As a business owner, marketer, or just a typical customer data enthusiast, you’ve got to ask yourself: Does your current data provide a complete picture of your customers?

Data enrichment allows you to gain context about your audience and to fill in the gaps and truly understand who your customers are.

When data enrichment is done right, all your collected complex data will work together to answer questions, gather insights, forecast the future and even suggest new ways of doing business. In other words, gain a business advantage.

Should I enrich my data?

The short answer is yes, but keep reading for the long answer.

The thing about data is that, like the human beings it is connected to, it doesn’t remain stagnant and if it is not updated, then over time it can become essentially useless. Data enrichment is an ongoing process. Think about one of your first customers and where they are now. They may have changed jobs, moved addresses, had an increase or decrease of income, or adjusted their purchasing habits.

Now take a moment to think about how a change in any of the above variables will affect your messaging to that customer. It will be the difference between sending them irrelevant content that may tarnish your relationship, or sending content that is tailored for them.

Data enrichment can help solve this problem. The right tool can crawl the internet in search of data to keep your customer information updated. It takes a mundane task of researching customers and updating their profile, or continuously asking customers to update their profiles themselves, and automates it all.

With access to an accurate and complete data set, you’ll gain insights that allow you to:

• make better, more informed business decisions,

• easily personalize content,

• plus grow an enriched and extensive customer database.

We touch on the benefits in the next section, however it’s important to note just how easy it is to enrich your data. Once logged in, use our Zapier integration to connect your Clearbit account to Ortto. Once the zap is in place, Clearbit will enrich your data. Filling out any holes in your data and automatically refreshing your customer records any time a change has been made. It’s that simple.

Data enrichment benefits

There are many reasons you should be enriching your data starting today. Here are just a few of the benefits to your business.

Improved data accuracy

If you’re working with out-of-date records, you could miss important details about your buyers like customer seniority, industry information, employee count, location, and revenue. Along with keeping your records current, data enrichment also de-duplicates data. If there are duplicates in your data, this can really mess up your data quality, meaning you're making decisions with inaccurate information. Ensure this doesn’t happen to you by enriching your data.

Build stronger customer relationships

Enriched data will provide you with the tools needed to develop meaningful customer relationships and more business opportunities. You’ll be able to understand your customers, anticipate their needs and supply them with only relevant content.

Saves money

Storing data costs money. By enriching your data you are not holding on to useless and inaccurate information. The money spent that would otherwise be used on storage can now be used on other business critical activities.

Get serious about sales

You always have a clean and accurate contact list with data enrichment. This will increase your sales efficiency, plus your sales team will always have access to up-to-date data. And because you know your customers better through data enrichment, you’ll have a greater chance to cross- and upsell.

10 real world data enrichment growth examples

1. Reduce form churns

There are a couple of no-brainers that need to be considered when implementing forms on your website. The form cannot be long. No one has time to sit there and fill out a 10 or even 5 question form. The longer the form, the higher the risk of the user exiting without completion. The idea is to make it as streamlined and frictionless as possible.

The second pointer is not to ask personal questions. Leads often prefer not to share specific pieces of information including LinkedIn or Twitter profiles, phone numbers etc.

Your form should simply get the information you absolutely need from the user, then by implementing a robust data enrichment tool you will be able to then retrieve the other parts of information separately and fill in the gaps.

As this is your lead's first interaction with your brand it's important not to start it off in a negative light. Make the form simple, easy and short.

2. Look for cross - and upsell opportunities

Data enrichment can be an ultimate sales tool when used correctly. Since data is being updated in real-time, you can use changes in data as an opportunity to cross- or upsell your product. It gets even easier as this can all be automated through Ortto.

For example, let’s say you're a SaaS company with a tiered pricing plan structure. One of your customers is considered a growing organization. When they started using your product they were sitting at 20-40 people within the organization.

Your data enrichment tool (e.g. Clearbit integrated with Ortto), has seen a change in the organization’s size, growing to 60. This has now been updated in your CDP. The trigger you created in Ortto has now alerted you to this, and the following automated steps are now taken:

• Your sales team is alerted through a Slack notification. They can contact the customer and speak to them about increasing their product plan.

• The customer is sent on a customer nurture journey, including targeted ads that highlight the features of the next tiered plan.

3. Enhance segmentation

Audience segmentation alone will truly take your campaigns to the next level. Adding data enrichment will further improve your segmentation activities as it builds on your current database with valuable information that your company can utilize when creating segments.

For example, a form sits on your website asking visitors to sign up to your mailing list. The form asks for their full name, email address and to tick a few boxes with what they’re interested in receiving news about. Once that information is added to your customer data platform, like Ortto, a data enrichment tool can then crawl the internet in search of extra information to build out your new subscribers profile. It can look for information around their current employer, location, the industry they’re in, or average income. Just to name a few.

If you have an event coming up, now you can segment an audience for those working tech and software at a mid-management level in the Sydney area.

Segmentation will give you an edge over your competitors as you can now connect with your customers on a much more personal level and even anticipate their needs.

4. Boost lead scoring

The longevity of your company relies on accurate lead scoring, and healthy conversion rates. There are a few ways to ensure your lead scoring capabilities are optimized.

• Your marketing and sales team are working closely together to find new users, and nurture them to become loyal customers.

• Implement a data enrichment tool into your CDP. This removes any tedious manual processes so your team can focus on other meaningful tasks.

Let’s say you are scoring leads based on user activity on your website, e.g. checking your pricing plan page multiple times in a short period. If you’re a SaaS company with a free trial activated, you can track engagement scores, whether the user has taken a product-qualifying action and, use a data enrichment tool like Clearbit, to find out the size of the company so you can get an idea of the opportunity potential.

Now with all of this information at your fingertips, you can score your leads and send them into a tailored journey, whether that's product-led, sales-led or somewhere in between.

5. Hyper-personalization

Hyper-personalization may sound like a buzzword, but at its core, it's about creating meaningful connections with customers and leads.

The more data you have available to you the more personalized your content can become. And this is where enriching comes in. Not only will it keep your data updated (so youre not sending irrelevant messaging), but also ensures you have a comprehensive outlook on all your customers.

For example, your SaaS product is an employee onboarding software and your demographic is HR professionals. Your data enrichment tool can search through hiring sites like Indeed, Glassdoor or Seek to see the companies who are actively recruiting at scale. As onboarding can be a pain point for many larger companies, your content can be personalized to their needs, industry and organizational size.

6. Monitor business signals‍

When we talk about business signals we mean any sort of activity indicating that a lead is ready to buy, or needs the solution your product or service offers..

These signals are usually based around time-sensitive, news-driven data learned from a company’s social channels or other media outlets. Perhaps it's moving to a new office location, or there’s a change in management, or they received their next round of funding.

Data enrichment tools will crawl over the internet and pull this information directly to your contact database. Let’s take the example of an organization receiving their next round of funding. They have previously shared with you that they love your product, but weren’t able to commit due to budget. Thanks to your data enrichment tool, now is the time to reach back out with a personalized pitch.

7. Welcome back lost leads

Just because a lead has said no in the past doesn’t mean you should write them off completely. Budgets, decision-makers, and business needs all can change within a year or two, so it doesn’t hurt to reach back out and see these lost leads as a new opportunity.

Creating a lost leads audience within your customer data platform, where you can store these potentials and keep their details updated with data enrichment will be an easy activity to have running behind the scenes.

Then if any changes occur, you can then trigger an outreach journey, or have your sales team make the next move.

8. Farewell data silos

Data silos are all too common, causing a huge interconnectivity barrier between teams. Imagine if all your data can be found in one platform, unified from a range of different data sources. Where data enrichment tools can be integrated and your customer details are always updated in real time.

Ortto’s customer data platform uses no-code integrations to unlock data from marketing, finance, support, sales and product into a single customer profile. Then by integrating an enrichment tool like Clearbit using Zapier you can develop your customer data into the comprehensive list you’ve always dreamed of.

Anyone within your company has access to the same information meaning everyone can make well-informed, data-driven business decisions.

9. Identify your ideal customer

Knowing your ideal customers is like getting a head start in a race. You can focus your acquisition energy into a target audience who are far more likely to convert, or take a desired action.

Let’s say you are an online grocery delivery system. You will be expanding your delivery area into four more suburbs within the next month. From your substantial amount of customer data from your current catchment, you have identified that your ideal customer is likely to be between 25 - 35 years old, earning over $100,000, and have an average order value of $30.

With Ortto, you utilize this enriched data and build a custom audience segment. This can then sync with your Facebook, Google and Twitter integrations to create lookalike audiences that can be targeted in ads.

Lookalike audience will help you talk to the audience most likely to take action and even penetrate a completely new market.

10. A better customer experience

Providing a better customer experience (CX) can set you apart from your competitors. If a prospect has the choice between two companies and you’ve provided a seamless, personalized experience for them thus far, they would naturally choose your company.

This customer experience can only really be delivered by utilizing and maximizing the customer data available to you. Brands with a data enrichment process will gain a better understanding of their customer and what matters to them.

Identify the data that matters and is likely to make the biggest impact to provide a better experience for the customers.

The final word

Data enrichment simply means better, more accurate data. It ensures your business is set up to make better decisions and deliver more personalized experiences.

At Ortto we’re committed to not just unifying data, but ensuring that anyone in an organization, regardless of their data analysis skills, can read and segment data with ease. Try Ortto out today with a free 14-day trial.