and contactable information from LinkedIn profiles, domains, company names and other social profiles on any prospect at any company.
As for any business operation, data enrichment should apply in correlation to your business goals. It is equally important to define what data is valuable for your marketing or sales teams, but also the order in which the data is organized and stored.
Data Enrichment vs. Data Cleansing
Supportive to data enrichment, data cleansing is the process of finding and removing inaccurate, redundant and non-valid records from the database. Data cleansing grants businesses with accurate leads for better performance and reduced spam responses. For businesses to know more about their customers, data enrichment is applied over clean sources of data, enhancing it with completion and up-to-date information. Another term for data enrichment is data appending which means adding missing information to existing contacts, expanding the data to be meaningful.
Why is Data Enrichment Essential for B2B Companies?
In B2B marketing and sales, your audience is the most valuable revenue-generating asset. Data enrichment is an important aspect for businesses to overcome competition. Among various applications, there are few specific challenges where data enrichment becomes handy.
Advanced Segmentation
When it comes to running successful digital marketing campaigns, audience segmentation grants a higher return on investment on your advertisement spending. Breaking down your audiences into smaller, more specific groups opens the door for additional growth opportunities. With enriched data, companies have access to wider audience groups and their specific interests.
For example, assume that you are a content marketing manager at a time tracking software that wants to educate about the software’s features in a webinar format. The best way to attract your audience is through paid ads targeting HR and project management employees at high-tech companies. If you don’t have the data, you may find yourself wasting time and budget reaching out to non-accurate targets. Let’s use LinkedIn in this example – the social network for professionals. You could rely on Linkedin’s audience targeting by demographics and company targets. On the other hand, having the data on your prospects at your fingertips will narrow your targeting and budget spending on specific contacts by integrating your data with the platform.
Advanced Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is an evaluation system that enables quick identification of high-value sales leads in comparison to low priority leads. Scores can apply based on relevance, incomplete information or factors such as industry, job title and level of interest in your product or service.
Complete information on your prospects improves the performance of sales outreach and saves time. Your sales team should not spend their time and energy looking up missing information on the web. Data enrichment fills in the blanks with in-depth information on your customers. From here, sales and marketing teams can decide if to spend resources on a specific prospect.
When it comes to advanced lead scoring, sales and marketing teams should be on the same page. Nobody wants to lose a high-quality lead at some point in the sales funnel. Communication and integration of information between marketing and sales departments are highly important. Sales personnel should make clear updates based on their work. That will provide valuable information for marketing in order of targeting strong prospects consequently.
Improve Conversions
Whether you are planning to launch an ABM (account-based marketing) campaign or generate more leads from social media ads, data enrichment could increase the number of conversions that you’ve set as a goal. Data enrichment will optimize the decision-making process on which prospects and at which companies your team should contact. Accurate and segmented data helps in defining the right content and message while sending it at the right time to the right group of your target audiences with the highest conversion rate.
The same principle applies to a lead generation campaign. We all have been on that lazy side of form submissions. Not everybody fills in all the necessary fields. Here data enrichment becomes handy, providing companies with access to complete information. In addition, contacts who have spent the time on completing the form are more serious about your service than someone who barely wrote their name. No need to say more, data automation is the quickest way to process the information – rather than manual work of inserting the leads from your WordPress leads submissions.
Personalization
Your B2B customers know that their data is in your hands. Therefore, they expect a personalized approach when it comes to communication. Data enrichment can help your marketing team grab your prospects’ attention by presenting solutions to their pain points. With the assistance of machine learning, data analysts have the opportunity to take personalization one step ahead of the competition. Data enrichment helps to present a message and grab the attention at an early stage of the sales funnel.
Data Compliance
When it comes to business ethics, handling data should be done concerning privacy regulations. Laws protect consumer data with limitations on how to store the data and for how long. Please ensure that your company’s data is being scrapped properly without being subject to penalties. For example, in the EU (Europian Union) personalized data processing must comply with the GDPR policies as of May 25, 2018. Please ensure that your ongoing enrichment operations always protect the data with accuracy and legally.
Data Enrichment is an Ongoing Process
Similar to other technical applications and data management, data enrichment is an ongoing process. The goal is to deliver the most relevant message to your audience. Even the most detailed data should be verified continuously for the message to stay up-to-date. Data cleansing is an essential part of the process. With the help of machine learning algorithms that apply automation your data should stay current. Faster than humans, of course, automation technologies check and update the data 24 hours a day, every day of the week. Well-functioning data provides companies with the ability to provide focussed engagement in real-time. Providing the most optimal experience and high-targeting and problem-solving solutions.
There are a lot of data enrichment vendors. Outlasted Data has helped thousands of businesses to achieve global brand awareness and financial growth with data enrichment and data marketing services. Consult with the Outlasted Data team today on how data enrichment can help your organization!
