What is Data Enrichment? How it Improves Data

What is Data Enrichment? Boosting Business Success with Better Data

Data flows through every part of a business, whether in the form of customer names, emails, or purchase histories. However, it’s often incomplete or scattered, a puzzle with missing pieces. Therein lies the need for data enrichment. This is the process of taking your raw data, supplementing it with additional, high-quality information, and turning it into a fuller, actionable portrait of your customers, operations, or market.

One way of thinking about it is as improving your business’s eyesight. Enriching your data allows you to see the bigger picture more clearly, make smarter decisions, and connect with your market in transformative new ways. At Sagacity, we help businesses reshape their data into a powerful tool. And in this guide, we’ll break down exactly what data enrichment involves, how to reap the rewards, and why exactly it’s such a game-changer in the business world.

How Does Data Enrichment Work?

Data enrichment looks at your existing data and then supplements it with additional insights, which are generally sourced from trusted third-party providers. These specialists are experts in their fields and come armed with powerful datasets, such as demographic details, behavioural trends, or firmographic information to expand what you already have. And the result? A rich tapestry of data that can act as a reliable foundation for your strategies going forward.

It would be simplistic to say it’s just about adding more data to what you already have. It’s better to say that it’s enhancing your data. Data enrichment turns basic information into an invaluable resource that you can pull from when making consequential decisions. Whether you’re refining customer profiles or sharpening operational insights, it’s an asset worth utilising. Let’s look into why it matters.

The Advantages of Data Enrichment

It’s not just nice to have enriched data, it’s an absolute game-changer. Here’s how it can help you transform your business.

Make Informed Business Choices

When you don’t have complete or reliable data, you’ll find that a lot of your decisions are based on guesswork. When you enrich that data, you can start making confident and informed decisions. Sales opportunities might arise out of detailed customer profiles, while marketing ideas might form on the basis of behavioural trends. With only raw data, these insights might be missed.

Create Impactful Campaigns and Increase ROI

There’s few things more welcome for a marketer than enriched data. It’s the ultimate tool with which targeting can be sharpened. In 2023, a HubSpot study found that personalised campaigns can boost ROI (return on investment) by up to 20%. By getting the right data and enriched insights on customer interests or buying habits, you can work out how to ensure your message hits the mark every time.

Forge Meaningful Connections with Your Customers

At the end of the day, your customers want to feel like you understand them and are making the effort to connect with them. When you enrich your data, you can begin to see them as real people rather than statistical points. If you incorporate demographic details, such as age or family status, you can begin tailoring your products and offers to specific groups with specific needs. See more about this in our blog on understanding customer demographics.

Reliable, Accurate Data

According to Gartner, bad data costs businesses as much as $12.9 million every year in the United States alone. When you pair enrichment with data cleansing, you can make sure your information is accurate and up-to-date, which will save you a good deal of time and money.

The Data Enrichment Process

So, how do you go from raw data to enriched, actionable insights? It’s by no means a one-and-done task; it’s a structured journey that turns basic information into a plentiful resource. Here’s a step-by-step guide on the process.

1. Set Clear Criteria

To begin with, you need to establish what it is you’re looking for. In essence, you need a roadmap. Ask yourself what it is you’re trying to accomplish by enriching your data. Do you need better customer profiles to supercharge your marketing campaigns? Or are you wanting data on businesses in specific market segments (firmographic data) in order to optimise your B2B sales strategy?

If you work in retail, you might want to enrich your data with customer age and purchase history to target holiday promotions. An SaaS provider might want to look at firmographic details to identify high-value enterprise leads. Once you have a set of clear criteria, you can begin focusing on the next steps.

2. Collect Data

Once you’ve got a clear blueprint for what it is you’re looking to achieve (and what data you need to achieve it), it’s time to pull together all the data you’ve already got, no matter how raw. CRM records, sales logs, web analytics, even long-forgotten spreadsheets. Try to round everything up. If what you get is a mad jumble of names, emails, and ambiguous transaction notes, it’s still something to build from.

It’s likely that what you’ll put together will be chaotic or simply incomplete. A marketing team might have access to a number of different data resources, such as customer email lists from Mailchimp, sales data from Salesforce, and website behaviour from Google Analytics. The overall picture that creates might be mostly incoherent. But it’s a clear starting point.

3. Start Data Cleansing

It’s not an easy thing to accept, but dirty data (duplicates, typos, outdated records, etc.) can sabotage your enrichment efforts. If you’re trying to enrich a customer profile and find it’s linked to three duplicate entries with conflicting details, you won’t be in the best position. That’s where data cleansing comes in.

• What it involves: Scrubbing your data clean by getting rid of pesky errors and inconsistencies - you want to deduplicate all duplicates, standardise all that’s unstandardised, and update all that’s unupdated
• What to use: Tools like our data cleansing solutions automate this, saving you from headaches
• Why it matters: There’s no use in building strategies from unreliable data - sooner or later, you’ll find yourself back at the drawing board, starting from scratch
• Learn more: Check out our blog, What is Data Cleansing?, for the full scoop

Clean data is the bedrock of reliable insights, not just a nice thing to have. Bypass it, and you’re building on quicksand.

4. Data Enrichment via Integration

Once you’ve got the first three steps done, you can move onto the more exciting stuff: the actual enrichment. This is where you weave third-party data (this might include income levels, job titles, behavioural trends, and plenty more) into your existing dataset. Essentially, you’re filling in the blanks with top-quality data, which our Enhance solution can streamline for you.

5. Validate and Assure Quality

In an ideal world, data enrichment would be a one-and-done task. But it isn’t, and it’s crucial to stay on top of it once you’ve actioned a plan. You need to be sure that the data you’ve added is accurate, consistent, and high-quality.

6. Apply Data

Now that you’ve got an enriched, actionable dataset at your fingertips, it’s time to put it to work. You’ll find an array of possibilities opening up for your company, from targeted marketing campaigns, refining your processes (such as rerouting deliveries based on geospatial insights), or altering your strategies.

7. Monitoring and Updating

Data is consistently changing, which means that your enrichment efforts will have to do the same in order to match it. You might find that your customers move, they change their preferences, and the markets evolve; whatever it is, you need to be ready to keep up with the variables. Vigilant monitoring is essential.

How Sagacity Can Help

We aim to take the complexity out of enrichment and turn it into something straightforward, actionable, and impactful. If you’re inundated with messy records, or if you’re simply hoping to maximise your marketing efforts, we have a suite of tools to help you. Whether it’s Enhance for seamless third-party integration or Online Data Cleansing for pinpoint accuracy, we can turn your data into a powerhouse that drives real results.

Here's how we can tailor our expertise to your needs:

• For marketers: Sharpen your campaigns with laser-focused targeting that hits the mark every time
• For operations: Streamline your processes with reliable, enriched data insights that will help you cut waste and boost efficiency
• For SMEs: Scale smarter with trustworthy data that grows with your business ambitions

Better Data, Better Business

Data enrichment is the ultimate way to turn scattered, incomplete records into a deep well of data from which you can push your business forward. By implementing it, you can start making smarter decisions, sharpening your campaigns, and creating stronger relationships with your customers. Use expertise and tools to make your data work for you - driving growth and unlocking opportunities that might otherwise have been completely invisible.