Data Enrichment: A Smart Way to Improve Your Conversion Rates

With each passing quarter, the number of B2B marketers giving priority to database maintenance and hygiene is increasing.

This directly resonates with an industry-wide shift to data-driven thinking and decision-making; which has caused marketers and sales professionals to search for scalable ways of database management and growth.

This change has led to a proliferation of buzzwords, such as data verification, database cleaning, and data enrichment.

Of these buzzwords, data enrichment holds the most value for both marketing and sales, since it means applying additional data points to your current leads, deepening your insight, and giving greater context to the smarketing team.

Data enrichment creates a win-win situation by improving prospect-to-lead conversions for marketers and lead-to-customer conversions for the sales reps. How? Let’s find out.

What is Data Enrichment – A Quick Overview

Missing, incomplete, and obsolete records are key disruptors to the accuracy of customer data. Data enrichment is the process that growth-oriented businesses are using to solve these problems and to make data-driven sales and marketing decisions comfortably.

Data Enrichment describes a wider strategy that can include both cleaning up and integrating current data sets. As well as relating them to external data from social media, contact lists, and other third-party sources. Anything that enhances and improves the accuracy of consumer data by covering gaps and fixing “poor” information can be referred to as enrichment of data.

Data can be enriched manually or on a set cadence with the aid of automation tools. While DIY, manual enrichment may initially save your organization from additional investment, automation can save you time and effort in the long term. So, should you opt for DIY data enrichment?

DIY Data Enrichment: Let’s Go or Let Go

“My team or I can collect the data by doing some research or simply by asking the lead or by adding form fields to get this data? So, why do I need data enrichment?”

This is a legitimate question. The answer – Relying solely on form fields is a slow process for collecting additional information and often leads to bad CRM data. Only 33% of marketers believe that they can rely on their CRM data when it comes to data accuracy.

For example, it is a well-known fact that the number of fields on the online form has an inverse relationship to the conversion rate. You simply won’t be able to collect all the required information in one form. Some website visitors may fill out the complete form, but not all of them will bother to fill in the complete information.

That means you will have to push them regularly to collect more information either on email, call, or offering more downloads before you are sure that you are targeting the right people. Not an optimal strategy.

Secondly, if the fields are mandatory, prospects often enter the wrong information. Not because they are unethical, but merely because they are hesitant to be a part of the promotional campaigns.

Data Enrichment provides you with a quicker solution to completing contact data and also makes it more reliable. Given the many benefits of data enrichment to improve your CRM data, it can take the marketing and sales efforts to the next level.

Where Enriched Data Makes a Real Difference

Enriched lead data is useful because it captures everyday life. Unlike standard info, it has an infinite depth of knowledge to deliver automated decisions with greater efficiency.

As a result, enriched data can be trusted to carry out the most crucial B2B marketing strategies:

• Strengthening ABM strategies with the right target account list
• Improving segmentation and targeting by accessing more crucial data
• Staying on top of the decision-makers from your target accounts
• Gaining intelligence on what stimulates revenue and motivates decision-makers
• Making stronger ad setup and creating more tailored content

Here are some more crucial areas where data enrichment can make a big and noticeable difference.

Going Beyond Standard Form Fields

Data enrichment provides additional data points to marketers that would otherwise face a larger challenge attempting to collect..

Returning to our example of marketing automation, you would want to reach CMOs that can afford your software? This means that company revenue plays an important role. Since it is an important bit of information about their company, it is a high-friction asking point.

Another alternative would be to go beyond just a work description to rate a lead. For example, if you target IT managers responsible for network security and they submit a form on your website. However, it still leaves a lot of uncertainty about whether they are qualified leads. In this example, you still need to ascertain if they can or can not afford your product. Data enrichment allows you to access complete information (data that is required to help you close the deal) of your leads to make the right decisions throughout the sales process.

Data intelligence tools like SalesIntel provide 95% accurate, human-verified contact, firmographic, and technographic data of millions of businesses, helping you to get the data you need without sacrificing website form conversions. With 10 years of historical match rate data as well as matching against a contact’s job history, you can append your data without asking your leads for it.

Improved Lead Quality

The lead scoring process is based on the interaction of leads with your website as well as with your marketing campaigns. Each lead is then assigned a score based on specific parameters and is assigned a ranking based on how well each lead matches your ideal customer profile.

Factors such as work title, industry, and income have a huge effect on whether the lead meets the requirements that sales need to close the deal.

Say you work for a marketing automation firm and target CMOs. The sales team only wants CMOs from companies of a certain size within specific industries as those industries to have the potential in terms of marketing automation adoption. They are the best fit for your product, and targeting those leads is the best use of sales reps’ time.

Unless you have industry data for your leads, it is all too easy to ship leads that have been interacting with your outreach, but their management does not prioritize automation because of the nature of their market. However, they are your potential client, you can’t let them go looking at only a single data set.

Using data enrichment, you can get all the required, reliable information you need so you can assign accurate lead scores. This would prevent the ‘let-go’ scenarios and improve lead quality.

Personalization the Messaging

With enriched information, you are growing the view of the target audience exponentially. The process gives you all the details you need to build hyper-targeted consumer segments. This means that you have the right consumer journey to the right business.

Today’s sales and marketing teams always need to keep the messaging as relevant as possible. Back in the early days of big data, it was enough to include the first name of the contact in the greeting. But now, your messages need to go beyond identifying the firmographics, technographics, and buyer’s intent to customize your message accordingly. And that’s why data enrichment is the growth path.

Enabling Machine Learning Technology

Using the potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning, sales and marketing experts can now provide more customized touchpoints with new and current consumers in ways that historically demanded immense human capital and massive budgets.

One practical example of this – chatbots. They have changed the way businesses collect vital contact details and company data from site users to the head. Thanks to data enrichment options, the team can get the customer data through communications with a robotic humanoid. The details collected from these interactions will then be enriched with existing knowledge in your CRM, or with a comprehensive sales intelligence platform.

Improving the Overall Customer Experience

Overall, data enrichment improves the experience of your customers throughout the buyers’ journey. Enriched CRM data means more accuracy in the hypotheses and conclusions that you draw from your existing database. This means that you can tailor your sales call script to be relevant to each prospect, increase up-selling and cross-selling opportunities and detect red flags in customers that are likely to churn more efficiently.

With real-time data enrichment, the CRM can be up-to-date at all times. Including all related updates on recent changes in the current customer market. By detecting and monitoring business signals among your current consumers, your customer success team will reach out to the most possible customers to help them get the most out of your offer.

So, data enrichment brings value to your top three crucial departments – sales, marketing, and customer success.

Data Compliance

Equally if not more important than the previous use cases, compliance. Laws such as the GDPR of the European Union and CCPA have placed limitations on what types of consumer data can be kept and for how long. If you do not have systems in place to search your databases and get your documents into line, your only choice is to discard potentially useful data.

Data enrichment processes may be set up to maximize compliance with GDPR, do-not-call lists, and all other regulatory criteria. This means that the data is not only correct and complete, it is also legitimate. Even if the regulations change in the future, continuous enrichment will maintain the usability of the data.

Lead Enrichment: The Bottom Line

As the industry matures, B2B marketers and sales professionals are constantly searching for opportunities to leverage as much value as possible from the assets they already have.

However, lead enrichment is more than just a method to drive performance – it is the cornerstone to securing a greater competitive edge.

Not only can this data boost your acquisition with more advanced targeting tactics, but it also (and more importantly) serves as a crucial edge in effectively turning the lead when it really matters – before anyone else does.

Of course, this can only explain why lead enrichment is such a powerful asset for B2B marketers and sales professionals. The amazing truth of what enriched data looks like can only be fully appreciated and seen practically. So if you want to explore more about how it actually works and what the enriched data looks like, chat with us to get a free trial of SalesIntel.