The sheer amount of data that companies these days collect mandates the need for ‘clean’ data that can be put to efficient use. To gain valuable insights from existing data, and boost performance and sales, business must have relevant, accurate and up-to-date data. Business follow process such as data enrichment and data cleaning in modern data-driven world.
What Is Data Enrichment?
Data enrichment is a process of integrating an existing first-party customer data with third-party data/publicly available data. This helps businesses in creating customer profiles, personalize messaging, and improve the overall customer experience without requiring the customer to fill out lengthy forms.
In simpler terms, data enrichment is a set of processes that businesses utilize to improve, refine, and enhance raw data. It is all about adding missing data to the CRM and is most effectively accomplished by the integration of a data enrichment tool with a CRM. This integration can be utilized to add company data such as technographic, signal, and firmographic data to a business database.
Data Enrichment Requirements
For a company to gain useful and valuable insights, data enrichment initiatives require:
- Incoming, third-party data to be of high quality and trustable
- To maintain the database by refreshing their data regularly to keep it updated
- All business tools and software must share the same, updated data
When are Data Enrichment Tools Really Required?
All types of data can be enriched, however, data enrichment tools are usually required when
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Data is Abundant
When businesses deal with big data, the chances of errors and mistakes are high. This data abundance can prove to be a daunting task if performed manually. Data enrichment tools identify errors and clean the data more efficiently and in lesser time.
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Campaign Planning
While planing a campaign, brands require reliable and accurate data. If campaigns run without reliable data, the results will be unreliable as well. Data enrichment tools enhance campaign performance and provide reliable results.
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Business Expansion
When thinking of an expansion, information about how where and how is necessary for any brand. Poor data quality is one of the main reasons brands fail to reach their maximum potential after expansion. These brands require data and insights to take their business decisions, where data enrichment can be used.
Benefits of Data Enrichment Tools
Data enrichment tools provide companies with business and customer insights and improves the brand awareness. The main advantages that data enrichment tools offer are as follows.
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Valuable Data
Brands need data to make informed decisions. It needs to be in the right format to share with stakeholders and senior management. As companies deal with a lot of data daily, much of this data is of an indigestible format. Data enrichment tools convert such data into digestible formats (shareable), enhancing the accuracy to facilitate important decisions.
The enriched data can then be used to collect more data or put to other good use. Businesses these days are increasingly making use of AI for data collection and management, which is only possible if data is accessible. Data is important for businesses to understand what their clients demand and also to collect more information from their clients.
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Data Accuracy
Due to various reasons, the accuracy of data decreases with time. In a simple contact list, around 30% of the contacts will be rendered useless in a year as potential clients may have changed their contact details. If an email campaign runs on an outdated contact list, the success rate will be low, and the return on investment from the campaign will be even lower.
Data enrichment tools verify each contact to ensure data accuracy. This makes it imperative for businesses to keep the data updated, refreshed, clean, and accurate. Data enrichment tools provide reliable and accurate data by correcting errors and mistakes such as typos and eliminates double entries.
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Time Saving
Businesses generally spend much time maintaining data. In CRM tools, an average individual spends around 6 hours/week updating records, entering contacts, and adding activities into the system. Data enrichment tools reduce effort and time by automating redundant tasks. It improves productivity, and the businesses can focus on important tasks that require human intervention. Although data enrichment tools are expensive, they need to be seen as an investment that helps the company in saving both money and time in the long run.
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Enhanced Personalization
Data enrichment tools provide businesses with all the information they need to create hyper-targeted customer segments. This ensures providing the right customer journey to the right prospect. Modern sales and marketing is based upon the relevance of customer interactions.
Earlier, the inclusion of a contact’s first name in the salutation was more than enough and considered as the epitome of personalization. Modern day marketers need to stay ahead of the competition, a brand’s communications need to go beyond a prospect’s technographics, firmographics, and recent events and tailor their messaging accordingly.
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Venture Into Machine Learning
Sales and marketing professionals can offer uber-personalized touchpoints with prospects and existing customers with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Back in the day, this kind of personalization would require a tremendous human resource and large marketing budgets.
A great example of AI in practice is chatbots. Chatbots have altered the way companies collect critical data from website visitors. Data enrichment has made it possible for sales and marketing teams to acquire customer data through conversations with chatbots. The data obtained from chatbots is then enriched with the existing information that is present in a company’s CRM.
Top 5 Data Enrichment Tools
Data enrichment tools are extremely useful while discovering new data and enriching existing company data. While a company may have large datasets of potential customers, if the dataset is of low quality, the sales and marketing efforts will not suffice. A good data enrichment tool allows businesses to enrich the low-quality leads and improve the probability of conversions. Mentioned below is a list of some of the top data enrichment tools available in the market.
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io
Prospect.io helps brands in cutting down the time they spend on prospecting by 75% leveraging automation. It helps a brand in finding emails, reaching out, tracking, and integrating. Prospect.io also provides features that allow the user to find any email address, send drip campaigns, measure campaigns, and integrate with other services.
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Lusha
Lusha is focused on verifying business profiles and appending existing company databases. The Lusha extension performs profile page scans and provides up-to-date contact information. The Lusha plugin currently supports platforms such as LinkedIn and Salesforce.
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Hunter
Hunter is an email marketing software that includes features, such as dynamic content, landing pages, customer surveys, web forms, reporting and analytics, and mobile-optimized emails. It allows users to search for business email addresses and mentions more than 100 million email addresses indexed. It also provides an email verifier service that returns results even when a standard verification tool fails.
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Google Forms
Google forms are specifically used for customer research and surveys. Although it lacks deep analytics and integration possibilities, it is useful while dealing with a smaller number of leads. Another point worth mentioning is that Google Forms is a free- and easy-to-use data enrichment tool for B2B leads.
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Boomerang
Boomerang is specific to email follow-ups and helps brands manage emails effectively. It allows businesses to schedule emails that are sent through Outlook, Gmail, or even Mobile, ensuring that no messages escape your attention. Boomerang makes all the difference between sending an email and sending it at the right time.
Conclusion
Data enrichment tools are essential for the modern-day marketers as they help target the right audience and make informed decisions. Enriched data gives marketing campaigns the boost they need to take personalization and customer experience to unmatched levels and meet business goals. Data enrichment significantly impacts sales and marketing and return on investment.
