Data is a crucial component of any business. It aids in decision making, generating new business ideas, and crafting targeted and relevant sales and marketing strategies.
But according to Harvard Business Review, low-quality data costs American companies over $3 trillion annually.
Data enrichment allows companies to fill in the blanks and get a clear and accurate picture of their customers. Enriched data is valuable data to the business and shareholders. It helps reduce marketing costs, create personalized campaigns, recover lost contacts and utilize untapped business data.
Data enrichment is the automated process of continuously upgrading and enhancing available first-party internal data by integrating a diverse range of relevant information from disparate internal or external third-party sources.
There are several forms of data enrichment processes which include,
- Contact enrichment is the practice of adding relevant, updated client contact information (telephone number, email, social media handles, job title) to an existing contact database.
- Geographical enrichment refers to the procedure of updating a client’s geographical information(postal address, city, town, zip codes, latitudes, longitudes) to get a more precise geographical positioning of clients.
- Behavioral enrichment refers to the practice of studying and mapping customers purchasing patterns. Behavioral enrichment tracks clients purchasing history and highlights areas of interest such as browsing and purchasing frequency.
- Demographic enrichment describes the practice of updating an existing client database with relevant information (age, sex, marital status, occupation) that helps a company understand clients’ behavior based on socioeconomic factors.
Here are a few reasons why data enrichment is essential.
Enhance data management with data enrichment tools
A business receives tons of unrelated business data, which by themselves make no sense but, when organized, becomes a treasure trove of relevant information.
Data management is the process of collecting, sorting, organizing, and arranging data to have a coherent and systematic flow. It aims to make information easier to access and use.
Data enrichment combines unrelated data to form a responsive data set with a logical information flow. It promotes integrating different data subsets to develop a comprehensive logical database that a business can use.
Enriched data improves predictive models
Data enrichment is common in predictive analytics, business forecasting, and big data management ecosystems.
Predictive models refer to the use of enriched data, machine learning, and algorithms to identify fraud and process inventory. It reduces business risks and optimizes sales and marketing campaigns.
Enhanced data is the backbone of predictive business models, which help companies accurately forecast outcomes and improve business operations.
Without data enrichment, businesses cannot correlate different pieces of disparate data to form logical data pictures needed to forecast future trends.
Enrichment prevents data decay
All businesses need relevant, up-to-date, and factual data that correctly reflects the current market environment, customer trends, and behavior.
Data decay refers to data quality decline/deterioration due to inaccurate, outdated, unreliable, or unverified data. Data decay misinforms a company's decision-making and marketing campaigns.
Data enrichment prevents data decay by updating old and inaccurate data with the most current, factual information. It is essential in cleaning, sorting, and updating old information into valuable, real-time data.
Improve data security with enrichment tools
Data security is a big issue in today’s business world. Technological advancement means the threat of cyber attacks, data tampering, falsifying user identities, and password-related threats are on the rise.
Data enrichment collects, collates, organizes, and reports security event data from varied internal and external sources. It creates a comprehensive threat analysis report helpful when taking counteroffensive action. Data enrichment improves a company's threat detection, threat hunting, and incidence response.
Data enriched security reports pool information from user directories, asset inventory tools, geolocation tools, third-party intelligence databases, and other security sites to quickly identify, neutralize and arrest data breaches.
Data enrichment is a formidable tool that any business can use to populate its database with current, accurate, and valuable information.
Read along to learn the benefits of data enrichment to a B2B company.
Benefits of Data Enrichment
Data enrichment has numerous and far-reaching advantages to businesses. Here are some benefits of data enrichment.
1. Reduces the cost of inaccurate data
Wrong data is expensive! A report by Gartner concludes that organizations lose up to $15 million annually due to inaccurate data.
Data enrichment streamlines and updates customer databases to get high-value, high-converting leads that translate to increased business. A reduction in database size leads to higher savings from reduced staffing and software costs.
Data enrichment ensures that only top-quality, usable data is always stored in a company's database.
2. Enriched data fuels focused marketing campaigns
Business marketing relies on current, segmented customer data that provides insights into user behaviors, preferences, and trends.
Data enrichment compiles relevant and current user data to create personalized marketing advertisements and campaigns. Data enrichment allows companies to understand their client’s needs better. It promotes acquisition, retention, and upsell efforts while providing user-specific products and services.
Personalized marketing helps companies hit their marketing goals faster and cost-effectively than other expensive lead acquisition efforts.
3. Save time and costs on managing faulty CRMs
Enriched data reduces time spent on managing CRM platforms.
Sales departments annually lose about 550 hours and $32000 per salesperson due to faulty CRMs caused by bad business data. They lose time and money manually updating, searching, and generating leads.
A study by Salesforce opined that sales teams spend 66% of their time managing weak CRM systems due to inaccurate and incomplete data.
Updated CRM systems enable sales teams to quickly and efficiently reach new clients, convert and retain existing clients while reducing costs associated with maintaining an obsolete database.
4. Improve customer engagement with enriched data
Enriched customer information allows businesses to craft appropriate and personalized communication strategies. It fosters and nurtures a good rapport between a company and its clients that positively translates to better customer engagement.
Data enrichment reduces customer email bounce rates, unanswered calls, and returned postal letters due to wrong contact information and addresses.
With enriched client information, companies can initiate specific and relevant emails, prospectus, and calls to their customers, which may spur positive user action.
5. Enhance expansion campaigns with good data
Businesses draw elaborate plans to grow sales, profits, and customer numbers, but that is impossible without solid, verifiable business data.
Data enrichment provides companies with a solid, verifiable database of their business operations, client information, marketing campaigns, and other crucial information during expansion campaigns. By using up-to-date data, companies craft specific campaigns with a high probability of success.
Good data helps companies execute successful expansion campaigns that achieve their target quickly and effectively.
6. Enrichment improves customer segmentation
Customer segmentation analysis is vital in helping marketers craft user-centric marketing plans. The enriched data allows marketers to understand the specific needs of particular segments of customers.
Customer segmentation is the practice of dividing and grouping customers into segments that reflect the overall needs and desires of the target group.
Customer segmentation enables marketers to create action-centric plans that improve the customer lifetime value to the company.
User segmentation improves customer service quality and satisfaction, fostering a conducive and beneficial business environment.
7. Improve Algorithms Accuracy with updated information
Modern business relies heavily on algorithms to solve problems and provide unique business solutions.
Algorithms depend on enriched data to provide practical business solutions to solve real-time business problems.
Business software equipped with algorithms automate, streamline and execute complex, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks quickly and efficiently.
Business algorithms are complex mathematical formulas used to improve business decision-making, automate process differentiation, and accelerate digital integration, leading to greater productivity.
Algorithms created from enriched data are more precise, factual and provide more significant benefits to a business.
8. Improve the use of Dark Data
Companies usually collect lots of data that is unused, but it costs them money to store. This unutilized data is referred to as dark data.
According to a study by Splunk, over 55% of a company’s data is unused and unidentified.
Data enrichment improves the discovery, use, and applications of dark data in a business. The three-step data enrichment process of extraction, transformation, and loading converts dark data into concise, logical, and usable data. AI processes integrated into data enrichment ensure that disparate data sources are tied together to form a more comprehensive and relevant business database.
Data enrichment allows businesses to use previously unused dark data to spur business growth, improve sales and make sound decisions based on verifiable data.
9. Recover lost contacts
Over time a company’s customer database becomes obsolete due to clients changing their email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, job titles, marital statuses, or other important contact and personal details.
When this happens, a business is left with an extensive contact database that is inaccurate and ineffective.
Through their advanced software programs and experience, data enrichment tools and companies can effectively recover these otherwise lost contacts. A business contact database can be updated with the most current client’s contact and personal information through data appending.
Using a current and accurate contact database will help a company reach and convert more existing customers.
Conclusion
Data enrichment companies like Datagma can quickly and efficiently cleanse, organize, and streamline your company’s CRM platform making it more robust, accurate, and effective.
Using cutting-edge technology and superior AI systems, Datagma helps B2B companies enrich their business data, customers data, financial data, and website data with over 50 exclusive attributes about their prospects and target companies.
Additionally, Datagma also offers an intuitive, customer-centric API that seamlessly integrates into your companies business applications allowing for a smooth, effortless data enrichment process.
The Datagma API will save you time, reduce your staffing and update all your customer information so that you’re always one step ahead of the pack.