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What is Data Enrichment? Benefits, Methods and Tools in 2024

Last Update : 20.12.23 • Publication : 13.02.23 • Reading :

If you're using data for your business, you know that having accurate and complete information about your customers and leads is crucial for effective prospecting and building strong relationships.


But too often businesses rely on incomplete and out of date. According to a Harvard Business Review study, only 3% of corporate data can be considered quality data. 


Data enrichment is the solution to this problem.


What is data enrichment?

Data enrichment is the process of gathering, cleaning, and validating data to ensure that it is accurate, up-to-date, and complete. It allows you to gain a deeper understanding of your customers and their needs. This can lead to increased sales and revenues.


The benefits of data enrichment

The benefits of data enrichment are numerous. With complete and accurate data, you can improve your targeting and personalization efforts, which can lead to higher conversion rates and increased customer loyalty.


Additionally, enriched data can help you identify new market opportunities and improve your overall decision-making.


Cost savings

Data enrichment can lead to cost savings in a number of ways. Ensuring that your data is accurate and up-to-date, helps you reduce the costs associated with mailing or calling the wrong people. It also helps avoid sending duplicate communications.


By identifying new market opportunities and focusing on high-value customers, you can reduce your acquisition costs and increase the return on your marketing investments.


Improve customer relations and experience

Customer Care

When your customer data is accurate and complete, you can gain a deeper understanding of your customers and their needs. This, in turn, can help you create more personalized and relevant communications, which can improve customer experience, satisfaction and loyalty. Effective data analysis, fueled by enriched datasets, is key in understanding these interests and behaviors, leading to more successful campaigns.


Moreover, by identifying and addressing customer pain points, you can improve the overall customer experience and increase retention rates.

Improving Marketing with High Quality Data

By enriching your customer database with additional data points, you can significantly enhance your marketing strategies. When your customer data is accurate and complete, you are able to have better insight into your customers and their needs.


This, in turn, can help you to create more effective marketing campaigns that are tailored to the specific interests and behaviors of your target audience.


With complete and accurate data, you can segment your audience based on demographics, purchase history, or past interactions with your brand. This allows you to create targeted, personalized marketing campaigns that are more likely to resonate with your audience and drive conversions.


With an updated and complete customer database, you can also identify new market opportunities and focus on segments that are more likely to convert.


Overall, data enrichment is an essential step in creating effective marketing campaigns that drive business growth.


Boost Sales performance with data

Increase Sales with Data Enrichment

Data enrichment is crucial for driving sales success. With a complete and accurate understanding of your customers, you can create sales strategies and tactics that are tailored to their specific interests and behaviors.


For example, by identifying key decision makers and understanding their pain points, you can tailor your sales pitch to address their specific needs.


Keeping your customer data updated and accurate, helps you identify new market opportunities which can lead to increased sales. Moreover, by addressing the issue of missing data through data enrichment processes, you can uncover hidden opportunities and trends.


By understanding the behaviors of your customers, data enrichment allows you to reach out to them at the right time and improve conversion rates.


The process of data enrichment

Set your data enrichment goal

Having specific goals in mind for data enrichment is super important. It helps you focus on what i's most important for your business and make sure you're getting the most out of the process. Without clear goals, it's easy to get sidetracked and not see the results you want.


Having specific goals in mind allows companies to focus their efforts on the areas that are most important to their business objectives.


This can help to prioritize data collection and management efforts and ensure that they are aligned with the company's overall strategy.


Let's say a company wants to get better at targeting and personalizing their marketing to customers. They might focus on data enrichment efforts that help them understand more about their customers like their age, interests, and habits. This way they can send tailored messages to different groups of customers and make their marketing more effective.


Another company may have a goal of improving sales. They may focus on data enrichment efforts that enable them to identify key decision makers, understand their pain points, and tailor their sales pitch accordingly.


Establishing data enrichment goals also allows companies to measure the ROI of their efforts. By setting measurable goals, companies can track the progress of their data enrichment efforts. They can measure the impact that progress has on business objectives such as improved targeting, personalization, and sales.


How to enrich your data

So, how do you go about enriching your data? The process typically involves the following steps:

  • Correcting data — This step involves identifying and correcting errors in your customer data. This may include removing duplicate records, correcting spelling mistakes, or updating outdated information. This step is important to ensure that your data is accurate and reliable.
  • Standardizing data — In this step, you will ensure consistency in the data by standardizing the format of the raw data you've collected. This may include formatting phone numbers, addresses, or dates in a consistent manner. This step is important to ensure that the data is easy to read and understand.
  • Appending dataThis step involves adding new information to your customer data, such as demographic information, purchase history, website activity, or geographic data, enhancing the depth of the data pool. This step is important to gain a deeper understanding of your customers, their needs and preferences, and to identify new market opportunities. This step also involves enriching the data with external data sources to get more insights and to get a more complete view of the customers.

By following these steps, you can effectively enrich your customer database. Use these information to improve your marketing and sales efforts, identify new market opportunities, and ultimately drive business growth.


Discover all our articles on Data Management

Keep your data up-to-date

Keep Up-to-date data

When determining the best time to enrich your customer database, there are a few key factors to consider.

  1. Regular review is crucial, especially to address the issue of missing or incomplete data. This could mean conducting data enrichment on a set schedule, such as annually or semi-annually.
  2. If you're not seeing the results you want from your marketing and sales efforts, your customer data might not be up-to-date. In this case, it would be beneficial to conduct data enrichment to improve the quality of your data.
  3. If you are planning to expand your business to new areas or , launching new products or services, it's important to have an updated and complete customer database. This will help you identify new market opportunities and target your efforts more effectively.

Methods for data enrichment

There are several methods that can be used for data enrichment, including scraping, manual searches, and using enrichment services.


Manually search

Manually Search for data

Pros of using manual searching for data enrichment:

  • Quality of data — The quality of data collected through manual search depends on the skills and abilities of the person collecting the data. To ensure the quality of the results, data collected manually can be verified for data accuracy and relevance.
  • Access to specific or detailed information — Manual searching can provide access to specific or detailed information that may not be easily accessible through other methods. For example, some data may only be accessible behind login portals.
  • Compliance with data privacy regulations — Manual searching can be more compliant with data privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA (assuming the person gathering data has the required training).

Cons of using manual searching for data enrichment:

  • Laborious — Manual searches are often a laborious method, as they involve searching for data on specific websites or social media platforms and collecting it manually.
  • Cost — Manual searches can be more costly, as they may require hiring additional staff or outsourcing the task.
  • Risk of human error — There is a risk of human error when manually searching for data.
  • Limited scalability — Manual search for data is not easily scalable and may not be feasible for collecting large amounts of data.

DATA Scraping

Scraping refers to the process of automatically collecting data from publicly available sources, such as websites and social media platforms.


Pros of using scraping for data enrichment:

  • Cost-effective — Scraping can be a relatively low-cost method for gathering large amounts of data.
  • Time-efficient — Scraping can be an efficient way to gather data quickly, especially when compared to manual data collection methods.
  • Access to large amounts of data — Scraping can provide access to large amounts of data from publicly available sources.
  • Automation — Scraping can be automated, which can save time and reduce the risk of human error.

Cons of using scraping for data enrichment:

  • Quality of data — The quality of data gathered through scraping can be variable and may not always be accurate or relevant.
  • Technical expertise — Scraping requires technical expertise to set up and maintain the scraping process.
  • Compliance with data privacy regulations — Scraping may not always comply with data privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

Enrichment services

Enrichment services refer to third-party companies that specialize in data collection and management.


Pros of using enrichment services for data enrichment:

  • Expertise — Enrichment services are provided by companies that specialize in data collection and management. It means that they have the expertise and resources to perform data enrichment effectively.
  • Efficiency — Enrichment services can be a cost-effective and efficient solution for companies that do not have the resources to perform data enrichment in-house.

Cons of using enrichment services for data enrichment:

  • Cost — Enrichment services can be costly, especially if used on a regular basis. Therefore, it’s important to find a data supplier that is both competitive and reliable.
  • Limited control — Using an enrichment service can mean that a company has less control over the data collection and management process.
  • Quality of data — Quality of data depends on the company providing the service and its expertise, so it might not always be accurate or relevant.

Stop wasting time with incomplete data. Find out how our Data Enrichment Service can help you get accurate and up-to-date information to power your business.

Searching from internal sources

Searching for internal data can be interesting because it can provide a company with valuable insights into its operations, customers, and markets. This can help the company make better decisions, identify new opportunities, and improve its overall performance


Existing data within your company can be found in a variety of departments within a company, such as sales, marketing, finance, and human resources.

  • Sales data can provide information on customer buying habits and trends.
  • Marketing data can reveal insights into advertising effectiveness.
  • Finance data can help a company understand its financial performance and identify cost savings opportunities.
  • Human resources data can give information on employee satisfaction, turnover rate, and performance metrics.

Searching for internal data can be extremely beneficial for a company as it can help to enrich the data it already possesses. But this method can be hindered by the silos and frictions that may arise in some organizations. Therefore it’s often advised to combine internal and external sources for data gathering.


Data enrichment tools

A data enrichment tool is a software or platform that helps organizations improve the quality and completeness of their customer data.


Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM systems are useful for data enrichment in that they provide a centralized location for storing and managing customer data. This allows for easy access to data for enrichment purposes and can also automate processes, such as data matching and appending.


In addition, some CRMs allow you to :

  • Have a follow-up history, such as appointments, communications, etc..
  • Automatically detect a contact's activity on your website
  • Have access to deduplication tools

By using CRM systems, companies can create a more complete and accurate view of their customers.


Data validation and data cleansing services

Data validation and cleansing services are useful for data enrichment because they help to ensure the accuracy and completeness of customer data.


By identifying and removing errors and duplicates, these services can improve the quality of data and make it more useful for enrichment purposes. This can lead to better decision making, improved targeting and personalization, and increased ROI.


Never miss the opportunity to enrich data through our partners program and unlock the full potential of your data.

What kind of data can be enriched

All types of data can be enriched. First, your need to determine what must be added, verified, corrected, standardized, etc. In particular, you should focus on data that tend to evolve rapidly over time.


This being said, here is a non-exhaustive list of the most used data:

B2C Databases

  • Contact information: Name, address, phone number, email address, and other contact details.
  • Demographic data: Age, gender, income, occupation, education level, and other demographic details
  • Behavioral data: Purchase history, website activity, social media activity, and other data related to customer behavior.
  • Psychographic data: Interests, hobbies, values, and other data related to customer attitudes and personality.
  • Geolocation data: Information about the customer's location, such as city, region, or country.
  • Third-party data: Information from external sources, such as public records, industry databases, or social media.

B2B Databases

  • Company information: Name, address, phone number, email address, website, and other details about the company.
  • Contact information: Name, title, phone number, email address, and other contact details of leaders and key contacts within the company.
  • Industry information: Industry sector, company size, revenue, and other data related to the company's business.
  • Technographic data: Information about the technology stack used by the company, such as software, hardware and tools.
  • Firmographic data: Information about the company's ownership, structure, and legal status.
  • Financial data: Information about the company's financial performance, such as revenue and growth.
  • Geolocation data: Information about the company's location, such as city, region, or country.


It's time to take action and start the data enrichment process for your own company. If you need any assistance or more information, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. We are here to help you unlock the full potential of your customer data.

Summary

Data enrichment is a powerful tool to help grow your company. It allows you to gain a deeper understanding of your customers and their needs, which in turn can lead to increased sales and revenue growth.

 

By regularly reviewing and updating your data, you can ensure that it is accurate, up-to-date, and complete. Take advantage of the many benefits that data enrichment has to offer.

 


If you need an automated service to enrich your data, try our Data Enrichment Services with a free trial.

Marc Wahba
Author Marc Wahba

Meet Marc, the co-founder and CTO of Infobel. He is in charge of software development. In 1991, he obtained a degree in civil electromechanical engineering from the Polytechnic Faculty and later earned a master's degree in management from the Solvay School of Brussels. Along with his brother, he founded Infobel in 1995, which was the first online directory to offer an online white pages directory. Marc's innovative mindset has led to the launch of new data products and services that have become a global success, serving clients all over the world.

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