Data Enrichment is a term often used in marketing, but what really is data enrichment, what are the benefits of data enrichment, and how can marketers, agencies, and companies make data enrichment a part of their marketing strategy? This primer is designed to answer these questions.
What is Data Enrichment?
As technology has evolved, so too has marketing. It’s hard to believe, but it wasn’t that long ago that marketing, especially “targeted” marketing, was mostly a “spray and pray” exercise. In this generation of marketing, marketers would purchase or build lists and implement a direct marketing approach, often leveraging direct mail and over time, email.
As the number of available marketing channels and marketing costs increased, the old-school “spray and pray” approach became more difficult to execute and marketers had no choice but to be smarter in how they target and reach prospects.
As the need to become more focused in marketing efforts became paramount, so too did the need to know more about the people marketers were trying to reach. In today’s era of marketing, data and information about the prospects you are targeting has become a critical part of increasing response rates, reducing costs, and ultimately driving a positive ROAS for targeted marketing.
Whether you are purchasing third-party lists, receiving form submits on your site, or even getting contact info of those that convert, chances are you don’t have the full picture of these customers and prospects. For example, let’s say you purchased a list of email addresses to do email outreach to, but don’t know anything else other than these prospects’ first name and email address. Sure, you can send these prospects emails and maybe have some success in doing so. But, as marketing has become more sophisticated, so too is the need to do more than just simple outreach. Multiple marketing touches is a good start, but what about personalization, segmentation and multi-channel marketing. With just a name and email address, how would you implement such strategies? This is where data enrichment, sometimes called data appends, comes into play.
Data enrichment fills in the gaps of information we don’t know about our customers and prospects by leveraging the information we do. Going back to the example of the list you purchased and the email addresses of each prospect, you can leverage a third-party data enrichment service, or data append provider, to fill in these gaps. These providers collect data from multiple sources and compile databases of consumer and business profiles that have numerous attributes, like a person’s home mail address, phone number and demographic attributes, like whether they own or rent, what line of work they are in, their gender, and whether they are married or have children.
Having this additional data about your customers and prospect allows you to customize your outreach based on what you know about them, as well as reach them on multiple marketing channels.
What Type of Data Does Data Enrichment Provide?
In may ways, data enrichment is simply an input/output activity; the data you have dictates the data you can append. In the world of enrichment, the data keys, or identifying data, is used as the basis for enriching your data. Enrichment is not intended to be a guessing game, but an accurate way to fill in the gaps based on what is known. As such, typically most data enrichment services/append services will only allow data appends on these data keys, namely email address, name and mailing address or phone number, or a combination of these identifying elements.
While the type of data available to append to your existing data might vary based on the identifying information you have on these records, these are some common examples of enrichments you can add to your existing files and customer data:
- Name and Mailing Address
- Email Address
- Phone Number
- Age
- Gender
- Marital Status
- Presence of Children
- Net Worth Range
- Income Range
- Education Level
- Occupation
What are the Benefits of Data Enrichment?
Data enrichment has multiple benefits and can be used in multiple marketing strategies, on an individual basis or in combination. The most common strategies and associated benefits are outlined below.
Multichannel Marketing
Moving a prospect to a conversion takes multiple touches. According to the Marketing Rule of 7, it takes 7 touches to turn a prospect into to a customer. But, it’s not just the number of touches, it’s also the channel of the touch. Some people are big into social media, but don’t use email. Others check their direct mail religiously, but don’t even use email. Also, each marketing channel has its own impression “permanence”. If someone sees a display ad, that permeance is quickly fading. On the other hand, a physical direct mail piece in someone’s hand may make a longer-lasting impression.
When you touch a prospect on multiple marketing channels, the likelihood of making an impression and swaying them to become a customer increases. This in turn, increases the value of your data and increases conversions, all from the data you already have and filling in the ones you don’t by leveraging data enrichment services.
Segmentation
For the sake of example, let’s say you are high-end, online women’s clothing retailer. You have two clothing lines – a line for young women, and a line that is geared toward more “mature” women, especially those that are moms. You just acquired a list of email addresses of women that meet the your target income levels and are planning an email sequence to try to get these women to make a purchase.
While you could simply send out an email drip sequence to all the women in your list, wouldn’t it be better to segment your marketing based on the clothing line that would be the best fit for each prospect in your list? Leveraging data enrichment, you could append demographic information for each person in your list, including age range and whether each prospect has kids. With this newfound information, you can segment your marketing into two groups which match your young women and “mature” moms clothing lines and then send a sequence of messages to each with clothing pictures that will best match their life stage and interests.
While this is just an example of combing data appends to segment your messaging, this technique will improve marketing success. Marketing segmentation makes sure your messaging matches your audience and by leveraging data enrichment, yields higher conversion rates and a lower cost per acquisition.
Personalization
When you first meet someone and don’t know their name, naturally you ask them and do your best to remember. The next time you see them again and use their name, this feels good to them. It conveys to them that they are important to you. And, the more you get to know that person and remember things about them and talk about these things with them, the more important they feel. This is an example of personalization, albeit in life and not necessarily marketing.
Using someone’s name or other details about them in your marketing messages conveys to that person that you know them, care about them, and understanding their wants and needs. The more you can do this in your messaging, the more likely you are able to make a connection with them and get them to take action. This personalization could be as simple as using their name in your messaging, or it could be using other information you may have. If you know they live in a specific city and have solutions designed for that city, personalizing that message to include their city will create a connection and in turn increase the likelihood of driving a conversion.
How Make Data Enrichment Part of Your Marketing Strategy
Data Enrichment alone isn’t a marketing strategy. Instead, data enrichment is a tool which can be leveraged in your marketing efforts. To be successful using data enrichment, you should start with a plan. This plan should include which data enrichment benefits you want to leverage in your marketing and taking inventory of what data you have and what data appends you will need in order to achieve your goal. It should also closely plan how this data will be leveraged in any segmentation or personalization of your marketing messages and sequences.
In addition to planning and implementation on the marketing side, you will need to find a data enrichment partner to fill in the data you need. When evaluating these providers, some of the evaluation criteria to look at are:
- Costs & Minimums
- Data Append Turnaround Times
- Coverage Rates
- Data Quality
Some data enrichment providers are easy to work with, provide great coverage and quality with a reasonable cost and no minimums, while others are more difficult to work with and won’t check all your boxes. Do your homework and take your time finding the right data enrichment provider to work with when introducing data enrichment into your marketing plans.
Try LeadPost’s Data Enrichment for Free
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