Data Enrichment Services: What is It and How Does It Work?

Author: Arun Pillai

In the B2B landscape, data continues to remain at the forefront. But, what about data quality? Most data become obsolete in a matter of days.

Moreover, if your data is inaccurate or invalid, your campaigns receive increased bounce-backs, which means a waste of time and resources. No wonder data enrichment has become a necessity for B2B success.

What is Data Enrichment?

As the name implies, data enrichment is the process by which the quality and value of raw data are “enriched” or made richer via data refinement, advancement, and improvement. In the data enrichment process, updated information is added to incomplete data fields, or additional information is added to an existing database.

All outdated and incorrect data is replaced with up-to-date and accurate information. This includes geographic data like Zip codes, address, city, etc., demographic data like name, email address, phone number, etc., and more. In turn, data enrichment refines, enhances, and improves the database to provide complete and comprehensive information.

To illustrate – suppose a potential customer entered an incorrect postal code when they provided their address details. In such a case, a data enrichment service will compare the incorrect data against accurate postal code records and correct the information.

Additional Read: Data Enrichment Best Practices

But Why Data Enrichment?

As people move, businesses close down, people switch work profiles or transfer departments – data decay is inevitable, no matter how much you try to slow down the process. Most data fields become obsolete or incorrect within months if not weeks. As a result, your database becomes inconsistent and your campaigns suffer from poor response rates. What do you do? You “enrich” data.

By data enrichment, you can eliminate “poor” data that is inaccurate, stale, incorrect, invalid, or duplicate and replace blank datasets with valid and accurate information. Moreover, with data enrichment services, you can fill your database with additional information such as behavioral, psychological, geographic, or demographic data to provide a complete and comprehensive database. You can use the enriched data to create more effective campaigns and improve the overall customer experience.

In the B2B landscape, enriched data allows businesses to –

• Enriched Customers Understanding

  The data enrichment process helps businesses to understand customers’ needs in-depth as it provides comprehensive and detailed insights into customer profiles.Data enrichment provides demographic and geographic information and behavioral data that helps to customize the marketing campaigns. It also includes interests, preferences, and market segments and covers other various parameters. This all-inclusive information enables businesses to drive customer-centric decision-making.

• Create Hyper-Personalized Campaigns

• As discussed above, data enrichment helps in a deeper understanding of the customers. Also, knowing more about customers allows you to proactively address the concerns, preferences, and challenges, and ultimately improves the customer experience.When you already know, what your customer is expecting from you, there is no room for sending generalized content. Businesses can collect all the detailed information, segment their audience based on their interests and they can create hyper-personalized campaigns.Data enrichment increases conversions, and email open rates by enabling businesses to create personalized campaigns that address all their niche concerns effectively.

• Reduced Marketing Costs

• Every marketing benefit of data enrichment is interrelated. Before this, we were speaking about how generalized campaigns do not serve the purpose of effectively reaching out to customers. And, data enrichment empowers the businesses with ability to create hyper-personalized campaigns.By this businesses will not waste their money on generalized marketing strategies for generic audiences, instead, they optimize their marketing strategy for each of the market/audience segments.Also, enriched data helps marketers optimize their Ad spend by identifying the most-used channels by customers, different platforms, and time to reach their target audience.Enriched data also helps in creating effective retargeting campaigns by understating the customer behavior and engagement levels at various platforms. Businesses can optimize their retargeting campaigns and reach their customer at the right time and right platform and reduces marketing costs on customers who are less likely to convert.

• Contributes to Predictive Analysis

• As we already know, data enrichment is adding detailed information, variables, and features to the existing dataset. Enriched data provides a more holistic view of the customer profiles. It adds information including social media behavior, engagement levels, and other behavioral patterns. These enriched customer profiles contribute to more accurate predictions about the marketing campaigns and their impactAlso, enriched data addresses the issues of data sparsity by filling in the missing information. Sparse customer data with missing details, redundancies, and errors can hinder the accuracy of the data and predictive models. Hence data enrichment is essential for building and taking the right output from predictive models.

• Improve Sales and Revenue in Niche Markets

  Data enrichment gives broader access to niche markets and helps to clearly define niche markets by adding valuable data. Also, it can provide deeper insights into emerging niche trends, and analyze gaps and opportunities for the businesses. This information enables businesses to position their products or services in a certain way that fulfills the niche audience. Thus, data enrichment helps businesses to maintain a competitive advantage in the niche markets by analyzing their niche USPs and meeting the needs of their audience.

How Data Enrichment Works

A data enrichment service will work on your raw customer data. The process of data enrichment is usually carried out in three defined phases.

Phase I: Objective

At first, data enrichment services usually ask for the type of “enrichment” service or additional data fields you want. This way, they can learn about your data entry process and how you operate your CRM system, even about the possible errors in your database that are responsible for data decay.

Phase II: Planning

Once the errors have been identified, the data enrichment service provider creates a plan to clean the “dirty” data to make it accurate, reliable, and effective. After that, data experts create customized tools to clean the data. They also define filters, rules, and algorithms to enter, update, and maintain the data records.

Phase III: Testing

In this phase, the plan created in the second phase is put to the test. All the cleaning tools, rules, filters, and algorithms are implemented in your database to check its accuracy and performance. If any filter, rule, or algorithm does not befit your business need, it will be modified until it works properly.

Once the three phases are complete, your database becomes enriched with accurate and updated information.

Here’s How You Can Use Your Enriched Database

Access Diverse Data Fields

Via data enrichment, you can fill your database with highly potent customer data and not just basic demographic data. You can have a 360-degree view of your ideal customer profile which allows you to market better via channels preferred by your customers. In turn, you can score leads, acquire and convert prospects, and whatnot.

For instance, if you only have the name and email address of a contact, you can use data enrichment services to access additional data fields to find information like the company name and mailing address.

Improve Segmentation

Enriched data offers additional datasets, so you have a clearer idea about who your ideal audience is. In turn, you can segment audiences across diverse categories and niches that were previously inaccessible. This allows you to create highly personalized content to reach and connect with your ideal audience.

What’s more; you can access extensive information about your potential customers, from buying habits to social media activity. In this way, enriched data allows you to target precisely. You can widen your reach and improve brand visibility to drive more sales.

Additional Read: Why Data Enrichment Matters and How Often Should You Do It

Create Personalized Campaigns

You can avail additional prospect/customer information via data enrichment services, and identify who your ideal customers are and what type of content they prefer. Consequently, you can create personalized content to reach and connect with them. Customers are known to respond positively to personalized content. You can reap benefits such as:

• Greater engagement
• Improved brand visibility and
• High conversions and sales

Data Privacy Compliance

You can also use data enrichment services to comply with data privacy rules and regulations. These laws usually define limits on what type of customer data can be stored and at what time. If your data is not in compliance with the law, you risk the possibility of fines and penalties.

However, with data enrichment services, you can create special mechanisms to maintain data privacy compliance and prevent such risks. Even if the privacy laws change in the future, your ongoing data enrichment service will make sure your data does not violate any of the laws and remains valuable.

Conclusion

In the B2B landscape, data quantity is important but data quality is more important, and data enrichment services offer exactly that. Enriched data is refined and complete, so your database is never inaccurate or “dirty.” But remember, data enrichment is an ongoing process, not an endpoint.

At first, the data enrichment service provider cleans the database to remove duplicate and obsolete information. Then, the services replace the blank datasets with accurate and valid information to “enrich” the database. In this way, data enrichment services keep your database up-to-date and relevant for optimal use.