Data Cleansing VS Data Enrichment – What Should Be Your Focus?

The main difference between data enrichment and data cleansing is data enrichment (also known as “data appending”) is the process of adding additional information to your existing contacts for more complete data. Whereas, data cleansing is the process of determining if your contact data is still correct/valid.

B2B marketers are prioritizing database maintenance and hygiene with each passing quarter. This is in line with an industry-wide move toward data-driven decision-making, which has led marketers and salespeople to look for scalable database management and growth methods.

To ensure that marketers and sales professionals can identify and reach the right leads at the right time, data cleansing and contact data enrichment are the two most commonly used methods to have accurate contacts for outreach. Given that both terms are used to maintain a healthy database, marketers and sales teams may find it hard to differentiate these two terms.

So, for the sake of data reliability (and a clean database), this quick read will help you get a better understanding of what each of these terms means and what you should focus on.

What is Data Enrichment?

The process of combining raw data from your internal resources with data from other internal or external data sets is known as data enrichment. For any enterprise, enriched data is a valuable asset because it transforms raw data into usable insights. The vast majority of brands enrich their raw data to use it for decision-making and prospecting.

What Is Data Cleansing?

Data cleansing, also known as data cleaning, ensures that a company’s data is accurate, consistent, and reliable. Simply put, it’s the process of sifting through a mountain of data to collect high-quality, actionable data regarding customers’ preferences, motivations, and other factors. Data cleaning involves resolving discrepancies, culling repetition, updating obsolete records, and discarding inaccurate details.

The Difference between Data Cleansing VS Data Enrichment

The key difference between data enrichment and data cleansing is that the latter involves fixing inconsistencies and updating or eliminating obsolete or unreliable data. Meanwhile, data enrichment is the process of supplementing one dataset with data from other credible sources.

If you want to start a data project, you can begin by cleaning up the data you have and removing any unnecessary information. You use data cleansing to find duplicate, corrupt, or incomplete information in your customer database. Then, you would also want to use third-party data to add more reliable data on top of the clean data you already have.

What Should You Focus On?

The answer is – both.

A recent study shows that 91% of companies with more than 11 employees use CRM software for sales and marketing. Poor CRM data stifles income, sales efficiency, forecasting, and, ultimately, business growth. When bad data enters your CRM, it poses an obstacle to producing B2B leads. Your sales team is having trouble filling the funnel, your predictions are off, and your goals are eventually missed.

Here are some of the eye-opener statistics for bad data.

• Bad data has an annual financial effect of $9.7 million on companies.
• The cost of bad data is projected to be more than $3 trillion a year in the United States.
• Bad data causes salespeople to waste over 27% of their time.

Data cleaning and data enrichment are the two crucial steps involved in maintaining data quality.

Data Cleansing: Making Sure Your Data Is Accurate

Data cleaning is the first and most important step in the process. The aim is to find any gaps or anomalies in the raw data so that all invalid data points can be eliminated.

As an example, imagine you have created an email list through your digital marketing campaigns. Data cleansing would involve deleting all of the odd, fake email addresses from your database, as well as any duplicate contacts. You’ll be able to move on to the next phase, data enrichment, once you’ve found and eliminated all redundancies and inaccuracies.

Data Enriching: Making the Most of Your Data

After you’ve finished cleaning your data, it’s time to put your raw (and incomplete) data to work. Data enrichment is the method of enhancing the raw data to make it more useful. This can be accomplished in several ways. One of the most basic and widely used approaches is to combine data from different sources.

If we use the email list as an example, after cleaning it, the next step would be to enrich it. This is something you can do with data from your CRM system or data purchased from a third-party vendor. If you add details like location, field, and full name to the addresses, your email list becomes more useful for segmentation, targeting, and outreach.

Given that, to extract relevant insights from company data and, eventually, boost sales, companies must:

• Have immediate access to the information that is most valuable to them.
• Be confident that the data they are working with is reliable and up-to-date.

Keeping it Simple With SalesIntel

By optimizing prospect-to-lead conversions for marketers and lead-to-customer conversions for sales reps, data cleansing and enrichment provide a win-win scenario. But if the process isn’t automated, it can take a long time which is why a data partner can be highly valuable.

We recognize the challenges of B2B lead generation and the value of providing reliable, up-to-date data for your sales and marketing efforts. This is why SalesIntel uses human verification to ensure that our data is as reliable as possible. Every 90 days, the data is reviewed for accuracy.

Here are a few of the benefits of SalesIntel’s Data Enrichment feature:

1. Get Advanced-Level B2B Data: Take your prospecting to the next level with full data from our data portal in just a few clicks. SalesIntel has 10 years of historical match rate data as well as matching against a contact’s job history.
2. Reduce Form Fields to Increase Lead Form Submissions: Fewer form fields mean more lead form submissions. If you depend on inbound leads, simply request the email address, and we’ll assist you in filling in the missing data.
3. Append Existing & Incoming Leads: You can enrich existing data with as little as an email address, and SalesIntel will automatically append the business and contact details you need to run your sales and marketing campaigns.

SalesIntel has been assisting B2B companies in closing their dream accounts and powering their account-based marketing activities. Our goal is for your team to be confident while approaching prospects and spend time only on qualified leads by keeping all your data cleaned and enriched.

Get access to over 6.2 million human-verified B2B contacts and make the most of your data using features like buyer intent signals, data enrichment, filters, and more. Start a free trial if you want to double-check our data’s accuracy.