If you advertise directly to customers in any capacity, data is worth its metaphorical weight in gold to your business. From contact information to demographic data, every piece of information on your customers is a gateway into future advertising plans. However, if you’re missing crucial data, you may harm your return on investment (ROI) on marketing campaigns. That’s where data enrichment comes into play. Data enrichment is a process that starts with data that you already have and adds additional perspective such as demographics, wealth score, psychometrics such as green score, email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses and more.
Here, we cover data enrichment and how it provides meaningful insights into customer behavior and can enhance your next sales campaign.
What is Data Enrichment? at a Glance
- Examples of Data Enrichment
- Why Should You Use a Data Enrichment Service?
- How to Use Data Enrichment in Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Direct Mail Campaigns
- UGC Campaigns
- Social Media
Examples of Data Enrichment
Data Enrichment turns first-party data into a complete customer profile using third-party data. Let’s start by discussing first-party data. Say you run a campaign where you collect emails through your point-of-sale or e-commerce system. These emails would be first-party data, as your customers volunteered it directly to you for a service. Third-party data, on the other hand, exists on the internet. This includes census information, general geographic data, and other external sources.
If you’ve ever Googled your name, you know how much random external data exists on the internet. While it would be ideal to search for your customers one by one, that’s not practical, especially with the sheer amount of information you need to craft a complete customer record. Plus, there’s no way to guarantee you’d receive high-quality data, like up-to-date email addresses. This is where data enrichment comes into play.
Data enrichment services take your existing customer base and craft complete profiles. Data enrichment services can gather critical insights like marital status, job titles, income levels, geographic data, and more by using a single piece of information like a name or phone number. These services can take an email list and flesh it out, removing old, out-of-date addresses and ensuring that your next sales campaign reaches active, interested customers.
Why Should You Use a Data Enrichment Service?
Data enrichment services offer deeper insights into your customer base and help you personalize your marketing toward each customer. By accurately identifying key demographics, you can craft individual email campaigns that feel personal to your customers and improve the overall customer experience at your company.
Data enrichment services take the burden of collecting customer information away from business owners and sales teams. By starting with small pieces of information and extrapolating them out using AI and specialized programs, data enrichment services offer complete customer profiles to help you mold your marketing campaign. For example, suppose you’re worried about effectively utilizing the sales funnel or have email campaigns falling flat. Data appending can give your business a leg up and help boost your email marketing success.
Data enrichment applies to more than just email marketing. You can make informed decisions about your business by identifying crucial customer segments and adjusting business goals to target potential customers. By identifying existing engaged groups of people, you can laser-focus on that subset of your customer base or track down niches you may have yet to reach effectively. Thanks to high-quality data, you can craft a customer database that fuels your next marketing campaign and helps grow your business.
With a specially crafted customer data platform, you can quickly sort customers by key demographic points. This allows you to see customer information at a glance without filtering through spreadsheets. Then, organize customers by datasets like age, marital status, and more to get a clearer idea of your customers and their goals. The more you know about your follower base, the more you can hone your marketing campaigns to target their interests.
Even with all this information, using data enrichment effectively in your next marketing campaign is crucial to ensuring you get the best ROI on data enrichment services. While accurate customer information makes creating a sales campaign more straightforward than ever, you need creativity and innovation to create a truly spectacular marketing campaign that will drive customer conversion rates and increase brand awareness.
How to Use Data Enrichment in Marketing
While we’ve hinted at a few ways to use data enrichment in your marketing efforts, there’s much more to cover. By combining internal-source customer dataset information with additional sources, you can see the big picture. Setting business goals based on complete customer data can propel your marketing efforts to new heights and set a course for your next marketing endeavor.
But what kind of marketing benefits from data enrichment services? In short, every type of marketing can benefit to some level from data enrichment. From email and physical mailer campaigns to user-generated content (UGC) campaigns and social media posts, having accurate demographic data on your customer base can significantly improve all marketing efforts across the board. You can increase your customer conversion rate and overall marketing ROI using data enrichment tools.
Email Marketing
The most up-to-date email addresses can significantly impact email marketing’s open and response rates. Since email marketing boasts a 1:36 ROI ratio for every dollar spent, every email must reach its destination to maximize profits.
However, data enrichment has more benefits than avoiding spam filters and dead inboxes. For example, you can target customers for personalized emails by accurately tracking critical demographic information.
For example, data enrichment can tell you which of your customers are single or recently engaged. With this information, you could send out wedding season deals to optimal candidates and avoid spamming happily married individuals with wedding promos.
Similarly, you can target people who live in a particular area, customers in a field of work, or even customers with a specific heritage or family background. Data enrichment can also tell you things like the likelihood to donate to charity, wealth score, and more, allowing you to craft your next marketing campaign better.
Direct Mail Campaigns
Much like email marketing, physical mailing campaigns benefit from data enrichment. Having accurate physical addresses is vital to physical mailer marketing. With demographic data, you can target customers more likely to respond to physical mail.
You can also narrow down potential respondents to those in a specific area or stage of life. For example, if you own a furniture company, you could send out mailers to likely college students to advertise dorm furniture. But, thanks to data enrichment, you’d avoid sending these deals to elderly customers who may be confused at the call to further education.
Of course, data always overlaps, so target customers that fit several potential target demographics to hone your next physical mailing campaign for better results.
UGC Campaigns
User-generated content (UGC) includes things like social media posts and photos. These campaigns are a great way to humanize your company and act as a form of influencer marketing where you don’t have to pay the influencers. Instead, you gain free content to show potential customers by running hashtags and photo-sharing events.
With data appending, you can get critical insights into your customer base, such as average age and interests. Then, by combining this information with customer-generated content, you can craft content that will attract your target demographic.
Make sure to search out new niches and use insights in clever ways. For example, if your customers are interested in green companies, consider promoting UGC that shows recycling, sustainable product use, and more.
Remember, using that data is up to you and your sales team once you have accurate data. While there are plenty of guides and insights to help walk you through data use, innovative data applications drive business growth and can make or break your next marketing campaign.
Social Media
Social media campaigns can also benefit from data enrichment. For example, knowing a majority of your customers are in the Zoomer/Gen Z or Millennial generation can help drive your marketing. These demographics may be more likely to respond to social media marketing, including influencer marketing. If your customer base leans toward these platforms, guiding your marketing focus in that direction can benefit your business in the long run.
Since marketing comes down to spreading the word about your business and reaching as many customers as possible, using several marketing strategies alongside accurate data enrichment can boost your business and cut down on the overall cost of your marketing campaigns.
Thanks to data enrichment, you can craft your subsequent sales plan confidently, knowing you’re reaching more customers than ever without messing around with pesky surveys and incomplete customer insights, or begging past customers for data. Data enrichment can help boost your sales team to new heights and give them all the tools they need to craft the best marketing campaign possible.
By running your customer database, you’ll have critical insights at your fingertips, allowing you to make business decisions on the fly. These insights allow for innovative planning and new business goals, helping you grow your company one customer at a time. If you’re looking to increase your customer conversion rate and marketing effectiveness while discovering new and innovative niches, data enrichment is a worthwhile investment for you. To learn more about our data enrichment services, contact us today.