Most of us may be familiar with what data enrichment is. Also referred to as data enhancement or appending.
From helping in planning to opening new sales opportunities. Data enrichment really has a lot of benefits.
First, let’s look at a simple definition. So, what is customer data enrichment?
Customer data enrichment is simply adding more valuable information to an existing customer data set. This includes prospect and company data.
Before we jump in, you may be asking: what’s special about this article?
We promise to help you understand what data enrichment is with real use cases. Also, we’ll hopefully answer:
- How to know if you need data enrichment?
- Some real use cases
- Is data cleansing included with enrichment?
- How you can understand your customer better with more data?
- Types of data enrichment
- How enrichment helps with market segmentation?
- Finally, how it will apply to you [free data sample]?
Customer data enrichment, nowadays, is a need. More Insights give your current data set value which effects your sales and marketing efforts. We’re all guilty of giving incorrect or incomplete information in forms. Marketing teams are well versed with this issue. Although this is inevitable, the problem is easily avoidable.
And, yes, data enrichment is the answer. Often at times, knowing why you need it is a challenge.
However, it depends on a few reasons.
How To Know If You Need Data Enrichment[some questions to ask]
- What data set you currently have? – List of names, companies or links. Ask yourself if your data set looks incomplete
- What do you need it for? – email or calling campaign, Ad targeting, forecasting, planning, etc. Data requirements changes depending on the need.
- Which data-points do you need for your campaign? – Validated email addresses, numbers, technology insights. There are thousands of data-points. More on this point below in the section, “types of data enrichment”
For example, you have a data set of company names(who’ve visited your site). Now you need contact information and insights, to target via cold outreach. This is where you realize you need contact data enrichment.
This is just one of many instances.
Having a large number of contacts in your database is good. Although, we can’t forget that quality matters too. Furthermore, internally maintaining your growing database will certainly be a challenge. Let alone enrich and segmenting it. Customer data enrichment with segmentation lets you execute more focused campaigns. Meaning, you can segment and target specifically.
As a result, enrichment and segmentation will lead to new opportunities. This leads to more meetings and hence, you crush your quota!
Some Real Use Cases[From Cloudlead]:
These are some scenarios Cloudlead has often helped customers solve:
- A technology company needing customer and company data enhanced to find sister organizations. They then target leads in those sister companies with warm introductions.
- An advertising and marketing company share their website visitor company list with links. They know these companies have shown intent. All they need is solid contact data for targeting.
- A technology company has customer data but needs social profiles for focused Ad targeting and multi-channel engagement. This was for executing their monthly ABM campaign.
- An engineering firm got company data enriched with engineering contacts for recruitment. With their GitHub profiles, the recruiters got much-needed data for making better decisions.
- A sales analytics company would share conference sign-up data for enrichment and scoring. Their sales team wouldn’t be concerned with dialing invalid numbers or getting a high bounce rate
Honestly, there are too many applications!
Talking about bounce rate. Often, people ask if data enrichment means the data will be cleansed too.
Does Data Cleaning Play A Part In Enrichment?
Yes and no. Some B2B data companies also validate contact data while enriching data. This is to keep your data set valid. To be honest this is the way it should be.
Ideally, both data cleansing and enrichment go hand-in-hand. In fact, having tons of data and insights won’t matter, if the data is mostly inaccurate.
Data decays at a rate of 3% per month if not more! Not investing in data cleansing with enrichment is like using cheap fuel to win a competitive race. You need the best data to fuel your team of salespeople and marketers. Period.
Read: Data hygiene best practices!
Understand Your Customer Better With Data Enrichment
Having more data on your customers helps you understand them better too. Yes, this is a given. However, we undervalue customer data and it’s ability to help us understand our customers.
According to Teradata, still, “only 41% of marketing executives believe that the use of data-driven insights would have the most benefit in better-allocating budgets for marketing activities.”
After reading this study, It’s safe to say, even in this day and age, we know little about our own customers. However, having more data-points gives can change this situation.
So what kind of data enrichment is available? Which data-points matter?
Types of Data enrichment
There are various kinds of data enrichment in the market. Some data enrichment companies don’t have access to all kinds of data. In such cases, relax, you can always opt for custom data enrichment. This is where you can request data that you specifically value and is not easy to come by.
You need to supply some sort of information like a list of domains, company names, or leads, etc. Let’s jump into some types of enrichment and what customer data you can specifically get enhanced:
Contact Data Enrichment:
- Email enrichment: You could supply a list of domains, company names or leads and get validated emails
- Phone enrichment and validation: You can acquire numbers or get your existing set of numbers validated and enriched
- Customer data enrichment: Add a correct or complete name, current employment status verification, Job title verification, qualifications, and more! The list is certainly very long
Social Data Enrichment:
This primarily includes enriching customer data with social profiles or insights. Additionally certain data companies can also enrich with details like:
- Number of followers
- Status of social account: Active or inactive
- Hobbies & interests
- Company Ads: Is the company running social Ads? and on which social media channel
Firmographic Data Enrichment:
This is enriching with company data.
- Annual Revenue, employee size, funding status, parent company, industry
- Address information like zip codes, NAICS, complete physical address, HQ address
- Other firm related insights like No. of X, X can be salespeople, IT, Marketing, Finance, Operations, Customer support, etc.
Technographics & Digital Data Enrichment:
All companies are using some kinds of technologies. Knowing your customers tech stack helps reveal a lot of things. Having digital insights can give leverage to your sales representatives too.
Your well-crafted cadence won’t be adversely affected if you have information at your fingertips
Next time you call selling a technology product you’ll be prepared to handle prospects effectively.
Although, with market segmentation, your planning and execution will be much better.
How Enrichment Helps With Market Segmentation?
According to Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, EVP, Industries at Salesforce:
“Market segmentation is the process of parsing potential customers into groups, based on characteristics like shared interests, needs, or locations. You can approach market segmentation in a bunch of different ways, and here at Salesforce, we actually use multiple segmentation strategies concurrently.”
You should certainly read the complete article, here: Understand Your Customers Better with an Industry Segmentation Strategy
Some more segments could be, technology usage, size, funding status, etc. You can use these well organized and segmented sheets to plan personalized and focused campaigns.
Furthermore, according to this study: Using Data Mining for Customer Segmentation, customer segmentation can help with:
Design and development of new products/services and product bundles tailored to each segment’s characteristics rather than the mass market.
Moreover, this is enforced by the fact that top B2B marketing and salespeople are always anti-spray and pray.
Also, thanks to regulations like GDPR there is more awareness about targeting in a compliant manner.
Read: 3 Must-Read Points on GDPR Compliance if you are in Sales or Marketing
So now hopefully, you have valuable information on what customer data enrichment can potentially do for you.
Start planning on using data enrichment to open new sales and marketing opportunities today! To help you get started as promised we’ll offer a free sample of data enrichment.
Just share a data set with us and you’ll get an enriched file back based on your criteria. We plan to deliver on our promise!
Drop a message on our chat or send an email with the data file to “Maz@cloudlead.co“.
Feel free to drop a comment or give us your feedback on this article!
