[Infographic] 7 Benefits of Data Enrichment—And Why Your Marketing Team Needs Them

[Infographic] 7 Benefits of Data Enrichment—And Why Your Marketing Team Needs Them

[Infographic] 7 Benefits of Data Enrichment—And Why Your Marketing Team Needs Them

If you’ve been in marketing for almost any amount of time, odds are you’ve taken your share of heat when things have gone wrong. Your martech probably has, too. “Why are leads [sales, profits or ROI] down, when our martech budget is so high?” is a common and understandable refrain in an era where most companies collect a lot of data. But maybe the problem isn’t skimpy data, it’s wimpy data that could use some enrichment.

Unlocking the Power of Customer Data

Your customer datasets are growing exponentially, with new collection methods, new formats, and new touchpoint opportunities. You probably already know a lot about your customers’ interactions with your brand—what they’re doing on your website and on your app, which emails they open, what they buy, and when they contact customer service.

But here’s the thing: targeting and persuasion are tough without a lot of very accurate and specific information. With details about a customer spread throughout dozens of martech platforms, it’s hard to get more than a fuzzy picture of each person.

Marketers attempting to reconcile a truly accurate snapshot of the customer know the pitfalls of combining customer records from multiple systems. This is where data enrichment can help by applying powerful identity resolution algorithms to populate customer records with the most accurate and recent information.

Data Enrichment: Improving Conversions, Increasing Retention

The real value of data enrichment lies in what you do with your customer data. Data enrichment helps with key business operations, such as prospect profiling, ad targeting, identifying look-alike prospects, and message personalization. Using powerful machine learning, you can build new customer segments and create advanced predictive models to analyze those segments. You can pinpoint key target groups of prospects and improve efficiencies across your campaigns.

With data enrichment, you can create highly detailed and accurate unified profiles of your customers by gathering data from a variety of external sources, then combining that with your own proprietary data. Once you’ve got the profiles right, you can use them, update them, and add new data to each profile about what each customer finds appealing and persuasive enough to close a sale.

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By automating data enrichment, you can get closer to building a golden customer record for every customer. Your teams can use these enriched records to design better marketing campaigns and sales outreach efforts. Ultimately, this means they’ll be more likely to improve conversions, hit revenue targets, and increase retention over the long-term.

7 Key Benefits of Data Enrichment for Marketing Success

Data enrichment tools serve the purpose of filling in the gaps left by incomplete or incorrect information. The first-party data you already have can be matched with zero-party data, and second- and third-party data. A system for data enrichment then appends new information to the records that are already captured and stored, pinpointing key target groups of prospects or improving efficiencies across your campaigns.

Within every organization, first-party customer data is almost always the most accurate, followed by second-party data, which is somewhat less accurate. The value of third-party data is often that it provides the most scale—most of it is inferred and then modeled.

In order to continue learning about your customers, and gleaning ongoing insights, a repeatable and ongoing data enrichment process is necessary. So what are the seven benefits of data enrichment—and why do you need them?

  1. Segment audiences.

    Enriched data provides you with an opportunity to segment customers according to new parameters previously unavailable to your organization. These new segments may appear after cleaning and unifying your own data from various silos. Or, they may be revealed after augmenting your data with newly added third-party data. These segments can then be used to power targeted campaigns across a wide range of channels that—informed by the exact information, content, or offers—are most likely to grab each group’s attention.

  2. Expand your reach with new segments and markets.

    Some companies use data enrichment to test and experiment with different markets or expand the scale of their campaigns. A third-party data provider’s total audience can be added to your databases and then analyzed for patterns of similarity with your own proprietary customer data. This can help you identify new customers and segments for targeted personalization. Subaru, for example, regularly unifies its data to understand when people are probably ready to make a vehicle purchase, rather than “just looking” or “fantasizing” about a new car.

  3. Turbocharge lead scoring.

    The more data you have, the more accurate your lead scoring will be. Data enrichment can attach critical new information to your leads to make each lead score significantly more accurate. For example, let’s say a lead enters your system by filling out nothing more in a lead capture form than a first name, last name, and personal email address. Data enrichment can augment such leads with additional information, like a business email address, job title, and location, which helps you recognize the visitor as a decision maker at one of your target accounts.

  4. Make new customer acquisition easy, effective, AI-powered, and automated.

    Increasingly, marketing and sales are focused on building smaller, more detailed lead profiles because they’re the most likely to convert. Data enrichment gives you in-depth insights into your customers so that you not only know your current customers better, you can also build more sophisticated buyer personas. This data might be the answer to helping you understand whether your buyer personas are valid. With deeper insights, you can improve customer acquisition strategies because you’re always talking to the right people at the right time in their buying journey.

  5. Make personalization pay off better.

    It wasn’t so long ago that personalization with customer data consisted of little more than adding a customer’s name to an automated email. Now, with data enrichment it’s possible to gain deeper insight into customers’ lives. Demographic and behavioral data can provide important personal insights (like when customers are moving, getting married, or starting a business) that enable you to offer personalized coupons and shopping recommendations just when they need them. This type of personalization is important in building customer loyalty because it helps customers feel like your organization really “gets” them.

  6. Improve customer experience with better customer journeys.

    Enriched customer profiles are really the starting point for a better customer experience. The more conclusions and insights you’re able to draw from your customer data, the more accuracy you’ll have giving customers what they want. When you’re able to identify customer hobbies, interests, likes, devices, and channels, you can design each touch point and message to meet customers exactly where they’re at in the customer journey. For example, can you direct them to content that’ll inform them of new ways to use your product? Are some features particular to their individual use case? When you know these answers, you can anticipate customer needs to deliver exceptional experiences.

  7. Customize offers and customer experiences.

    Customers don’t all use your product the same way. Different segments will value some features over others. When each customer begins using your product, behavioral analytics will tell you which group they fall into. At that point, you can guide them toward content and features that their group values. With data enrichment, however, you can customize their experience from day one. Say your company specializes in marketing tools. Your customers typically fall into two categories: startups and mid-size firms. Startups value product tours that demonstrate lead generation and conversion features. In contrast, established mid-size firms value marketing automation. With enriched data, you’ll know exactly which features to highlight as soon as they sign-up.

Seven benefits of data enrichment

Supercharge Your Marketing Strategy With Treasure Data

Data enrichment has never been more important for impactful marketing. Adding personal and professional data to proprietary customer profiles using an enterprise customer data platform—such as Treasure Data’s award-winning Customer Data Cloud solution—can supercharge your ability to use data efficiently and effectively.

A solid first-party data strategy based on data enrichment unlocks new opportunities for better segmentation, personalization, and customization at every step of the customer journey. Over the long-term, better use of first-party data helps you deeply understand who your customers are and what they expect from you. In turn, this helps you fine-tune every campaign and communication, which means you can spend less to get better results. And that’s a powerful combination.

To learn more about optimizing your first-party data with data enrichment, download our white paper today.

How to Optimize Your First-party Data Strategy

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this blog was published in 2019. This blog was revised on 4/20/23.

Kellie de Leon
Kellie de Leon
Kellie de Leon is the Senior Director of Content Marketing at Treasure Data. She is a marketer, writer, and speaker who is passionate about delivering relevant and valuable experiences for customers throughout the buyer’s journey to drive business growth. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
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