To sign up for our daily email newsletter, CLICK HERE
The world of technology has seen dramatic change over the last five years. All the way from personal tech devices like cell phones and laptops to data storage, advancements in CRM, and data analysis, it’s hard to imagine just how many changes have happened. Access to technology has also increased along with communication and commerce like never before.
While these are all good things and have driven the world of business forward, there has also been a certain amount of challenge that all of these advancements and increases have brought. One of those challenges has come in the fact that a lot of this change has meant an increase in data and information like never seen before.
This can be and is in many ways, a good problem to have. With more connection comes more interest, marketing, and commerce, but in the midst of all of this, there are challenges for making this data useful. Namely, the challenge lies in taking this massive amount of data that is available and turning it into useful analytics that can help empower and drive productivity and accomplishment.
One of the most effective tools for taking this increase in data and turning it into a powerful tool for your company is through data enrichment. This process takes a database and appends or, enriches it, with other collected data that is relevant. The process of data enrichment can be complicated and seemingly overwhelming, however, with the right services and software, this can be a simple process with incredible results.
How is Data Enriched?
Before getting into how enriched data can be used to move your business forward, it helps to have a little background as to what exactly the term ‘data enrichment’ means. In the digital world, everything is recorded. Interactions are made every second and data like emails, profile names, methods of payment, locations, and much, much more are all stored somewhere.
As you can probably imagine, this data piles up to be of substantial quantity. This data usually goes on a journey from its origin point of interaction, to what is known as data soils. These large deposits of information can do one of two things – they can simply take up space, or they can be used strategically to improve a company.
One of the problems of this data is that is extremely raw and can be at such an unfiltered state that it remains hard to utilize. That’s where the process of data enrichment comes into the picture. Data enrichment refers to a digital process that takes relevant information to already stored data and appends it. In the case of a data silo, when this happens data is taken out of a silo and placed in a data warehouse where it is ready to be utilized.
Appending data is simply the act of adding more onto an already existing piece of data that optimizes its use. This can look like a lot of different things. For instance, a very simple example of data enrichment is updating a CRM existing data log of users with their correct, and active emails. It could also look like collecting biographical and geographical information such as birthdates, locations, and more and associating it with existing profiles that lack such information.
The process of data enrichment allows for existing data to be enriched with information that is relevantly related in a way that optimizes and refines that data’s ability to serve a purpose. This way the data doesn’t just sit in a silo but can spread across an entire platform or company in a useful and impactful way.
How Does Data Enrichment Benefit Your Company?
When it comes down to the brass tax of how data enrichment can promote your company’s goals and increase your productivity, you have to look at the four main data types that can provide value.
- Product data
- Sales data
- Marketing data
- Billing data
By enriching these four data types a company can increase its analytical accuracy and propel several departments forward. For instance, by enhancing product data with information relevant to purchase interactions, user quantity, usage metrics, and more, you can help to develop a better customer profile that will help your sales and marketing team. This will help these teams understand more about what drives a customer’s in-house transactions or what holds them up.
Billing data can be utilized to give you information relevant to customer profiles that deal with ARR, payment histories and patterns as well as contract sizes. This can help you stay up to date on strategic communication with existing clientele and help to better understand the challenges of potential clients.
Conclusion
Data enrichment is a tool that takes existing data and connects the dots in powerful ways. By investing in the data acquisition that is already part of your company’s property, you can take raw data already on hand and enhance it to be a useful tool.
