Relevant? Unique? Enough? Understanding the need for data enrichment and net new data

Author: Gautam Mane

Anything to do with digital marketing has a set of data as its starting point. The success of any campaign depends on the data. Hence, marketers have to ensure that the data set is relevant, unique and large enough.

Highlights

• The plethora of data sources makes it almost impossible to ensure that the data at hand is credible and usable
• Data cleansing removes corrupt, inaccurate or duplicate data
• Data enrichment is a set of processes and tools to improve the quality of data
• Data enrichment helps you easily segment data to devise separate campaigns basis age, sex, location, socioeconomic strata, or any other markers
• Segmenting data enables to personalize your outreach campaigns and offerings
• Data enrichment will also open your eyes to cross sell and upsell opportunities

Digital Marketing today is very different from marketing of yesteryears. It no longer involves only the running of promotional campaigns and hoping that the maximum number of prospects see it. But today, marketing revolves around data.

Whether it is directed email marketing, social media posts, or website contests, anything to do with digital marketing has a set of data as its starting point. Because the success of any campaign depends on the data, a marketer using the data must ensure that the following have been taken care of:

• Is the data relevant? A company offering fashion clothing would find most of the data useless if the data is about people over the age of 40. The data that is being used for a campaign should be able to provide the correct view of likely consumer behavior relevant to the product or service being provided.
• Is the data unique and free from duplicates? When you are dealing with a huge amount of data, it is possible that there might be data points which occur more than once. That would give you a wrong idea of the quantum of data being used.
• Is the data enough? Statisticians usually work with a limited set of data, and they try to extrapolate the data to give answers regarding a larger universe of data. But in digital marketing, that does not quite work. There needs to be enough discrete and unique data points to be able to set up a workable pipeline from which enough conversions can be targeted.

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

Because of the above reasons, marketers depend a lot on data enrichment. Data enrichment is a set of processes and tools which help to improve the quality of data. Today we have a number of sources for customer data. You could be mining data from the traffic on your social media profiles or your website. You could be using and collecting email lists, or you might be getting data from online quizzes and contests. The plethora of data sources makes it almost impossible to ensure that the data you are using is credible and usable.

It is important to understand that data enrichment is not the same as data cleansing. Data cleansing is the process by which corrupt, inaccurate or duplicate data is removed from a data set. Data enrichment, on the other hand, seeks to add value to the data you already have so that you get better results from using that data.

Let us take a very simple example. Let us say you have a data set of three fields – name, location, and email id. You are carrying out a B2B campaign where you need to reach out to decision makers in corporates. Those data points of your data set which contain the personal email ids might not be as useful to you.

A data cleansing exercise might remove all the data points in which personal email ids are provided. But a data enrichment exercise would go a step further, and use the name and location to harvest existing data and provide the corporate email ids where available.

Let us look at four more ways in which data enrichment can give you better data:

1. Whether you use net new data (from third party sources) or you work on your existing data, data enrichment can help you easily segment your data much better. That way you can devise separate campaigns for different segments, on the basis of age, sex, location, socioeconomic strata, or any other markers that would be useful to you.
2. As soon as you are able to segment your data, you also get the ability to personalize your outreach campaigns as well as your offerings. This will help you arrest the sales slowdown that can come from using fatigued data.
3. Data enrichment will open your eyes to cross sell and upsell opportunities to existing clients, and also suggest the best product matrix to offer to prospects. This will make your lead generation activities more robust, and will ensure much better conversion to sales.
4. Data enrichment also helps at the other end of the spectrum. Again taking the example of the corporate email id of a prospect, data enrichment can flag off a change in the corporate email id. This would give a timely signal for likely churn.

Additional Read: Data Enrichment Best Practices

The fact that digital marketing is toothless without data is now well known. What is now needed is data enrichment to give that data more teeth.