Data and metrics are used by modern businesses to make informed decisions about various strategies. However, gathering information is only half of the struggle. To ensure that they have the most valuable insights, companies must refine their data. Otherwise, companies could continue to retain inaccurate and duplicate data. Businesses can refine data analysis to actionable insights to improve their services through data enrichment.
Data enrichment is a procedure of supplementing a database with new information. In short, it is about providing more value to existing data! A rising number of firms are embarking on data enrichment, aware of the huge interest that this may generate at any level of administrative, marketing, management, and sales.
What is Data enrichment?
Data enrichment is a technique used by companies to supplement their internal databases using information from one or more external sources. Data enrichment is crucial for businesses because information usually starts in a raw form and needs reformatting. Without converting the data, companies retain large volumes of unstructured information. However, with data enrichment, businesses can normalize and reduce data to get the most relevant information.
What is Data Enrichment used for?
It is vital for a company to know its customers well, and the data is precisely the best tool to achieve this. However, a poor quality database has the opposite effect by wasting your company’s time and money.
Enriching its data is, therefore, necessary to better identify opportunities. Indeed, a good knowledge of the needs of customers and prospects makes it possible to determine the best opportunities in its sector of activity. Valuing the base is an excellent way to save money in marketing actions and improve your ROI.
Types Of Data Enrichment?
There are numerous types of data enrichment. However, the following are the most common for business data enrichment:
1. Demographic Data Enrichment
Demographic data enrichment is the process of adding demographic information to an existing dataset, such as income level. You can collect a wide range of demographic data, such as the type of automobile driven.
It’s crucial to understand your final goal when enriching with demographic data so that you have a database that’s relevant to it. For instance, if your organization will be issuing credit cards, by providing customized communications, data coupled with demographic information can considerably improve targeted marketing efforts.
2. Geographical Data Enrichment
Geographic data enrichment is the procedure of adding geographic data to an existing dataset, which can provide a variety of information, ranging from postal codes to city and town boundaries. Geographic data can be beneficial in a variety of situations, such as determining where to open a new store or attracting the most number of customers feasible in a given place.
Why Update The Company Data?
Taking into account the report by Experian Data Quality, having 32% of unusable information per year in your company’s data can irreparably have a negative impact on your sales figures.
Annually, 18% of telephone numbers change. In their lifetime, the average American moves 11.7 times. Email addresses degrade at a rate of 22.5% every year. Hence, a continual update is necessary to prevent these kinds of problems. It will help you better determine your real targets and their expectations. Therefore, the idea is to maintain the quality of the database so that it remains permanently usable. According to research published by Experian Data Quality, poor data costs an average organization 12% of its revenue.
Before, the business databases of companies only contained two columns, one for the name of the company and the other for the TIN. In recent years, more and more companies have understood the importance of a richer database for their CRM. This is the reason why the enrichment of B2B data has begun to be democratized within companies.
Also, several types of information must be collected to enrich its data in contacts or company data. Among the most common are:
- Well-defined contacts: surname, first name, email and occupation of key people in the target company. This person can be a business manager, CEO, etc.
- Information relating to digital presence: social networks, websites, etc.
- Legal information concerning the company
- The company’s economic and financial data: turnover, number of employees, balance sheet, etc.
These are just examples of data that companies need to enrich their databases. Moreover, you can attain data enrichment with several other types of additional data depending on the activity and the commercial strategy that the company is carrying out.
Example
E-commerce stores track online customer engagement, such as conversions, click-through rates, page bounces, and interactions. Without data enrichment, these data would simply accumulate without pointing to a conclusion. By refining the data, the organization can find recurrent patterns and variables to detect client pain points, interests, and product preferences.
“Without big data, you are blind and deaf in the middle of a freeway.” – Geoffrey Moore, management consultant and theorist.
What Are The Sources of Data Enrichment?
In order to gather the information needed for B2B data enrichment, companies use several public data sources, such as:
- Global Financial Data: to collect information relating to the accounting and finance of other companies.
- Google Trends: to find commercial advertisements.
- Community Safety Statistics (CCJCSS): to find legal data.
- NIST: to collect information from the TIN database.
Public data are not the only sources of information to enrich B2B data. You can also find relevant information about a particular company by using its website, social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and official publications such as press releases and annual reports.
What are The Benefits of Data Enrichment for Business?
1. Eliminates Duplicate Data
Duplicate data might consume excessive storage space, raising management costs and reducing operational efficiency. However, redundant information is very common in businesses, as many are not sure which set of data to keep. Through data enrichment, companies can create a master file of important information. This method eliminates duplicates, improving data integrity and consistency.
2. Better Target of Marketing Automation Campaign
Once the list of qualified leads has been established, they will be able to enter the conversion funnel. This is generally where Marketing Automation is used, a marketing technique that consists of automated email marketing or, more generally, a set of actions according to scenarios based on data.
So, if you have enriched data on your prospects, you will be able to segment them better. This then allows you to develop more relevant and personalized marketing automation scenarios. Expected result from this is better interaction with prospects and ultimately a better conversion rate.
3. Improves Customer Relations
Companies can personalize the customer experience and engagements with enriched data to foster business-customer relationships. Managers can even fine-tune communication methods to appeal to the needs and preferences of the client. When done correctly, businesses can boost customer acquisition and retention.
“Big data will spell the death of customer segmentation and force the marketer to understand each customer as an individual within 18 months or risk being left in the dust.” – Virginia M. (Ginni) Rometty, chairman, president and CEO, IBM.
4. Optimizes Marketing
Most businesses already use some form of target marketing, as generic promotions have proven to be less effective. However, companies are unable to develop targeted campaigns without customer data. Organizations understand when, where, and how to engage their audience through data enrichment.
5. Improves Customer Experience
Data enrichment processes are the only sure way to keep up with changing customer needs. Otherwise, companies must continually pursue the strategies of their competitors. Through data enrichment, managers can track trends in emerging markets to meet consumer preferences. By continually improving the customer experience, companies gain a competitive advantage within their industry.
6. Cost Savings
Studies show that a petabyte of Big Data can cost a business about $1 million to maintain. Yet companies often only use a small fraction of their information, rendering the rest of the data useless. By refining data through enrichment practices, companies can significantly reduce data management costs.
7. Improve Delivery Times
On-time delivery is crucial for companies in the transportation and logistics industry. The supply chain is frequently optimized to reduce delivery times. Your company can use location data to identify and fix inefficiencies in its supply chains, such as delivery or passenger transit routes.
8. Improves Customer Satisfaction
In the same way as relations with customers, the enrichment of data also promotes the involvement of the customer in the company. Based on data, companies can create customer segments and focus on different strategies for each group. Although personalized initiatives, customers feel that the organization really appreciates their patronage.
“Data that is loved tends to survive.” – Kurt Bollacker, computer scientist.
9. Increases Sales
Because businesses no longer have to rely on guessing when generating leads, data enrichment enhances return on investment. Instead, businesses can focus their time and investment on a calculated list of customers, thereby increasing sales and profits. Data enrichment also opens up opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling to increase average order value (AOV).
How to do Business Data Enrichment?
Because a company’s information needs can be great, it is important not to take the value of business data lightly. You must manage it effectively to avoid incurring needless additional costs or making the procedure inefficient and unproductive. To that effect, below are some key steps to follow to achieve this.
1. Refine the targeting of the various protective actions
The first step in data enrichment is to define the different types of data you want to add to the database. You can choose to enrich the data of the sectors of activity, the dates, or even the turnover. It will therefore be easier to take action by sending prospects in your database. In addition, couple this process with other tools such as marketing automation solutions and thus better target the content to be sent.
2. Select external data sources
It is important to carefully select these sources without risking breaking the law. Indeed, public sources have the advantage of being totally free and compliant with Protection of Personal Information and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). However, retrieving and processing information through these sources requires technical capabilities that most companies, especially small businesses, do not have. In addition, these data have small imperfections that need to be corrected.
Private sources are not free and generally cost more. However, they have the advantage of being flawless and much more reliable. In addition, these sources are PIPEDA compliant.
3. Enrich business data into contact details
This step is one of the most important in data enrichment of business. Indeed, it is necessary to seek contacts to engage on a list of companies previously constituted to initiate a prospecting campaign.
Apart from that, it can also be semi-public information (work emails, standard phone lines). Thus, to be able to generate targeted contacts with email according to the typology of the position, it will be necessary to recover, clean and format the information obtained. Then, it is up to you to make a request for personal contacts and direct email through LinkedIn to be able to build relationships with the various decision-makers in the company.
4. Maintain Data Accuracy
Data enrichment is not a one-time project for your company. It is a continuous process to ensure that your company works with data that is useful to it. That said, it is critical to keep data current and enrich it on a regular basis, whether in real-time or in your data warehouse. If data is not kept up to date, it will naturally decay and lose value over time, to the point where it is no longer useful to your company.
Companies should invest in solutions that automatically enrich data in their CRM system to verify its accuracy in order to keep up with constantly changing data.
To Conclude
Being data-driven means going beyond customer analysis and transactional activities. It is about making your teams operationally efficient by giving them the data they can trust. It is about understanding the underlying behavior that drives them to become buyers and finding the key element that can help your business acquire new customers.
Data enrichment consists of supplementing a company’s database in order to improve its prospecting strategies. In order to take advantage of it, it is essential to define in advance the information to be collected, choose the sources well, and seek out the target contacts for prospecting.
