Data Enrichment Best Practices That You Must Know

In today’s business scenario, customer data is available in more forms than ever before. It is a good thing on one hand and an overwhelming challenge on the other. Good, because there is no dearth of relevant information and challenging, for the simple reason that businesses often find themselves at a loss when they have to identify trends within a data set. This is where data enrichment comes in as a handy tool. It is essentially the process of merging multiple data sources that enables business to build strong data profiles that eventually help them make well informed decisions. On the surface the process of data enrichment might sound complicated, but if you follow a structured approach and industry best practices, you can easily reap its benefits. Let’s find out the best practices associated with data enrichment services.

A majority of businesses choose to outsource data enrichment services to get the desired results, knowledge of the best practices associated with data enrichment will allow you to leverage outsourcing in your favor.

Optimize lead data

In today’s highly dynamic marketplace your lead data is always in flux. While some of the lead lists decay due to the movement of key personnel from one company to another, the rest of them become redundant as a result of people changing their email addresses and contact information. In such a situation automation comes in as a handy tool that enables you to keep your lead data up to date. When your lead data is in good form, your bounce rate comes down automatically and you are also able to avoid being blacklisted as a result of broadcasting email campaigns to the same address many times.

There is no dearth of automation tools in the market that not only keep your lead data up to date, but also shorten the lead capture from. People generally take out time to fill up short forms and the rest of the information is captured later by the automated tool. Once you have the vital information, the automation tool captures other information such as job roles, company name and social media profiles etc. thus giving you a complete buyer’s persona. Adopting automation reduces your work on one hand, and leads to better conversion rates on the other.

Apply dual lead scoring process

Another critical data enrichment process that businesses often falter on is the lead scoring. It happens mainly because lead scoring and enrichment call for manual work. As each lead is unique depending on its position is the sales funnel, budget, and level of engagement, it has to be analyzed by experienced resources individually to drive conversion. Though a number of automated software like Salesforce offer accurate lead scoring functionality, the results may vary depending on the original data. A mix of automation and manual enrichment process gives you more accurate results. While automation helps you identifying the trends within a data set, manual analysis can monitor business critical information such as customer behavior, location, and business size etc.

Define opportunities and goals

You might have a team of the best data scientists at your disposal to give you bespoke data enrichment services, but success will be elusive unless you have clearly carved out the goals of your enrichment process. When you give your team a well defined path, your data scientists can easily identify trends within the data. It also allows them to make predictions, and detect new opportunities. Business critical information such as changes in customer behavior, frequency of product use, customer service requests, and key employees leaving the company etc. can easily be retrieved when you give your resources clear goals in these terms. In turn you can use this information to devise strategies of staying ahead of the competition.

Use data enrichment to enhance customer experience

A Salesforce study has found that by 2020 more than 51% customers would expect the companies to anticipate their needs in advance and suggest relevant products to them. This is simply an eye opening reflection on what should be the focus of your data enrichment services. Whether you outsource data enrichment services of do in on your own, the one area that your data enrichment should concentrate on is enhancing customer experience. Automation around data gathering, prospecting, enhancing conversion is all fine, but in the longer run it is the customer experience that will boost your ROI. So, if you want to sustain your business and stay competitive in the market, drive all your data enrichment services towards customer experience.

While data enrichment is an absolute must for the success of your business, knowing the best practices used in the process also holds a lot of value. Industry best practices are a result of years of research into customer behavior and their expectations. After all what value would it add to your business if you know the email address of your prospective buyers. Data enrichment best practices not only add value to your decision making by procuring a complete buyer’s persona, but also help you in identifying trends.