Using Data Enrichment to Improve Marketing Performance

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Data enrichment involves augmenting the quality of existing customer data by integrating newer data from additional sources. It helps you add extra contextual information to the data needed to understand customers and their behavior better. 

At a time when almost 20% of businesses lose customers because of inaccurate and incomplete data, data enrichment plays a crucial role in obtaining detailed and accurate customer insights that can significantly enhance marketing strategies and outcomes.

So, join us as we explain what data enrichment is and how you can use it to improve marketing performance. 

What is Data Enrichment?

Data enrichment is a process that enhances and refines raw data, making it more actionable for businesses. By integrating data from additional sources, data enrichment adds depth and context to existing customer data, allowing for more informed decision-making. 

The enrichment process generally entails integrating various internal first-party data sources, like CRMs, web and mobile analytics, transactional data, feedback and reviews, social interactions, and more. Another way to enrich data is to collect information from external sources and append it to your first-party data. These sources include your partner and affiliates, data syndication platforms, and public sources like government records, open data portals, and social networks.

Data Enrichment Vs. Data Cleaning

Data enrichment is a unique concept different from data cleaning, but the two are closely related. Data cleaning or cleansing is the process of identifying and removing inaccurate, corrupted, duplicated, or incomplete data within a dataset. 

For instance, you may split the “full name” column into first and last name columns so you can use first names for your personalized campaigns. Similarly, your system may have multiple records for the same customers. Cleaning data would mean deleting the duplicate or merging the two records. 

Think of data cleaning as a preliminary step in a broader data enrichment process. Once the data is clean and you have a unique identifier for each customer profile across your entire data infrastructure, you can go ahead and enrich data from all disparate sources. 

Additional Read: Google’s Third-Party Cookie Purge: It’s Time for Cookieless Marketing

How does Data Enrichment help Marketers?

Data in its raw form doesn’t provide any insights that marketers can use to their advantage. And you already know that the more accurate and complete customer data is, the more actionable it is in marketing. So, enrichment isn’t a good-to-have but a must-have step in your data management process.

Here are some ways data enrichment helps marketers:

1. Better Customer Segmentation

One of the biggest benefits of data enrichment is that it gives you more data points or attributes that you can use to create much more granular user segments. You can go beyond basic demographics and purchase patterns and add more layers to your segments based on content consumption patterns, site behavior, income levels, and education. 

2. Improve Lead Scoring

Think of how banks approve loan applications, especially from customers who don’t have accounts with them. While they collect the applicant’s name, income, and other basic details themselves, they turn to bureaus like Experian or Equifax for details like credit score, history, and loan defaults. 

Similarly, data enrichment gives your sales team the extra context they need to rank prospects, like purchase intent signals, online behavior, technographic data, etc. They can better gauge if a lead fits the ideal customer profile and target those who show the highest conversion probability.

3. Effective Communication

The more you know about a customer, the better you can understand their needs and expectations. Data enrichment lets you do exactly that. Backed with more relevant information about customers, you can target them effectively, be it through content marketing, email campaigns, promotional offers, or advertisements. 

4. Deliver Personalized Experiences

By enriching customer data with details like their preferences, past interactions, and product usage patterns, you can understand what they want out of your product or service. Leveraging this information to craft personalized experiences enhances customer engagement and significantly boosts satisfaction levels.

5. Cost Optimizations 

Enriching data as part of your organization-wide data management strategy ensures clean and complete data is available to everyone who needs it. This eliminates the need for data teams or other departments to do ad-hoc data appends and integration for their specific usage. As you can imagine, it improves the organization’s productivity and reduces the cost of managing data. 

These multifaceted advantages of data enrichment underscore its critical importance in achieving broader marketing goals. Whether the objective is to drive conversions, increase sales, or maximize customer lifetime value, data enrichment serves as a key enabler, transforming raw data into a strategic asset that propels marketing success.

Additional Reading: How WATI increased its conversions by 26%, & scaled its business by 2X through First Party Data Enrichment & Attribution

How is Data Enrichment done?

Here’s how you can start enriching data at your workplace:

1. Identify Sources of Data

First and foremost, identify all your online and offline sources of customer data. These can include your website, mobile apps, POS systems, surveys, etc. Also, review the collected data to identify inaccuracies and gaps you want to fill with enrichment. 

2. Select Data Sources for Enrichment

Once you’ve identified your data sources and possible gaps, you can easily choose sources to enrich your collected data. First, look at internal sources like your data warehouse, CRM, ERP, and analytics tools. Then, identify external data sources that can complement your first-party data, including public databases, social media, third-party data providers, and more.

3. Invest in a Data Integration Tool

Next, you’ll need a solution to collate all your internal and external data and create a customer 360. Most brands today rely on a customer data platform (CDP) to accomplish this task. This software integrates with your existing data infrastructure, allowing you to enrich data and store unified customer profiles in your data warehouse.

Additional Read: The Relevance of Composable CDPs – Marketer’s POV

4. Activate Data

After enriching your customer data and creating unified customer profiles, you can finally make it available on your business applications. You can use CDP’s reverse ETL pipelines to sync enriched data downstream to CRMs, email automation platforms, and other tools your marketing team relies on. 

Enrich Customer Data with EasyInsights 

Data enrichment transforms marketing from a game of guesswork into a strategic, insight-driven endeavor. By deepening their understanding of customers, businesses can craft effective marketing strategies that genuinely resonate with their audience.

Ready to enrich data? Check out EasyInsights, a composable CDP. EasyInsights lets you enrich your data using attribution and intent data. Moreover, you can merge first-party and third-party data to build reusable customer 360 profiles.

Book a demo today to see EasyInsights in action!

Additional Read: How Data Activation Will Transform Performance Marketing In 2024