In this current day and age, practically every organization is steadily collecting first-party data and third-party data to fuel their insights and business choices. This simple fact contributes to use data enrichment being a central challenge in all industries that must be overcome to succeed.
Most companies can capture raw data but much less are able to convert these realizations into action, which only further magnifies the importance of data enrichment.
Data enrichment, also referred to as data enhancement, is the methodology of improving existing datasets with information that stems from additional sources.
This additional information could appear in the form of product, marketing, sales, or even billing analytics.
The objective with data enrichment is to pair this customer data together to be able to cross-examine it for more nuanced and thorough insights, ultimately to pass over the benefit of all of this to the customer to have an enriched experience when engaging with an organization’s products and services.
Now we come to the area of who inside of an organization typically uses this freshly enriched data, and this is definitely not a one-word answer because its benefits are spread widely across an organization’s employees.
Let’s take a look at home to best use data enrichment for billing, product data, lead and account enrichment, as well as for marketing and sales.
Table of Contents
1. Billing and Product Data
Billing data applies to all of the details that are captured during the procedure of payment when a customer makes a purchase, which can include details such as annual recurring revenue (ARR), determining previous payment dates, and contract sizes.
Product data refers to details regarding the customer directly through the product, such as the use cases, the number of users, product usage metrics, sign-up dates, and purchases as well.
2. Lead and Account Enrichment
Lead enrichment deals with tracking the activity of particular prospects or already-existing customers to expand internal data, which provides additional insight into existing leads by adding in additional data from other sources.
In most cases, lead enrichment is done by enhancing lead information in an existing database or CRM data enrichment tool.
This is even more important for businesses with a PLG/self-serve signup process due to the fact that all of the information about the customer is pulled in-product and the associated business teams in an organization usually don’t have access to tools like Amplitude or Mixpanel that have the ability to capture product analytics.
Having the knowledge of where exactly a prospect or customer is in their journey is of key importance for sales and marketing teams that are in need of increasing their conversion rates for consumer engagement.
Data enrichment creates access to knowing about emails that were opened, being able to associate product usage, integrations installed, and resources there downloaded.
Account enrichment and lead enrichment are practically the same things, with the key differentiator being the focus placed on accounts rather than individual prospects.
Product data shouldn’t be something that is inaccessible to business teams because problems can carry over on an account level due to the fact that individual account executives and marketers won’t be able to know who to market to.
Being able to identify which users are most active according to their product usage makes it easier to handle this.
3. Marketing and Sales
Marketing data deals with the information that takes place throughout the customer journey, such as links that have been clicked, resources that were downloaded, and how long sessions lasted.
Sales data refers to all of the insights that emerge from the customer during the process of the sales pipeline, such as first meetings, companies in POC/trail, active deals, and product demo dates.
When it is all said and done, the key use cases for data enrichment are more times than not centered around sales and marketing teams that need detailed information looking for leads to be garnered from the customer journey and can be utilized to provide better service.
Getting free users upgraded into becoming paid customers is a major reason for data enrichment, using it to deliver highly personalized offers and messages.
Basically, each and every single business captures all of the data that they need to make sound business decisions. But that doesn’t mean that they are all making good use of that data with steps that their team can actually act on.
Keep in mind that if your data is siloed and sequestered in a manner that makes it too difficult to access freely by the most non-technical members of your staff, how will they ever be able to make accurately informed decisions?
This is where the true value of data enrichment becomes apparently clear.
