If you are looking to place your customer at the heart of all your activities, and if you intend on doing this at scale, then you are going to need high quality data as a foundation. Data informs your core marketing activities from how to engage with your customer all the way to what they want to buy and how they want to buy it. These insights begin with the information that you collect and collate from your customers. When initially obtained however, this data is in its raw form. The next step is to convert this raw information into useful material that can be used critically within your business. To achieve this you need data enrichment.
What is data enrichment?
Data enrichment refers to the enhancement and elaboration of data by acquiring stats and figures from different data sources. This is done by combining multiple sources of data from inside the business in order to create a more comprehensive understanding of your customer’s preferences and behaviours. In order to put customers at the heart of any organisation, businesses need to understand them. Once you do, you can then create personalized and authentic brand engagements. Here you will need access to the customer’s purchase history, you will need to understand current behaviours (both online and offline) as well as their preferences, demographics, psychographics and other important aspects. Armed with this information you can then customize the data to better engage with your customer base going forward.
Benefits of data enrichment
1. Reach out to a wider audience
Data enrichment will empower you to improve the segmentation of your audience and help you reach more customers in a wider setting. In other words, with high quality data you will be able to reach out to the right people, at the right time and in the right way. It also allows you to boost your numbers on your target list. In order to this you need to be constantly updating your records to make sure the info is sound and current. There is no point in working with old outdated data. Throughout this process you can also personalize your data to a greater extent so that when you engage with your customer base you are doing it in a way that speaks to them directly and attends to their current needs.
2. Improve lead scoring
This is also an important aspect of your marketing strategy. Here you will be trying to understand if the quality of each individual lead is high. This ensures marketing efforts are put to good use. You ideally want your marketing team to only focus on contacting actual potential customers and not waste their valuable time on contacts who are not really interested. So in this way data enrichment ensures that each lead is appropriate and worth the time, money and effort.
3. Build an improved customer experience
Customer experience is vital and it tends to be something that is often overlooked. Whatever the business it’s important to give your customers a good experience. So how do you know if your customers are enjoying their experience of your business? You need to ask them, of course. Then the next step is to take these finding and input them into your data. The important thing here is that the information they provide will really improve future interactions. Through data enrichment you can really build on your customer’s experience and help you deal with them in a more engaging and helpful way.
4. Grow products and services strategically
When you are engaging with your customers and improving your data, you are also gaining knowledge about your market segment in real time. This offers the value add of giving you real insight into your market by identifying any untapped needs as well as see what your competitors are doing. This in turn gives you the opportunity to consider your products and services so you can grow strategically in line with your customer’s needs.
The bottom line
Data enrichment is key to creating better marketing strategies. This process comes down to customer engagement, and combing the business as a whole for insights that explain what your customer wants going forward. By combining data from multiple sources you will then be armed with valuable insights and will be able to better communicate with your customer. With more strategic marketing efforts you will then entice customers to engage with you and have a higher chance of converting leads into sales.
