They say money won’t make you wealthy, but data definitely can. By far, data enrichment is crucial, especially when it comes to the 360-degree customer view, as it can give your company the authentic voice of the customer along with decent revenues.
Companies that know their audiences’ tastes outperform their competitors and obtain the desired results. To reveal customers’ needs, data enrichment services come into play. They collect information about consumers’ behavior and their preferred methods of communication.
In this article, we mainly focus on the data enrichment process and the tools that carry it out. Here, we also explain what benefits an organization can obtain by implementing data enrichment practices.
Table of contents
- What Is Data Enrichment?
- Advantages of Data Enrichment
- Techniques for Effective Data Enrichment
- What Are Data Enrichment Services?
- Top Tools for Data Enrichment
- Tips for Choosing the Right Data Enrichment Company
- Conclusion
What Is Data Enrichment?
Data enrichment is a process of adding details to a customer profile by making it exhaustive and multifaceted. This process involves internal organizational data apps as well as third-party datasets. Meanwhile, data enrichment services ingest information from such sources and add it to a general customer profile.
There are two principal categories of client information suitable for enrichment:
- Contact details. Ensure that companies reach their current or potential consumers.
- Behavioral patterns. Light up a personalized approach for each customer.
In general, data enhancement serves customer-related departments. It aims to improve their daily workflows, conversion rates, brand loyalty, and other important metrics.
Advantages of Data Enrichment
Well, it’s clear that marketers and sales professionals are very interested in enriching customer data, but how can entire organizations benefit from it? Let’s shed light on this by providing solid advantages that data enrichment brings to an organization:
- Enhanced data quality. The problem of missing values is very common here and there. However, it’s not acceptable when it comes to user-related details. To complement missing details about a customer, data enrichment is there.
- Facilitated decision-making. Having all data at disposition is like planning a trip with a map on the table. Managers no longer have white spots in understanding customers, so they can make wise and balanced decisions.
- Improved customer segmentation and targeting. With details about clients, it becomes a piece of cake to categorize them by any parameter. Data enrichment tools help to consolidate behavioral patterns and show which groups of customers prefer which products or who buys the most cheap/expensive services.
Techniques for Effective Data Enrichment
By now, we have been mainly concentrating on the theory of data enrichment phenomenon. Now, it’s time to review some practical solutions and techniques for improving the data quality by enriching it.
Usually, the operations on data are either manual or automated. The first case might be an option only for small datasets, but that doesn’t exclude human error. Automated processes rely on data enrichment services and usually involve the following steps:
- Data collection. Information about users comes from different channels and is usually stored within various data locations.
- Data cleaning. Depending on the technology used, this stage might apply before or after integration. It assumes the removal of duplicate records or correction of corrupted data.
- Data integration. This is the core of data enrichment, involving combining data from organizational apps, databases, and other resources.
All these stages, step-by-step, form a single source of truth about customers, which serves for marketing and sales teams.
What Are Data Enrichment Services?
Tools for automated enhancement of customer data are called data enrichment services. They could be roughly classified into two groups:
- data integration services.
- data discovery platforms.
Data integration tools, such as Skyvia, operate data as described above and consolidate it in a central repository. Collected data includes contact details and behavioral patterns such as time spent on a website, reactions, etc.
Data discovery platforms enhance user information in another way – they provide quality datasets for companies to reach new customers or learn more about the existing ones in a particular sector. Such services can be used together with data integration platforms.
Top Tools for Data Enrichment
It’s the right moment to learn about particular tools for data enrichment.
Skyvia
Skyvia is a universal SaaS data platform for quick and easy solving data-related tasks: data integration, ETL & Reverse ETL, automating workflows, creating complex data pipelines and simple integrations, CSV import/export, etc.
With Skyvia, you can:
- Load data from one source to another with Import integration (ETL and Reverse ETL).
- Transfer data to a data warehouse with the Replication scenario (ELT approach).
- Export critical data from business apps in a CSV format with the Export option.
- Sync several applications with the Synchronization scenario to make the customer data up-to-date in all systems.
Additionally, Skyvia offers complex integration scenarios, Control Flow, and Data Flow, allowing you to:
- involve several sources for data enrichment
- set up pre- and post-integration tasks
- perform data integration tasks in a specific order following certain conditions
Skyvia is a powerful tool that allows you to:
- Perform any operation with no coding.
- Construct desired data flows in seconds only using the drag-and-drop user interface.
- Connect to 170+ sources (cloud apps, databases, data warehouses) to enrich data.
- Test all the functionality on a free trial.
Clearbit
Clearbit is a data enrichment service that mainly assists B2B companies. It easily integrates with popular CRMs, such as HubSpot, to complement existing records with 100+ data points. For instance, it adds information about location, employee count, annual revenue, and other details about the company of interest.
The pricing for the Clearbit service is flexible, though data enrichment is available under the Business plan only.
Zoominfo
Another popular platform for data discovery is called Zoominfo – it contains accurate datasets about businesses. Organizations targeting B2B companies as their targeted clients can freely use Zoominfo for data enrichment purposes.
This tool has the SalesOS solution for helping sales managers obtain more information about their prospects and find new leads. Meanwhile, the MarketingOS solution supplies multiple attributes about companies, which provides great changes to modernize marketing campaigns.
Datanyze
In fact, Datanyze was acquired by Zoominfo several years ago, though it’s still presented as a standalone product. Similarly to Zoominfo, it provides B2B contact data but with a strong focus on sales, while Zoominfo offers a broader spectrum of options suitable for marketers, organizational teams, and HR.
Datanyze is a browser extension integrating cloud CRMs and marketing automation platforms. It supplies companies with real-time information that is regularly updated. This solution also has a strong objective to introduce new prospects to sales managers in the industry they’re targeting.
LeadGenius
LeadGenius is known as a lead procurement and sales intelligence platform. It helps companies to generate, qualify, deliver, and convert leads, which accelerates and increases sales.
LeadGenius is a cloud-based solution, so it can be installed as a browser extension and integrated with other SaaS solutions for sales.
Leadspace
Similarly to other tools, Leadspace also provides accurate industry-oriented datasets. However, Leadspace is more than just a data enrichment service because it provides extra functions for analyzing how enhanced data works.
FullContact
FullContact has a series of different products, and one of them, called Enrich, helps businesses nurture records. This tool is suitable for different types of businesses as it provides plans for enriching the data of individual customers as well as companies.
Tips for Choosing the Right Data Enrichment Company
The abundance of data enrichment tools provokes the difficulty of choice. In order not to get lost in this wood, here are some crucial tips to select the proper solution.
- Define strategic goals that the business needs to achieve in the next month or year.
- Explore the set of features of each tool of interest and see how it aligns with strategic goals.
- Decide which audience the company targets – B2B or B2C customers.
- Consider how to obtain the needed data – whether it’s needed to consolidate internal information about users or find third-party external datasets.
- See how the price for a specific data enrichment product meets your budget.
Those are only small suggestions for selecting the right data enrichment service. Criteria, such as supported languages, ease of use, and the level of integration with other products, may also be critical factors for purchase.
Conclusion
Companies participate in a neverending race to get higher revenues through marketing and sales initiatives. However, the quality of data isn’t usually superior for new prospects and existing customers, which impedes from reaching the desired numbers. One of the modern approaches addressing this problem is data enrichment.
This process relies on data enrichment services of two types:
- Data integration (Skyvia)
- Data discovery (Clearbit, ZoomInfo, Leadgenius).
Choosing a data integration tool, such as Skyvia, could be advantageous for data enrichment. Skyvia can bring together internal organizational tools (CRMs, ERP systems, cloud apps) and access more than 170 sources to ingest third-party data from there. Besides that, you can use Skyvia for other data-related tasks!
