What is Data Enrichment? How it Improves Data

Data enhancement is the process of combining raw data with another set of data to form a more comprehensive view of customer information. The additional dataset is usually provided by a trusted third party offering specialist data enrichment services. 

For instance, if you wanted to enhance your customer data with consumer spending information, data enrichment can be used to update existing customer records with this data. This can be used to enrich customer data with a range of valuable records, helping businesses maximise the use of datasets.

Enhancing your data can yield some powerful results for your marketing efforts that aren’t to be underestimated. From increasing ROI, to establishing deeper relationships with customers, the benefits of data enrichment are invaluable.

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about data enrichment, including how it works, the types of data you might combine, and how you can use it to your advantage.

How Does Data Enrichment Work?

Data enrichment seeks to enhance data by combining existing customer records with additional information. Data enrichment is most effective when the additional data is provided by a reliable, external source. Though, businesses can also enrich databases with existing first-party data. For example: In the retail sector, you could combine demographic data with purchase history information. This would leave you with a holistic view of your customer, with meaningful insights that goes beyond the basics of age, gender, and location.

In turn, this can help you understand what type of people are attracted to certain products and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.

Combining data in this way can help you identify patterns and trends, and consequently create more targeted ads and communications.

There’s no strict limit on how many datasets you can combine, either, it will depend on what you are looking to find out by combining them. For example: A retailer selling high-end wellies might want to find out their customers’ geographic location, age, gender and salary, or average spend, combining this information to tailor marketing efforts and directly target specific customer segments.

Online Data Enrichment

One of the most simplified ways that businesses are enriching their data is through the use of online data management platforms, such as Online. This offers a self-serving data enrichment solution, where organisations can upload their existing data and view insights into data accuracy and enhancement opportunities.

The Advantages of Data Enrichment

Data enrichment brings with it an abundance of benefits for your business that shouldn’t be overlooked. Here’s an overview of the main benefits of data enrichment.

1. Make informed business choices

Decisions without data are essentially a stab in the dark. Data enrichment allows you to utilise and strengthen data, and then use it to make informed, stronger business decisions. That’s not to say that every data-driven decision will soar, but it will increase the likelihood of success.

2. Create impactful campaigns and increase ROI

Data enrichment gives you the opportunity to produce marketing campaigns that speak to your customers in their language, and promote products or services you know they are interested in. For example, through data enrichment, you might discover that millennial women are more likely to purchase a certain product over Gen Z. You can create targeted ads and promotions that appeal to millennial women. As a result, you’re likely to increase your sales and ROI.

3. Forge meaningful connections with your customers

Securing sales and a strong return on your investment is desirable. But let’s not forget your customers are people, too. Data enrichment allows you to see your customers as just that, by providing you with a deeper insight into their behaviours, characteristics, and personal preferences.

You can take this information and use it to forge meaningful relationships with your customer base. This is important in and of itself, but will also undoubtedly lead to increased customer loyalty and satisfaction.

4. Reliable, accurate data

We’ve talked about how data enrichment can inform smart business choices, but to be led by data, first you need to trust it. Enhancing data doesn’t just broaden your view of individual customers, but also ensures the data is up-to-date and accurate too in combination with data cleansing.

Consequently, you’re left with datasets you can actually rely on to improve business performance.

Let us take care of all your data enrichment needs

We’re proud to offer the most comprehensive data enrichment service the UK has to offer. Our Enhance service consists of:

Core

A comprehensive individual level product containing over 50 million UK adults, with over 800 actual and modelled attributes across demographic and lifestyle variables.

Property

An address level product built using our trusted, comprehensive and relevant data assets.

Postcode Indicator 

A postcode level product containing all PAF valid residential postcodes, with indicators across over 300 variables. This data supports location analysis, marketing strategies, targeting, and product development.

Geo

Compiled with a number of open-source data points with additional modelled attributes including GeoSociety; a rich source of data that gives valuable insight into what issues are concerning particular locations and sections of society.

Get in touch to find out more