Technology Is Changing How We Treat Data Enrichment

A major problem for industries today is a glut of poor quality data. Sales and marketing teams are flooded with inaccurate data causing time to be wasted chasing leads that cannot be converted. 

According to a study by Gartner in 2020, almost 32% of senior marketing executives believe that marketing data and data analytics have not had a significant impact on their organization due to the presence of poor quality data.

Across all industries, good quality data is required over quantity. Data enrichment is a process by which the internal data from an organization’s database is integrated with external data resources to improve and refine the quality of existing data. With the development of new processes and machine learning, enrichment has become more useful and accurate than ever before.

What do you mean by data enrichment? 

As the name suggests, data enrichment means improving the existing raw data of an organization. It involves the addition of new information to missing fields or the removal of existing inaccurate data. Data enrichment is expected to provide better analytics and a deeper understanding of business insights. 

But in more practical terms, data enrichment refers to integrating external data from various high-traffic sources with internal organizational databases so that all the incomplete fields in internal data can be filled. This increases the quality of lead/customer data and makes both lead conversion and general CRM usage easier for the organization. 

When marketing teams have complete profiles on their leads/customers, they can run personalized and targeted marketing strategies with high conversion rates. A better understanding of the customer helps to understand what the customer wants from the organization. 

SalesIntel collects data from different external sources to be added to an organization’s internal database to enrich their data. We offer automated scheduled data enrichments as well as manual enrichment by applying individual filters. Clients can set up a regular rhythm by which their data will automatically be supplemented with details on leads/customers from our sources. They can also choose to enrich their data manually for particular fields/customers when necessary. 

SalesIntel runs a 90-day re-verification cycle to avoid data decay. Contact information such as name, company, email, phone, job titles, and other fields for each customer record are constantly updated. Organizations often have correct data initially, but it becomes obsolete and inaccurate over time. The annual data decay rate is around 60 to 70%. Our 90-day verification ensures that the data is regularly updated to maintain its accuracy and sustain enrichment efficiency. 

Why do you need data enrichment? 

We have already discussed the basic idea behind data enrichment as creating a more comprehensive customer profile for better sales and marketing strategy implementation. Let’s now go more in-depth into this process. 

Data enrichment helps an organization better understand its customers and leads. This makes the process of lead scoring or account scoring much easier. Sales and marketing teams can prioritize their efforts on leads with better potential based on the categories they fall in and how they match previous customers. In the case of existing customers, active accounts can be targeted to get better sales volumes and more effective marketing. 

When the organization has access to high-quality data, it can utilize its data intelligence tools more effectively. Different campaigns can be organized to target different segments according to their sensibilities and needs. Apart from targeted marketing for leads and customers, general marketing campaigns can also be more effectively designed with this general target audience. 

Customer satisfaction also improves with increased data enrichment. When the customer’s data is available at sales reps’ fingertips, customers get a much smoother and easier experience. Customer interactions can be shaped according to the information available to the sales team saving time in the prospecting stage. 

SalesIntel goes one step further to ensure customer satisfaction. Firms struggle to collect adequate customer data because most customers avoid filling out long web forms. We help organizations increase their form conversion rates by keeping them short. Once they get the client’s email, all the details can be filled in by our data enrichment. 

Impact of data enrichment

Better ROI on machine learning technology

Many organizations have started to use some forms of AI or machine learning in their operations. But these technologies can only be effective when they are fed large quantities of accurate data. Data enrichment improves the overall performance of machine learning technologies and ensures better results. 

Sales and marketing intelligence is the first outcome, but a less talked about but equally important one is improved automated AI-powered systems like chatbots. Improved machine learning tools help increase the overall quality of service and client satisfaction. 

Emotional connection with customers

To forge customer loyalty, brands have to build a personal connection. Data enrichment and data drive analytics to improve the quality of targeted marketing and customer service so that customers feel personally taken care of by the brand. It helps build brand loyalty, improve the brand’s reputation, and increase word-of-mouth publicity. Studies claim that organizations that use data analytics to collect behavioral insights of their customers experience 85% more sales growth than their competitors. 

Reduced expenditure

Data enrichment has a significant impact on profit margins by reducing expenditure on business intelligence. When accurate insights are not available from the internal database, many organizations have to resort to costly market surveys and other data collection drives to understand their customers’ tastes and demographics. But data enrichment builds a robust organizational database that can provide all the information needed for analytics-driven business decisions. 

Studies claim that, in many companies, around $15 million of the budget is wasted every year maintaining and using manpower on bad data. Organizational audits have found that, on average, it takes $1 to verify and add an item to the database. It takes around $10 to correct and update the information after adding it to the database. But a whopping $100 is spent over time in maintaining decayed data in the internal database. 

With SalesIntel, data decay drops significantly. Our firmographics and technographic make this updated, enlarged database more practical for marketing teams.

Future of data enrichment 

Predictions from business experts claim that data will continue its reign over the world of business in the coming years. But, at the same time, costs behind bad data are also piling up. Studies predict that by 2022, almost 70% of businesses that use data analytics will introduce data metrics systems to check their data quality and reduce attrition of funds through maintenance and continued usage of bad data. 

Data quality improvement is a growing concern across all industries. Data cleansing to remove duplications and inaccurate data, regular updates to erase decayed data, and data enrichment to complete incomplete data are all becoming essential processes. But when this data quality management process is done manually, it takes up the lion’s share of the sales or marketing rep’s time. This process also cannot ensure complete efficiency, and bad data continues to remain in the database. This system is not sustainable in an environment where businesses want to grow and expand their database size. 

The key solution is provided by third-party contact data solutions providers like SalesIntel. We dedicate our workforce to collecting and organizing data so that our client’s marketing and sales employees can be focused on applying that data effectively. Sales teams should be selling not dealing with data management. 

Our customers report that their database has grown almost 15 times over. But this growth in size is not undercut by a drop in accuracy. Client businesses have seen a 100% spike in their call-to-connect ratios (rise from 10% to 20%) due to increased accuracy of contact information. 

SalesIntel clients reduce their prospecting time and increase speed to lead with our accurate contact and company data. 

If you are struggling to get the promised ROI on your CRM or marketing system, test drive SalesIntel’s accurate B2B  contact and company data. 

Studies have shown that data enrichment can increase sales and customer satisfaction by around 50% in the majority of companies implementing the practice. 

Build better marketing campaigns and connect with your customers using human-verified contacts.