What Is Data Enrichment? How to Add Value to the Data You Already Have

9 June 2020

“Cash is king!”

Not so much anymore. Businesses need capital to grow capital, but in today’s businesses know that it’s all about the data. Neither business owners nor managers make choices without performing data analysis to confirm their goals.

Data speaks like nothing else: it delivers sales numbers, creates schedules, points to errors, and identifies successes. It presents itself to the viewer as a dashboard, a spreadsheet, or a graph, and it contains the building blocks of customer information. Savvy marketing managers know how to use this information, and they also understand the benefits of data enrichment.

Read on to understand more about data collection and enrichment and how it works to support your marketing efforts.

What is Data Enrichment?

Modern business software tools are powerful organizational and data collection sources. These applications not only help keep a company organized, but they also generate reports about everything they know. Enriching this data is a way to increase the value of those reports to gain a better understanding of the business.

By 2017, 90% of the world’s data was created in the previous two years. Data improves outcomes, advances technology, and generally helps people make good decisions. Data enrichment is the process of adding to that information through the process of refining existing data, adding more insights, and data extrapolation.

Refining Data

Cleaning up a database is the first step to make sure that the information in it is accurate. Marketing campaigns use all channels to reach existing and potential clients; if their contact information isn’t correct, the message is lost.

Each record must be checked and corrected and then maintained. In many instances, more time is spent scrubbing the data than applying it.

Adding Insights

There are two common types of data augmentation, or purchased data: demographic data and geographic data. Effective targeted marketing is based on this knowledge.

Suppose a company database contains only an email address and phone number for existing clients. Adding demographic data and geographic data helps target that customer’s behavior by mapping store locations or figuring average area income.

Data Extrapolation

Data engineers use several methods of producing more information from a given set of data. One approach is “fuzzy logic,” which uses non-binary values to use data as the human brain does.

An example of this type of enrichment applies to variables such as job titles, abbreviations, and spelling errors. Specialized data search tools help analysts narrow down what they’re looking for.

What About Data Integration?

Most companies have software that will generate reports about users, leads, sales, and customers. All of this data can and should be used to create a single updated and maintained database for your marketers to use.

By the time all of this information comes together from your CRM, mailing lists, and sales software, it will be full of duplicate and inaccurate records. It will contain typos and other errors. It’s worth hiring a professional to correct and deliver back to you a clean database.

How Data Enrichment Improves User Experience

Marketers need to be extra creative these days. They are competing for business on all platforms: websites, television, mobile phone advertising, and email campaigns. Good data quality is key to these efforts making the most impact while providing the best user experience.

Here are some ways that enriched data helps the overall UX of a marketing initiative:

Short webforms

Imagine that you have made a social media post and it has some success driving people to your site. This is a crucial moment: you need them to opt into your marketing campaign. Will they want to fill out a full name and address form?

If you have augmented your data, asking for their email address on your site could give you a full name and address on the back end. You can now reach them using print marketing as well as include them in your targeted email campaign. Speaking of which:

Marketing Segmentation

If you have added demographic information to your data, you can begin to market to groups of them. Tailoring your marketing campaigns is the next step in increasing your customer base. A well-placed ad on a website designed for male readers, or an offer made to attract younger visitors will begin to convert visitors into customers.

Hyper-Personalization

The ultimate in segmentation. The better your data, the more you can market straight to the individual, with insights that will engage them and encourage them to become your customers.

When you provide them with relevant content, you increase the quality of their experience and make meaningful and impactful connections with them.

Social Media Outreach

It’s everywhere, and it’s an advantageous medium to reach users and to find out what they are talking about. Starting a conversation with potential customers is one of the best ways to increase your conversion rate. Smart content driven by enriched data is the way to do it well.

When to Decide

If you are embarking on a marketing campaign, the first thing you should do is check the quality of your data. The data you have should accomplish three things:

• It should provide an accurate assessment of your customer’s behavior.
• It should be clean and free of duplicate information and mistakes.
• It should be enough data to provide true insights and conclusions about your customers.

If it doesn’t, you’re a prime candidate for data enrichment and integration services. Your marketing isn’t going to do what you want it to, and you could end up alienating the customers that you want to convert.

You’re also exactly the business that we can help the most. We add value to your data, which in turn adds value to your marketing initiatives and conversions. Find out more about how we can help you tailor your data for future successes.