Data collection will always be a work in process. Complete information on every lead, product, and competitor is impossible—and impractical! That’s why you’ll often need to supplement your own datasets with information from other sources to make them actionable.

Data enrichment is particularly crucial for creating targeted marketing campaigns and gaining an accurate understanding of your target audience.

In this article, we will discuss how quality data enrichment supports businesses in creating effective marketing campaigns that resonate with their audience. By the end, you’ll have a better understanding of how to use data enrichment techniques to know all you need to know about your leads.

What Is Data Enrichment?

Data enrichment is a type of data collection that involves adding more data to an incomplete or outdated database. This could be achieved by combining data from internal sources with third-party data or by combining internal data into a single source of truth. Through this process, data becomes more accurate, useful, and actionable.

We know that being data-driven is the only way to build a product that delights customers. But data is not always at the tip of your fingertips. For example, when you collect lead information on inbound forms, you’ll likely only have names, email addresses, and company names. And that’s it.

Not many leads will go through 10 fields requesting personal information. That’s why you’ll only want to collect the bare minimum to be able to contact them. But this raw data won’t help you in lead segmentation or targeted marketing campaigns. You’ll need to know more about each lead to effectively categorize them and create personalized marketing strategies. Additional data such as demographics, interests, and behavior help you in tailoring your approach to each lead, increasing the chances of conversion.

Accurate actionable data empowers decision-makers to put their best foot forward with data-driven decisions and customer-centric campaigns. Data enrichment can provide these additional details by combining multiple sources of information into one cohesive database. Then you can segment, nurture, and capture leads more easily.

What Are the Different Types of Data Enrichment?

Creating a complete customer profile involves collecting different types of data. When you’re looking to better understand your customers and improve their experience with your company, here are some data points you might consider enriching:

Socio-demographic data (age, marital status, income, number of children in the household)
Work history data (company, role, turnover, number of employees)
Geographic data (postal code, city, country)
Buying behavior data (purchase intent, willingness to pay, product views)
App usage data (interaction with apps, number of downloads, usage time, device used for access)

Depending on your product, each data point will be more or less relevant. For example, if you developed a dating app, marital status and location will be of primary importance. If, on the other hand, you sell productivity software, you might focus your data enrichment efforts more on work history data (although some socio-demographic data points might still be useful, such as age).

Identifying crucial data points for collection is a crucial step in the data enrichment process as it guides your expectations for new insights to be gained.

What Are the Benefits of Data Enrichment?

With data enrichment, you’ll gain deeper insights into the buying behavior of your leads and existing customers. It’s a crucial step before kicking off any marketing campaign or making any big product decision.

There are three main benefits of enriching your data:

Save Costs

Enriched data is enhanced with missing or incomplete information to ensure that all your data is usable and useful. In this sense, data enrichment will prevent unnecessary data storage costs.

Another cost-saving benefit from data enrichment is how, during its process, we eliminate duplicates, thus also decreasing the data storage costs.

Turn Data Actionable

Going through the process of enriching data also benefits the data quality itself. By removing duplicates, completing missing information, and condensing several data sources into only one, you’ll also make sense of messy and contradictory data.

Improve Conversions

Most companies are already moving away from a one-size-fits-all marketing approach. With accurate relevant data on your leads and customers, you will gain deeper insights into your customers' buying behavior and deliver the experience they expect from your brand.

In short, anticipate your customers’ needs and focus on relationship-building in every campaign.

How Do Marketers Use Data Enrichment?

More and more consumers are becoming impervious to generic ads. They now expect brands to anticipate their needs and give them relevant information they can’t find anywhere else.

Generic campaigns are out, personalization is in. Especially in B2B sales strategies.

Or rather, personalization is just the bare minimum.

Spewing generic cold emails to thousands of emails can do more harm than good for your brand image. Brands now need to show that they understand customer needs.

That’s why targeted advertising is the future. This approach not only increases the conversion rate but also improves the overall customer experience and brand loyalty.

To do this, marketers need lead segmentation and data on buying behavior, purchase history, online behavior, and other relevant information.

However, 49% of marketers don’t have enough confidence in their organization’s sales and marketing data. This can mean that the Sales & Marketing team is spending too much time researching leads or, even worse, trying to sell their product to the wrong audience.

The data enrichment process is an essential part of the marketing cycle. While old-school marketing targets a large number of leads to close a small number of deals, more and more brands are investing in highly targeted and personalized campaigns that bring higher returns from fewer contact attempts.

Effective marketing campaigns begin by understanding existing customers and prospects. With data enrichment, you’ll turn incomplete information into complete customer profiles. Learn what they are interested in, their pain points, and their online behavior to benefit from granular customer segmentation.

Lastly, accurate and up-to-date information can also bring lost leads back to life. If a prospect decided not to convert because of budgetary issues but has now raised a seed round, maybe it’s time to reengage and see if you’re a better fit at this time. Not only does this method help marketers get more conversions without having to generate new leads, but it also shows that you listen to your prospects’ needs and kept them in mind.

How Can You Enrich Your Data?

When you get customer data, you’ll usually only get the name, email, and company name. While technically this is enough to send a generic cold email, it’s not enough to properly qualify each prospective customer or send personalized content.

This is where data enrichment comes to play. For better returns and to reap the benefits of relationship-building, you’ll add publicly available information. You can enrich your data through web scraping, manual search, or by using data enrichment tools. Due to duplicates, unvalidated data, and database limits, the best approach to collecting data is to combine automation and manual validation.

Depending on your product, target customer, and industry, you could benefit from knowing their job title, phone number, company location, number of employees, sector of activity department, company size, industry, or social media followers.

The data points to collect will largely depend on your target customer profile. For example, if your product or service targets pre-seed startups in North America with up to 50 employees, then you’ll want to collect the startup stage, location, and company size.

When enriching your data, make sure you’re also eliminating duplicates. This will also help improve your reputation by ensuring that leads receive only relevant offers and preventing spam emails from being sent out to people who've already unsubscribed from your list. It also saves you time by eliminating unnecessary follow-ups.

Where Can You Find Accurate Data?

If you’re looking for the most trustworthy and efficient way to add data to your existing databases, here are our top sources for data enrichment:

The company website. Data collected directly from the source is usually as accurate as it gets. Collect information on pricing, location, industry, and more.
Google Maps. This is a great option to collect addresses, opening hours, and phone numbers. You can also view photos and videos from their location in Google Street View (if available).
LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great place to find out company size, role, previous working experience, and industry.
Crunchbase. Crunchbase is a database of startups, investors, and other companies formerly known as TechCrunch. You can check the company stage and money raised, as well as team size, location, founder, and more.
ProductHunt. ProductHunt is a great resource for finding new products, but it also offers an API that allows developers to access its data feed. Available information includes the product name, description, URL, and category. It also includes user ratings and reviews.
Data enrichment tools. You can also use a tool like Clearbit to get more comprehensive data faster. However, relying solely on automated data enrichment tools may result in inaccurate or outdated information, and raise privacy concerns.

As always, you’ll need to combine different sources for accurate and comprehensive data.

Finding accurate data is a challenge for any marketer, but it's especially difficult in the world of B2B. You may have heard that B2B buyers are more informed than ever, and that's true. That’s why getting accurate data will give you an edge in closing more customers.

What Are the Main Challenges of Data Enrichment?

Despite its importance, the process of collecting data can be challenging for businesses, especially those without the right tools or processes in place. There are three main challenges you may face when embarking on a data enrichment project:

Privacy Compliance

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) has changed the way companies handle personal data and has implications for any business that collects personal information from European Union residents, regardless of where the company is based.

Third-party data enrichment tools do not always follow privacy guidelines. This can lead to serious security risks for your organization as a whole and could result in fines under GDPR regulations.

Accuracy

Raw data is very error-prone. When collecting data from multiple sources, information may be inconsistent, making it difficult to determine its validity and sometimes rendering it unreliable to use.

Data Lifetime

Data enrichment is not a one-and-done process. Data changes constantly. Companies scale up and down, people get married and change their name, headquarters move, and funding amount increases, for example. Ensure data relevancy by scheduling regular database updates, at least every three months.

Is Manually Searching for Missing Data the Most Efficient Use of Your Time?

Data is at the core of all business decisions. But manually looking for missing data is time-consuming and not the best use of your time.

With Pareto, you can take advantage of cutting-edge technology and a team of data experts to automate the process of data enrichment, leaving you with more time to focus on creating effective marketing campaigns.

Don't waste your valuable time manually looking for missing data, let Pareto do the heavy lifting for you, so you always have readily-available data. Send your data enrichment project today.

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