Customers demand more from businesses today in terms of service, personalization, and innovation that suits their needs and tastes. If businesses have to stay relevant and keep up with the changing demands, they must invest their resources to learn as much as possible about their target audience.
The good news is that the information age and the internet deliver plenty of such data. The bad news is that more data gets generated all the time, and you have to incorporate it somehow when mining for insights that can help your business remain customer-friendly. Here’s where data enrichment (a part of data management) comes into the picture.
Enriching a dataset ensures data completeness, leading to deeper insights that can help your company’s sales and marketing teams better tune their messaging and offerings to the target consumer’s interests. This leads to better conversion rates and stronger, longer-lasting customer relationships.
Read on if you are curious about the process. We’ll also discuss how businesses benefit when they outsource data enrichment.
Data enrichment is a data management function that appends additional data to existing data sets to enhance their value in some way. Thus, where earlier you would have mere objective data, like a customer’s phone number, enrichment augments it with contextual data, like how often it is used. This additional data is gathered from various parallel sources that are related to the original data sources or it may come from a random source.
With this action, you enrich your data warehousing and gain significant value. You can then maximize the usefulness of your data. The enriched data also helps improve the coordination that exists between a firm’s sales and marketing personnel, improving the overall performance of your customer acquisition and retention process. It also makes for more focused, engaged, and satisfied employees since they won’t have ambiguity about the people they are contacting and won’t be demoralized from negative outcomes that they would face otherwise. The leads thus generated will also be better qualified and more likely to buy what you’re selling, thereby improving your brand’s reputation as well.
With the many benefits being offered by data enrichment, it’s no surprise that business stakeholders are vying for it at every opportunity. However, the process is complicated and resource-intensive as there is always a lot of data to deal with and little time to do it. Your instinct may tell you to immediately start hiring experts for the job at your company, as this in-house setup lets you have complete control over the process and everyone involved in it. But this comes with its set of drawbacks that could hamper your project’s progress overall and end up costing you more than anticipated. Labor costs especially tend to hit on profit margins hard.
Hence, the standard practice is to outsource this process to a dedicated B2B data enrichment services provider. Such agencies will have professionals, tools, and practices that add multiple benefits to your data enrichment project, as detailed below.
If you want to stay ahead of your competition, or at least be on par with them, then you must have your products/services out on the market in record time before your competition. With experts working on your data enrichment, you can hit the low time-to-market figures you need. Their experience helps them quickly identify pertinent information to be added, and they will just as quickly add that information to a dataset.
Data enrichment involves many steps, requiring sophisticated equipment, software, and expert professionals to accomplish. All of those things add to your costs. By outsourcing the process to an external agency, you reduce the costs by eliminating the need to invest in equipment and tools. Your labor charges come down drastically since economies of scale and currency exchange values come into the picture.
Hiring experts on short notice is nearly impossible since the screening process will take a long time. Thus, your project will get delayed. The other option is to go with inexperienced professionals who may not yield the desired results. With an experienced data enrichment company, you get instant access to data enrichment experts.
When you’re adding more information to your enterprise data, it should be kept away from unwanted access as it could give you an edge over your competition. But in this day and age of increased cyber attacks, your data will be vulnerable to such attacks without expert security measures.
External agencies always have such data security and privacy measures in place as they are constantly dealing with sensitive enterprise data. Their safety measures will keep your data safe and not let it suffer leaks and other herm.
Your employees make your business work through their efforts. Pushing them beyond their personal and professional limits by introducing processes like data enrichment can cause them to stress out. Such prolonged stress will demotivate them, leading to high attrition rates.
With dedicated professionals handling data enrichment, however, that won’t be an issue. With reduced ambiguity about their role and lower stress levels, your employees will be more motivated and productive, remaining at your company for a long time.
You may not know everything you should know about data enrichment, like what type of data you should add, what sources are best for the kind of data you need, etc. Making decisions about the process in this state could lead to undesired results. A data expert can assist you in making productive decisions regarding the process. That will help you remain on track to achieving your intended goals for it.
The direction of your business may change for many reasons. Then, your target market will also change, as will the data needed to address that market. In other situations, it’s the wants and needs of your present target market that can change. In either case, the external enrichment expert can align the process to better suit the new conditions, keeping intact your main goals from it i.e., better contact information.
Enterprise database management is a challenge in and of itself since there is constant access occurring from various stakeholders. Your operations depend on that access being smooth to remain efficient. This requires that all the data in the database be organized according to protocol, with accurate categorization. Data enrichment professionals will append data to the right data set so that this categorization is not disrupted, effectively preventing database mismanagement.
eCommerce runs on its inventory being tracked and moved on time and to the right place consistently. With large loads of cargo, this quickly becomes a huge challenge. Through B2B data enrichment services, you can hire resources who can log in the right information in your database regarding product inventory, orders, and such.
No eCommerce business is an island. It needs supportive business partners like suppliers and vendors to thrive. Gaining such partners is an arduous task, especially if you don’t have sufficient information about the ones you’ve shortlisted. With data enrichment experts providing contextual information about them, you can get the kind of partner your business needs.
Scaling can take a toll on your business if not done properly, especially if you charge ahead quickly without adequate preparation. But scaling is an inevitable part of eCommerce, so it’s bound to happen sooner or later. You can be prepared by having data enrichment experts provide contextual information about all the markets you intend to expand your business in. The insights gained about your potential target audience there will ease your scaling process and minimize risks.
A package may make many stops on its way to its destination address. These could include international checkpoints. It will help your eCommerce company a lot if you know the background of the people handling your cargo. Data enrichment experts can give you such contextual information so that you can easily resolve disputes if they occur at any point in the shipping/logistics chain.
Competitor research is essential to stay ahead in the business world, especially eCommerce. Data enrichment professionals are directly involved in extracting data about your competitors from authorized sources you provide. They could add any useful information they come across. This enhances your knowledge about your competitors, enabling you to get a better market edge.
Tools can make or break a job, so you always need to have the latest and best to get good results. Data enrichment companies buy access to such tools, automate much of the process, and ensure accuracy without the added cost and time. They always keep themselves updated with the latest tools so that your enrichment doesn’t fall behind your competition.
Enterprise data needs to undergo a lot of data management functions in addition to enrichment, like data cleaning, appending, and verification. Decent data enrichment companies offer a complete suite of data management functions and cater to all these requirements at once. By opting to go with data enrichment professionals, you open the door to improving the overall health of your data.
The world is becoming more data-hungry, asking businesses to follow further on that path. With the help of professionals from a data enrichment company, your data health will progress, you’ll get better customer conversion rates, and also build brand loyalty while establishing strong network connections that can push your company ahead in the market.
Gracie Ben is a data analyst currently working at DataEntryIndia.in, a leading data entry services company providing data entry & mining services & other data-related solutions. For more than ten years, she has actively contributed to the growth of many enterprises & businesses (startups, SMEs, and big companies) by guiding them to utilize their data assets. Having a keen interest in data science, Gracie keeps herself up-to-date on all the latest data trends and technologies shaping the industry and transforming businesses. She has written over 1600 articles and informative blogs so far covering various topics, including data entry, data management, data mining, web research, and more.
