Data Cleansing vs Data Enrichment [Which Is Better?]

Businesses lose $12.9 million on average annually because of the low-quality data. (Gartner)!

• What Is Data Cleansing?
• What Is Data Enrichment?
• What Is the Difference Between Data Cleansing and Data Enrichment?
• Data Cleansing vs Data Enrichment- Which One Is Better?
• How Often Should You Clean and Enrich Your Data?
• The Best Tools for Data Cleansing and Enrichment
• Final Recommendations
• FAQs
• CUFinder Data Enrichment Services

⬆ The above statistic is truly shocking, isn’t it? 😱

Poor data quality is like trying to build a puzzle with missing, duplicate, or mismatched pieces—no matter how hard you try, the final picture will never be clear or complete. 🙁

So, what is the best solution❓❓❗

Data Cleansing and Data Enrichment! These two methods make you free of errors, inconsistencies, and data incompleteness. 😊

If you want to know the differences between data cleansing and data enrichment, follow our guide. Here, we’ll review data cleansing vs data enrichment with examples, and finally tell you where you can get cleansed and enriched information.

So stay with us until the end of the article to learn everything you need to know about data enrichment vs data cleansing. 😉

What Is Data Cleansing?

Data Cleansing (also known as data cleaning or data scrubbing) is the process of finding inaccurate, incomplete, duplicated, or irrelevant data and correcting or removing it from a database. 🚿

The goal of data cleansing is to have an up-to-date, clean, relevant, and error-free database, leading to a reliable and high-quality dataset.

The more accurate your CRM is, the faster you will find leads and connect with them, the simpler your marketing will be, and the more sales and revenue you will experience.

📌 Example

For instance, imagine your CRM contains the full details and insights of over 1000 leads, including their emails, phone numbers, domains, locations, industries, social media, etc. but the performance of your email marketing and cold calling campaigns is not satisfactory. 

Many of the emails are wrong and many of the phone numbers are irrelevant. Here, the solution is to trust data cleansing!

By data cleansing, you find which emails and phone numbers are inaccurate, irrelevant, or duplicated. Then, this data is removed from your CRM and replaced with their correct forms.

🎁 Data Cleansing Benefits

1. Increasing data quality
2. Decreasing time spent on fixing errors later
3. Reducing costs in short and long terms
4. Enhancing productivity
5. Speeding up the process of prospecting

What Is Data Enrichment?

Data Enrichment is the process of adding new, relevant information from external or internal sources to your dataset to improve the existing data and make it more comprehensive and practical. 🚀

In other words, data enrichment focuses on expanding the breadth and depth of data.

The more comprehensive your CRM is, the more channels will be available for connecting leads, the easier your communication will be, and the higher your lead-to-customer conversion rate will be.

📌 Example

For instance, imagine you have 1000 companies’ names and locations in your CRM with their domains and phone numbers. But your CRM lacks their email addresses. 

As email marketing is still alive, you decide to start sending emails to these companies. The process of discovering their email addresses through manual or automatic methods is known as data enrichment.

By adding their email addresses to your CRM, you will make it more inclusive and detailed. That’s why we call this process data enrichment.

🎁 Data Enrichment Benefits

1. Better data quality
2. Improved targeting
3. Accessing leads through various channels
4. Enhanced personalization
5. Increased sales and revenue

What Is the Difference Between Data Cleansing and Data Enrichment?

As mentioned before, data cleansing and data enrichment are two completely different procedures, though many think they are the same and use them interchangeably!

Both are the ways for data management, but their mechanism, purposes, and functions differ.

Data cleansing vs data enrichment as the first one refers to the process of finding errors like inaccurate, irrelevant, or duplicated data of datasets and replacing it with valid data. While the latter is the process of completing the CRM data by adding new information to your CRM.

Let me elaborate more with a clear example 👉 When you have emails in your CRM but you are not sure of their accuracy, you need to use data cleansing to update the emails but when you have a list of companies in your CRM with no email, you need to use data enrichment to identify and add their email addresses.

Data enrichment assists marketing and sales teams to get rid of incomplete CRMs while data cleansing updates their databases with the latest version of leads’ data.

Data Cleansing vs Data Enrichment- Which One Is Better?

Neither data enrichment nor data cleansing is inherently “better” since they serve different purposes and are often complementary!

The choice depends on your specific goals. Here’s a comparison to help you decide ⤵

When Is Data Cleansing Better? 🚿

1. Your data is inaccurate and full of errors.
2. Your data is not fresh and updated.
3. Your dataset contains irrelevant data.
4. You want to remove duplicates.

When Is Data Enrichment Better? 🚀

1. Your data is clean but is not complete.
2. You want to add external information like demographics to your dataset.
3. You aim to enhance personalization or targeting.

How Often Should You Clean and Enrich Your Data?

I cannot provide one solution for all companies! The frequency of cleaning and enriching data depends on your organization’s needs, the type of data, its source, and how it’s used.

📙 However, the following guidelines can help you ⤵

1. Comprehensive data cleansing and enrichment should occur at least once a year for all business-critical datasets.
2. When launching marketing campaigns, it’s recommended to cleanse and enrich data.
3. After any data mergers or system migrations, it’s better to cleanse and enrich information.

The Best Tools for Data Cleansing and Enrichment

As manual data cleansing and enrichment is challenging and almost impossible when you have large CRMs, I’m going to introduce the best automatic data cleansing and enrichment tools.

Replace your manual, tedious data cleansing and enrichment process with automatic AI-powered tools to simplify your tasks and save time and money. 

1. CUFinder (4.8/5 on G2)

CUFinder is a premium business data enrichment and cleansing platform designed to not only enhance your CRM accuracy level to over 98% but also complete your CRM with fresh, new insights of people and companies.

Moreover, CUFinder offers lead generation services for discovering qualified leads, helping marketing teams access high-value and ready-to-buy prospects found nowhere.

CUFinder’s database covers the data of over 269 million companies and 419 million individuals (employees and decision-makers). It consists of their key contacts, including emails, phone numbers, social media, and domains, as well as minor details like company size, revenue, industry, etc.

CUFinder, equipped with CRM integrations, Excel file support, a free Chrome Extension, and APIs, can streamline your marketing efforts.

I recommend you to test your free credits in CUFinder to see how well it works. Sign up for free!

2. ZoomInfo (4.5/5 on G2)

ZoomInfo is an old, popular name in the dynamic world of marketing and sales, which is professional in lead generation, data enrichment, and cleansing with the help of AI technology.

Though its dashboard is difficult-to-use, it has its own fans because of its wide-ranging services for marketing, sales, operation, and recruiting.

Finding leads, enriching datasets, running sales pipelines, and discovering job candidates are some of the tasks done by ZoomInfo.  

3. Apollo (4.7/5 on G2)

The third tool I’m going to introduce here is Apollo, another well-known service in the field of data enrichment, cleansing, and lead generation. This platform is not as old as ZoomInfo, but its easy-to-use dashboard has encouraged many users to trust it.

Covering over 210 million contacts and 35 million companies, Apollo can be a reliable solution if you are looking for automatic ways of prospecting and enrichment.

4. Clay (4.9/5 on G2)

Clay is another famous platform focusing on data cleansing and enrichment. Fueled with leads’ contact information, firmographics, technographic, and funding information, Clay can enrich your datasets with a comprehensive range of data.

You can clean and format data, create lead scoring models, flag fraudulent domains, summarize job posts or financial docs, and even enrich SMBs like hotels, restaurants, etc. with Clay.

However, the Clay dashboard is not intuitive and it’s difficult to navigate. We hope their owners make it simpler in the near future.

5. Lusha (4.3/5 on G2)

The fifth and the last tool I’m going to introduce in this article is Lusha with over 150 million business profiles. It helps you build a high-performing pipeline and your ideal audience through its data enrichment and prospecting tools.

Skip manual company and contact search and replace this tedious process with the automatic tools of Lusha, finding leads’ details in the blink of an eye.

More outbound leads, deals, ROIs, conversions, and growth in pipeline are some of the main benefits of using Lusha. However, there are numerous online complaints about the weak performance of Lusha’s support team and the lower quality of its data compared to its competitors.

Final Recommendations

Now that you have learned data enrichment vs data cleansing, it’s time to focus on both of them if you want to make the most of your time and efforts.

A complete but inaccurate CRM or a valid but incomplete one is not helpful and practical. We need both data accuracy and completeness. 

An inclusive dataset provides various methods of connecting with leads and improves lead to customer conversion rate and a correct dataset leads to time and resource saving.

Looking to boost your CRM data integrity level, read this article about data cleansing vs data enrichment carefully to select the top tool for this purpose. 

I recommend you try CUFinder’s enrichment and cleansing tools to enjoy over 98% data accuracy! Sign up for free.

FAQs