In this day in age, data has proven its worth time and time again. Most companies are collecting data every day. However, many companies are not exactly sure how to make the most use of the data they are collecting. They also aren’t sure if they are ordering the right data or even enough data. It’s one thing to collect data, and it’s another thing to use that data to make crucial business decisions to further the company. This is why companies are beginning to look into data enrichment and how it can give businesses a competitive advantage. Taking steps to implement data enrichment into your business can turn your data insights into actions and better-informed decisions overall.

Data Enrichment At Its Core

Understanding what data enrichment can do for your company is crucial. Most companies are familiar with CRM platforms containing basic customer and client information. Information like name, email, phone number, and address are common fields in SaaS tools. However, data enrichment takes it one step further. Data enrichment is the process of enhancing data with more information from other sources. When you gain more information on a customer and enrich the data you have, you now can see even more about a customer and make better-informed decisions. The data enrichment process can also give more accurate views of a customer or client, improving customer experience. 

Here’s why data enrichment is essential. In most companies, data is collected through different sources and then funneled into a cloud data platform. When the data is in the warehouse, it’s only understandable for data teams and other technical users that understand SQL. Reports can be made for business stakeholders, but reports are only a general perspective of what is actually going on with individual consumers. Without knowing what is going on with individual consumers, data collection is kind of a waste. Your teams, like sales, finance, support, marketing, and product, have no way of accessing this information and using it to make better decisions about users and create a better customer experience. Data enrichment democratizes this key information to everyone instead of just the users who understand SQL. With more customer data available, your teams can make actionable decisions based on all the information at hand instead of just a general report. Now everyone has access to the same information across the company, making uniform decisions that contribute to the company’s goals.

Data Enrichment Types

There are a few different types of data enrichment. These types can help focus on information related to the consumer. These types are:

  • Behavioral data enrichment: Looks to add behavioral patterns to user profiles.
  • Demographic data enrichment: studies the customer in depth.
  • Geographic data enrichment: gathers information surrounding the customer.

With more access to data, a business will want to gain as much information about a consumer as they can. This way a company can decide the ideal behavioral attributes for customers, and make decisions based off of the specific data they collected. To take data enrichment further, there are data subsets that can provide much value to a company:

  • Product data: information about a customer that comes from them using a product such as sign up date, messages sent, and number of users.
  • Sales data: information about a customer that comes from the sales process such as first meeting, free trials, and product demos.
  • Marketing data: information about a customer from their overall journey such as web pages viewed, link clicks, and resources downloaded.
  • Finance data: information about a customer that comes from the payment process such as contract size, subscription type, and annual recurring revenue.

Implementing Data Enrichment

Now that you understand what data enrichment is and ways to get more data, you can learn how to implement it into your business. There are some data enrichment tools that can help give your teams access to crucial information. Some examples are:

  • CDPs: users can consolidate all of their customer data into one platform and can be sent to different places. They can easily integrate with other third party APIs and push data into preferred tools.
  • iPaaS: platforms that easily move data from point A to point B, and can build intuitive workflows for simple use cases. 
  • Reverse ETL: integrates with the data warehouse so users can sync data to their end destination. Users just need to define the data and send it to the necessary columns and fields.

Leverage Your Data

With companies using data enrichment to leverage their data, business teams can all access the same information to make better business decisions. This creates better customer experiences and more informed decisions that line up with the direction a company wants to go. Data enrichment leads to a 360-degree view of a customer that is accessible to your sales, marketing, finance, support, and product teams. With data enrichment, your company goes from accessible data, to actionable data. This can drive outcomes and improve the effectiveness of a company overall.