The last decade has presented profound changes in the digital landscape. In modern times, any competitive business must exhibit some capacity for data collection. Businesses must contain data from multiple silos and analyze data in the interest of pivotal executive decisions. With data warehouses and dashboards, the modern business must leverage the inherent profit of data against competitors. The modern data stack has presented advanced business intelligence tools to offer the best, most fruitful data analysis experience to executive and marketing teams. Each day presents more opportunities to view relationships among data than the last. However, to receive and observe data solely through a dashboard is to abandon the benefits of data enrichment. Data enrichment activates accessible data in such a way as to allow for better interdepartmental communication. Data enrichment can give your data teams the marketing power to increase revenue.
What Is Data Enrichment?
Any discussion of the basics of Data Enrichment must begin with more conventional methods by which to obtain data. Most fundamentally, a customer relationship management tool can offer a lot of unrefined information about your customer base. It provides lots of information, but it does not necessarily offer a potent way to make sense of information. CRMs often present high-quality data on their own. This data might regard contacts, like the customers themselves, deals, like current purchases being processed, and companies, like B2B opportunities for growth. Many of these CRMs offer similar benefits, though the data being collected and the use cases often vary. Data enrichment is the process by which to refine data warehouses and aforementioned analysis tools with extra 1st or 3rd-party data. This process sets a high standard for accessible data, enabling data teams to access data in real-time and depend on the best, most familiar tools.
Data enrichment offers more of a bird’s-eye view when it comes to data. Having a lot of data does not always make the decision process easy. In fact, it often makes the decision-making process much harder, obfuscating relationships among data. Data enrichment illustrates trends for you, as trends are the only things that are ultimately able to inform your executive decisions. Raw data does not cut it. Once data enrichment provides your business teams with an overview of the most critical data, your teams can use data in their day-to-day work in order to solve complex business issues and address goals meaningfully.
Demographic Data Enrichment
There are three more specific types of data enrichment, the first of which is known as demographic data enrichment. A broad form of data enrichment, demographic data enrichment offers more of a focus on enriching customer data. “Demographic data” to enrich includes: job titles, marital statuses, income levels, addresses, and order number. With enough enrichment, demographic data can give your data team access to the best, most relevant information about customers. Think of it as a general profile of each of your customers.
Geographic Data Enrichment
Less broadly, geographic data enrichment regards any data about location. This includes addresses, zip codes, cities, time zones, and counties. Geographic data enrichment allows for the propagation of potent advertisement campaigns throughout the most susceptible areas. With geographic data enrichment, you can target singular groups of people and build personalized advertisements toward potential business leads. Customers’ interest across any area may inform your business decisions thanks to geographic data.
Behavioral Data Enrichment
This type of data enrichment allows for additional customer simulacra to exist across user profiles whose registration has been guaranteed by any software-as-a-service modules. Behavioral data is usually present across your website or mobile app. Behavioral data reflects empty carts and the clicks of potential patrons; it governs customers’ behavior. The key events of purchasing and managing cart items are crucial for improving your understanding of your customer base.
This type of enrichment is accomplished with third-party data and software, presenting the many benefits of web events. Web events include clicked hyperlinks, abandoned carts, pages viewed, and session length. Behavioral data enrichment may also include data about a product. Product data includes music playlists, subscription types, login dates, or anything that regards a customer’s relationship to a product or service. Behavioral data can even include data from external marketing tools, like whether or not an email was opened.
Why Use Data Enrichment?
There are many reasons to employ data enrichment, though the most central uses regard your sales, marketing, and customer support teams. Sales teams can use data enrichment to warm up the coldest leads and learn which leads to follow in the first place. Marketing teams can use geographic data enrichment to discern where to put commercials and billboards among other outreach. Customer support teams can use customers’ data to solve problems quickly and generate excellent reviews among happy customers.