5 Key Advantages of Data Enrichment You Need Now

If I gave you a challenging marketing and sales goal, and then handed you a list of contacts, of which 30 to 70 percent contained missing or erroneous information, you would think my expectations are insane. And you would be right. After all, asking someone to perform a feat of greatness and then hamstringing them is a practice best left to maniacal third-world tyrants. It’s the equivalent of asking someone to make a meal with fetid ingredients. Sure, you might be able to cobble something together, but the results are going to prove disastrous.

What’s remarkable about the aforementioned hypothetical is that a lot of B2Bs are doing the same thing by tending to their databases sporadically, or worse, annually. Gartner estimates that each year 30 percent of the customer data you store becomes obsolete. Salesforce estimates this number to be significantly higher, as in 70 percent of stored data is hot garbage after just one year. Moreover, according to Gartner, “the average financial impact of poor data quality on organizations is $9.7 million per year.” IBM maintains that in the US, businesses lose $3.1 trillion annually due to poor data quality. That’s a lot of money that could be put to better uses, like enriching your data, or building a swimming pool and filling it with the money you saved, so you can literally swim in your success.

Data Enrichment Is Vital to Your Success

Data enrichment is a process that takes the data you have gathered and stored (first-party data) and merges it with the latest and greatest data from a significantly larger database, such as a third-party data provider, like Zoominfo, Apollo.io, and many more. This automated process makes the data your marketing and sales teams use more complete, more accurate, more reliable, and more likely to produce the kind of results you dream about. It also increases the number of contacts you have, and in the case of some data enrichment solutions, it allows you to compare your lists to the total addressable market (TAM). This in turn, allows you to set realistic goals that are now achievable—thanks to your decision to make high-quality data a priority.

Why Enrich Data Regularly?

Enriching your data is nice in all the extra information it provides, but there are other benefits it delivers as well that have to do with data cleanliness. As a data enrichment tool filters through your current contacts and compares information with third-party providers, it should also automate the process of eliminating duplicate information (a.k.a. de-duplicating), correcting errors, such as titles changes and misspellings, and updating mobile and office numbers, emails, and more. Essentially, your data enrichment solution should provide continuous data cleansing, validation, and standardization in addition to appending the data you need to make your records and lists both current and complete.

5 Key Advantages of Data Enrichment

Your data is the rocket fuel that powers the returns you see on your sales and marketing efforts, so enhancing it is always a good idea. And now, without further ado, here are five key advantages of data enrichment, you should be enjoying right now!

#1 – Enriched Data Enhances Your Personalization Strategy

Sending the right message to the right contact at the right time, requires that you have the right contact information. When you enrich your data, not only will you have the right information, but you’ll have more of it, so you can connect with current and potential customers on a deeper level by providing them with content that is relevant to their customer profile. Using enriched data, sales and marketing can leverage fresh insights from geographic, firmographic and behavioral data to develop highly-targeted messages that address a customer’s needs, as well as where they are in the sales cycle.

#2 — Enriched Data Produces Greater Customer Insights

One of the best benefits of enrichment is that it puts more details in your database, so sales and marketing teams enjoy a more complete picture of individual customers, as well as both major and minor accounts. When you have a wealth of customer insights at your disposal, it leads to:

• Better targeting
• Smarter segmentation
• More effective lead nurturing
• Higher conversion rates
• Increased opportunities

Enrichment is also critical for nurturing prospective buyers into full-time customers. When you have more information on folks like web visitors and prospects who sign up for a newsletter, white paper or free trial, you have the ability to create a highly personalized user experience for each person. This results in prospects forming a deeper connection with your brand and feeling seen, heard and understood by your company, which is essential to them choosing to do business with you again and again.

#3 — Enriched Data Empowers You to Hone in on VIPs

Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 principle maintains that 80 percent of a company’s profit is generated by 20 percent of its customers. Imagine the sales and marketing goals you could achieve if your data was enriched with all sorts of useful information on just the top 20 percent, let alone all your customers.

In addition to broadening your understanding of top customers, data that has been enriched has the power to inform you of which prospects have the potential to have high-value. Armed with this information you can provide them with the kind of experience that helped other customers similar to them convert. You should also be able to significantly shorten their sales cycle, which benefits everyone involved.

#4 — Enriched Data Enhances Campaign Performance

There are a myriad of ways that enhanced data impacts campaign performance. Below are a few of our favorites:

• Data Enrichment Helps Your Campaigns Find New Customers

Data enrichment enables you to create niche segments based on common customer characteristics. Enriching your existing contact information is also a great way to find and add new markets to your overall marketing and sales strategy. In addition, because it enables you to reach more customers and prospects with campaigns that are personally relevant to them, it increases your opportunities and close rates.

• Data Enrichment Keeps Your Campaigns and Company Rep on the Up-and-Up

Inaccurate data increases campaign bounce rates, unsubscribes and opt-out rates. No marketer worth their degree is willing to risk becoming labeled as a spammer, or worse, getting their company blacklisted from sending campaigns to what could be the perfect customers. Data enrichment reduces the risks associated with bad data by validating all contact information before you send campaigns. This increases the likelihood that your campaigns will reach their intended target and be welcome in their inboxes.

• Data Enrichment Helps Prevent Fraud  

It’s important to know that the people your campaigns are targeting are legitimate business people and data enrichment makes that kind of peace of mind possible. According to Tamas Kadar, CEO of Seon, a global fraud prevention company, “Data enrichment is important because it helps you know more about your users without asking them for extra information. For instance, you can verify someone’s identity simply by asking them their email address. It helps to reduce risk without increasing user friction and slowing down the user experience.”

#5 — Enriched Data Leads to Better Decision Making

Information is power, and the more you have, the greater your ability to make decisions that are well-informed, smart, and solidly grounded in facts instead of opinions and other forms of bias. Data that has been enriched will reveal new patterns, fresh insights, and emerging trends, which are all essential to your organization’s ability to remain current, relevant and highly competitive.

People change. Email addresses, mobile numbers, titles, departments and other critical contact information changes. Customer behaviors change. Company names and locations change. The only way to stay on top of all these changes is to automate the process of keeping your data enriched and ready for use.