Data Enrichment: Up Your Marketing Strategy with Reliable Insights
Imagine for a second that you’re a detective who is working on a complicated case. You’ve gathered a handful of clues, but they’re incomplete and scattered all over the place. Solving this case is the equivalent of having a jigsaw puzzle without a reference picture on the front of the box. Sounds frustrating, right? Now, envision you have a magnifying glass that allows you to see the big picture by adding in additional details. In the world of data, the magnifying glass you’re seeking is a process we call data enrichment.
Data enrichment is a process that brings more in-depth and up-to-date information to datasets. It can transform raw, basic data into detailed and specific information that delivers a plethora of insights. Let’s look further into everything you need to know about data enrichment, so you can better understand what it is, why it’s essential, and how it can bring your datasets to life. We’ll uncover real world examples and reasons why data enrichment is an essential aspect of every marketer’s toolkit.
What is data enrichment?
The definition of the term “data enrichment” is relatively self-explanatory. The process of data enrichment takes raw, undefined information you have about your audience (their names, addresses, purchase histories, etc.), and adds more context, precision, and depth. It allows you to take basic data and understand it more thoroughly, shaping it into a tool that allows for more methodical decision-making.
You can add context, precision, and depth to your audience information through data enrichment by using additional details from various sources. Sources can include third-party vendors like VisitIQ, but it also can include public databases, social media profiles, and more. By implementing data enrichment to your existing datasets, you will gain insights into your audience that will allow for better analysis, segmenting and targeting, marketing strategies, overall objectives, and results.
Why is data enrichment important?
Data enrichment is an important process for businesses, organizations, and marketers who want the most return on their marketing investment. The difficulty of data enrichment varies depending on various factors, which include the data complexity, sources available for enrichment, existing data quality, goals, etc.
It’s important to embark on the data enrichment journey, no matter the level of difficulty for various reasons. Ultimately, it will revolutionize the way your business or organization utilizes information related to your current or prospective clients. Here are some reasons why data enrichment is a pivotal step in your data strategy.
Improved Understanding
While raw data provides businesses and organizations with a vague idea around their audiences’ attributes, enriched data paints a complete and detailed picture of your target audience. Data enrichment adds context and additional details, allowing for a deeper understanding of business operations, customers, and marketing trends.
Informed Decision-Making
When it comes to data, quality is just as important (if not more important) than quantity. Having accurate and comprehensive datasets allows for decision makers to have a clear understanding of their objectives and target customer, which leads to smarter decisions, improved strategies, and stellar results.
Prime Personalization
Much more than just a buzzword in the modern world of marketing, personalization reigns supreme when it comes to meeting your consumers where they’re at. Envision that you know your customers’ behaviors, needs, and preferences in the most detailed and accurate way possible. Enriched data allows for thorough understanding of your customers, and it fuels personalized interactions. In turn this will lead to stronger relationships with customers, leading to customer satisfaction and a boost to your brand’s reputation.
Targeted Marketing
Today, there is no excuse for casting a wide net and hoping for the best when it comes to marketing initiatives. By enriching customer data, businesses can segment their audiences with the upmost precision, ensuring they can deliver tailored and relevant marketing campaigns and communications to each segment of customers.
New Opportunities
Having enriched data will unveil new opportunities for customer understanding, allowing for businesses and organizations to trailblaze new communications with their clients that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. By analyzing enriched data, professionals can uncover new patterns in customer behavior, correlations between various actions, and other trends. This helps businesses identify emerging areas for growth, innovation, and optimization.
Competitive Advantage
In the world of modern marketing and communications, data reigns supreme. By leveraging enriched data, businesses have a competitive edge. They will be able to make informed decisions about their marketing and communications that will likely be missed by competitors who are not embracing the power of data enrichment.
Customer Satisfaction
Making a sale to a customer one time is great, but having customers who feel truly understood and catered to goes a step beyond a transactional customer-business relationship. Businesses that have enriched data are able to be proactive in their customer communications and create tailored experiences that turn a one-time customer into a loyal patron.
Put simply, data enrichment elevates your data from being a passive asset to being the core backbone of your business. Having reliable and detailed information about past, current, and prospective customers allow for increased growth, innovation, and success. Enriched data isn’t about having more data. Instead, it’s making sure the data at your disposal is the right data, at the right time, and in the right context.
Examples of Data Enrichment
If you have basic customer information, such as name and address, you don’t have to stop there. With data enrichment, you can uncover a treasure trove of information to better understand and target your ideal customers. Here are examples of common aspects of data enrichment that are available.
Demographic Information
It’s essential to ensure your customer data is enriched with demographic details like age, education, gender, and even income level. Knowing these factors will help you segment your audience and create marketing strategies that resonate with them.
Purchase History and Behavior
In the world of e-commerce, one of the best insights a marketer can know is obtained through purchase history and behavior data. By tracking a customer’s patterns, preferences, and trends, marketers can make recommendations that are personalized to what a customer has identified interests them, and they can also target promotions based off these insights.
Geographic Enrichment
Do you know your customers’ addresses? You can enrich this data with geographic information, such as latitude and longitude coordinates. Having coordinates of your customers helps you visualize the locations of your customers on a map, so you can better analyze patterns that are related to purchases, demographics, and target areas.
Website Activity
Knowing which pages on a website have been visited, how long a customer spent on each page, and which products have been viewed are essential bits of information that can help businesses and organizations better understand their customers. A clear understanding of website behavior allows marketers to create a better user experience through tailored web content.
Social Media Profiles
A basic list of customer names and email addresses can be enriched by data that links customers to their social media profiles. This can give businesses clearer insights into customers’ activities, interests and even social connections. Marketers can then create strategies and campaigns to better serve their customers.
Firmographic Data
Business-to-business data is essential for organizations that provide products and services to other businesses. When it comes to B2B data, firmographic information will provide insights like company size, industry, location, and revenue.
Financial Data
Financial institutions find it valuable to use financial data to enrich customer data. This can include customers’ credit scores, financial history, and transaction patterns. This is an invaluable tool when it comes to fraud detection and risk assessment.
Email Verification and Validation
Validation services can enrich email addresses, which allows for email campaigns to reach the intended audience members. Ultimately, it’s an essential data enrichment tool that is proven to improve deliverability rates of emails.
Data Append Service
Would you like to know more about your customers in a general sense? Third-party data enrichment services can enrich data with attributes like job titles, phone numbers, and social media channels. This allows for more understanding of your customer, and it might give you good insight on which platforms are best to use for marketing campaigns.
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is a process in data enrichment that provides insights into customer satisfaction. Textual data like survey responses and customer reviews can be analyzed to help define areas of satisfaction, as well as potential areas for improvement.
Market Research Data
For existing data sets, companies can incorporate external market research data to offer a much broader understanding of customer preferences and relevant trends.
Weather Data
Sometimes overlooked, historical weather data can be a unique tool of data enrichment. Marketers can use historical weather data to find patterns and correlations between consumer behavior that may be tied to the weather. This can help many companies better plan their marketing strategy to align with the weather, and ultimately, the associated predicted behavior of their customers.
There are various forms of data enrichment, and the examples above show how the practice helps add accuracy, more context, and depth of data. All types of data enrichment ultimately give marketers the ability to extract meaningful insights and make informed decisions.
How to Enrich Your Data with VisitIQ
Do you have your own disparate data sets that you want to enrich for your business operations? At VisitIQ, we have the capability to ingest and enrich datasets for businesses and organizations. By utilizing our Solution, EnrichID™, our team of experts provide you with updated and opted-in consumer marketing details, which will allow for enhanced outreach and communication between you and your target audience.
If your dataset currently includes your customers’ names, home address, and/or personal email addresses, we can ingest that data and enrich it by matching it against our identity graph. When we return your data to you, it will provide you with up to 500+ identifiers for each customer, helping you paint a picture of your customers like never before.
Final Thoughts on Data Enrichment
Just like every detective needs a magnifying glass, every marketing professional needs insightful data. It’s time to switch your gears of data-driven decision-making into overdrive by utilizing data enrichment. Get ready to discover patterns, connections, and possibilities for your marketing campaigns that wouldn’t exist without enriched data. If you’re ready to bring more value than you ever thought possible to your data-driven marketing initiatives, VisitIQ is here to help. Happy marketing, friends!
