How To Automate Contact Data Enrichment Process In 10 Steps
Simplify your workflow with a 10-step guide to automating contact data enrichment and enhancing lead management.
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Imagine you’re a salesperson and just landed a hot lead. After a quick Google search of the contact, you discover many outdated information, like an old employer, a different city, and even an obsolete phone number. To make matters worse, you find out this person is now a competitor, and you’ve wasted valuable time and resources. Wouldn’t it be nice to avoid this awkward situation altogether? Contact data enrichment can help. The term refers to automatically filling in missing data fields on a contact to create a complete profile. Not only does this process help you get to know your prospects before reaching out, but it can also help you avoid contacting someone with outdated information. This blog will examine Data enrichment techniques and explain how to automate contact data enrichment.
Aomni’s website technology checker is a valuable tool for achieving your goals. It can help you learn how to automate contact data enrichment and enrich your existing data to make your marketing efforts more effective.
What is Data Enrichment in B2B?
Data enrichment is enhancing the value of existing data with additional information. It often uses reliable third-party data sources to add more information to customer contact information or other data. The goal of data enrichment is to improve the value of the data by providing more insight into your customers.
No doubt you’ll have lots of customer data already. For example, information on their previous transactions or whether they’re signed up for your newsletter. It’s also likely that you’re missing important data that adds up to create a:
- Complete and rich profile about them
- Their preferences
- Behaviors
- Needs
The Role of Data Enrichment in Personalizing Customer Experiences and Driving Sales
Data enrichment is one key way to optimize marketing efforts and improve sales. Enriched customer data allows marketers to understand better their audience and their purchasing behaviors, including what offers they’re interested in, which products or services they are interested in, and what drives them to complete a purchase.
This is important because the more you know about your customers, the better you can serve them and improve their experience. After all, insufficient data is bad business and can impact everything from compliance to new opportunities.
How to Enrich Your Data: The Enrichment Process
The data enrichment process involves multiple steps that work together to enhance your datasets effectively:
Data Collection
Enrichment tools access data sources to gather additional information, including:
- Public databases
- Social media platforms
- Proprietary databases
Data Matching
The collected data matches your existing records using unique identifiers like email addresses or company names.
Data Appending
Once a match is found, the enrichment tool appends the relevant data to your records, filling in the gaps.
Data Validation
Enrichment tools verify the accuracy and consistency of the appended data. During this phase, any discrepancies or errors are corrected.
Data Integration
Enriched data is seamlessly integrated into your CRM, marketing automation tools, or databases, ensuring easy access for your team.
Why is Data Enrichment Important In B2B
Improving Customer Experience with Data Enrichment
Data enrichment can significantly enhance the customer experience. Some notable research shows the importance of personalized customer experiences:
- 66% of customers want brands to understand their unique needs and expectations.
- 52% want all offers that come from a brand to be personalized.
- 54% of customers say they’re likely to look at items in-store and buy them online (or vice-versa)
- 53% of brands are investing in omnichannel strategies to match
Accurate, enriched data is the key to creating targeted, personalized customer experiences—and the lack thereof can turn customers away.
Cost Efficiency Through Data Enrichment
Data enrichment can also help reduce total costs.
Here’s why:
- With a solid data enrichment strategy, your focus shifts to keeping data that matters to your company, such as customer contact information or transaction histories.
- Other, less relevant data can be deleted or shifted to lower-cost long-term storage sites.
- Enrichment makes detecting and eliminating redundant data possible to reduce overall spending.
Personalized Experiences Are the Best Experiences
Customers want personalized experiences, and data enrichment helps businesses deliver them. Companies can use enriched data to understand customer preferences and behaviors and segment audiences to create targeted marketing campaigns.
With precise data, brands can personalize communications and offer to help improve:
- The buyer’s journey
- Reduce churn
- Make customers feel valued
Related Reading
- Data Enrichment Best Practices
- B2B Data Enrichment Solutions
- Email Enrichment
How To Automate Contact Data Enrichment Process In 10 Steps
1. Define Your Data Enrichment Goals
Before sorting through tools or workflows, clearly define what you want to achieve with your data enrichment project. Think about the types of data you want to enrich.
This could be:
- Personal Details: Names, email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, or social media profiles.
- Company Information: Industry, size, revenue, headquarters location, etc.
- Social Data: LinkedIn profiles, Twitter handles, or public social activity.
- Behavioral Insights: Interaction history, such as engagement with email campaigns, product usage, or website visits.
Having clear goals ensures that you’re not just collecting data for the sake of it but gathering insights that drive results.
2. Understand the Purpose
Ask yourself, why are we enriching data? Your answer will shape the enrichment process. Knowing your “why” is key, whether it’s for sales prospecting, segmenting your audience for marketing campaigns, or improving customer service. Also, decide how frequently you need to update your data.
Options include:
- Real-Time Enrichment: Automatically update data when a new lead enters the system.
- Batch Updates: Run scheduled updates weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
- On-Demand Enrichment: This feature triggers updates based on specific actions, such as a lead filling out a form or engaging with a campaign.
3. Choose the Right Data Enrichment Tool
Your tool of choice will make or break the process, so choose wisely.
Look for tools that offer:
- High-Quality Data: Reliable and up-to-date global data.
- Integration-Friendly: Seamless connection with your CRM or other platforms.
- Automation Features: Smart workflows that minimize manual effort.
- Privacy Compliance: Adherence to GDPR, CCPA, and other regulations.
Popular options like Cognism, ZoomInfo, and Clearbit provide robust data enrichment capabilities. Evaluate their strengths and pick one that fits your needs.
4. Integrate Your CRM
Integrating your data enrichment tool with your CRM ensures smooth workflows. Tools like Cognism make this simple.
For instance:
- Log in with your credentials.
- Head to settings to link your CRM (e.g., Salesforce).
- Enable automatic data syncing to enrich records directly within your CRM.
This connection ensures enriched data flows seamlessly into the system, keeping your contact profiles fresh and detailed.
5. Automate the Process with Smart Triggers
Automation is the heart of efficient data enrichment. Use smart triggers to make updates effortless.
For example:
- New Contact Triggers: Automatically enrich data when new leads are added.
- Updated Contact Triggers: Refresh records when a contact’s info changes (e.g., a new job title).
- Batch Updates: Schedule nightly or weekly processes to enrich entire groups of contacts.
- Real-Time Updates: Keep information accurate during live campaigns or customer interactions.
6. Map Data Correctly
Ensure enriched data lands in the proper CRM fields. If the tool adds a company’s revenue or industry, confirm it’s mapped to the correct fields (e.g., “Annual Revenue” or “Industry”). Misaligned data can create confusion, so use CRM features like dynamic field mapping to automate this step.
7. Prevent Duplicates
Duplicates are a nightmare for clean data. Use deduplication rules to ensure your database stays organized. Tools like Cognism can match records by email or combinations of fields (like name and company), updating existing entries instead of creating duplicates.
8. Keep Data Quality in Check
Even the best tools aren’t 100% perfect. Regularly audit enriched data to spot errors or inconsistencies. Cross-reference with multiple sources to validate key fields and run periodic cleansing to remove outdated or irrelevant information.
Success story: Darwinbox saw a 10% improvement in database quality after implementing Cognism. They enriched 15,000 U.S.-based contacts with over 90% accuracy, showing the power of regular quality checks.
9. Monitor and Optimize
Track the performance of your enrichment process. Are your tools providing accurate, valuable data? If not, adjust your workflows by tweaking triggers, updating data sources, or experimenting with enrichment intervals.
For instance, if API limits are causing delays, add backups or schedule fewer real-time updates. And if enrichment fails, have a manual review process to catch errors promptly.
10. Stay Privacy-Compliant
Data privacy isn’t optional—it’s essential. Ensure your enrichment process complies with GDPR, CCPA, or industry-specific regulations. Obtain consent when necessary, provide opt-out options, and ensure your privacy policies cover data enrichment activities.
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- Clearbit vs Apollo
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- Apollo.io vs ZoomInfo
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- Data Enhancement vs Data Enrichment
- Contact Enrichment Tools
5 Contact Data Enrichment Best Practices
1. Define Clear Objectives
Establishing precise objectives is crucial for measuring the effectiveness of your data enrichment processes. To do this, define SMART goals that are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Timely
For example, you aim to improve data quality by a particular percentage or increase the accuracy of customer segmentation.
2. Combine Enrichment With Data Cleansing
There's no point in enriching insufficient data, so cleaning your data first is critical. This step ensures you weed out errors, delete irrelevant data, and update your remaining sets with relevant external information.
3. Select Reliable Data Sources
Ensure your third-party data is accurate, up-to-date, and relevant to your business or industry. For example, you might glean fresh insights from government databases and business information platforms like:
- Aomni
- Crunchbase
- LinkedIn profiles
- News articles
4. Prioritize Data Security and Privacy
As with any type of data handling, businesses must protect sensitive information and comply with relevant data regulations. Ensure that your data enrichment process is secure and transparent, and always gain customers' consent to use their data.
5. Integrate Data With Your Workflows
Data enrichment must be an ongoing process deeply embedded into your existing workflows. This ensures your data remains up-to-date and can be accessed easily by relevant teams for decision-making and customer engagement purposes.
Use Cases Of Data Enrichment
Sharpen Your Focus With Data Enrichment for Lead Scoring
Sales and marketing teams in B2B organizations can use contact data enrichment to help prioritize leads for outreach. Enriching lead data lets teams uncover critical insights about leads, such as their:
- Job titles
- Company size
- Industry
- Revenue
- Other demographic or firmographic details
This helps them evaluate each prospect’s potential and focus on higher-quality targets to improve conversion rates and optimize their sales pipeline.
Personalization at Scale Is Possible With Data Enrichment
Contact data enrichment makes it possible to personalize marketing efforts at scale. In B2B, where buyers often have specific pain points and unique challenges based on their industry, organization, and role, targeting your audience with generic marketing messages simply won’t cut it.
Enriched data helps marketers deliver highly relevant content that resonates with specific audience segments, whether creating personalized email campaigns, ads, or landing pages. With a more detailed understanding of their prospects’ businesses, enriched data ensures that messaging speaks to their pain points and addresses their industry challenges to increase engagement and response rates.
Improve CRM Performance Through Contact Data Enrichment
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are essential for tracking and nurturing leads and prospects. However, these systems are only as good as the data within them. Contact data enrichment enhances the information in your CRM by:
- Filling in gaps
- Adding updated contact details
- Incorporating new data points
This gives sales teams a more comprehensive view of customers, helping them craft better pitches and build stronger relationships. With a more complete understanding of the customer’s business, needs, and history, sales strategies can be more informed and effective.
Make Market Research More Robust with Data Enrichment
Market research is essential for B2B companies looking to make informed strategic decisions. Data enrichment tools help gather detailed market intelligence and industry insights. Enriching data with information like:
- Competitor data
- Revenue estimates
- Employee counts
- Growth trends
It allows B2B companies to make more informed strategic decisions. It helps identify market opportunities, assess the competitive landscape, and uncover trends that might be missed, making market research more robust and actionable.
Optimize Email Marketing With Accurate Targeting From Data Enrichment
Email marketing can be a highly effective channel for B2B organizations. Accurate targeting is critical for success. Data enrichment ensures that email lists are correct and include vital information for segmentation and better targeting.
This reduces bounce rates, increases engagement, and improves email marketing performance. By using enriched data, companies can tailor email campaigns to reach the right decision-makers at the right time with the right message.
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- Kaspr Alternatives
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- Demandbase Alternatives
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Try Our Website Technology Checker for Free Today
When looking at how Aomni can help boost sales performance, one of its most significant features is its ability to enrich contact data for account-based sales and marketing.
Aomni's AI agents conduct intelligent research on prospects using their:
- Social media profiles
- Personal and professional websites
- News articles
- Other publicly available online information
This process uncovers valuable information that helps sales and marketing professionals create highly personalized communication strategies to engage prospects with relevant insights into their business challenges.
Aomni also continuously monitors this online information for changes that could impact business communications, so you can always have the most up-to-date contact data to work with as you prepare for meetings and calls with prospects.
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