Mastering Data Enrichment: A Comprehensive Guide from Start to Finish

This article investigates one of the most important concepts in sales and marketing: business data enrichment.

It starts with the meaning of data enrichment, continues with several details, rules, uses, benefits, and tactics, and ends with introducing the best data enrichment platform in the market.

What Is Data Enrichment? – Data Enrichment Overview

Data enrichment is the process of improving data quality by adding more data to our existing information. In other words, it is the process of completing our raw data to make complete records of information.

Let’s explain data validation and enrichment with some examples:

Example 1:

Imagine you have the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of 1000 companies in your CRM. If you add their emails and website addresses, a data enrichment has occurred. By adding their emails and domains, you make the CRM more complete.

Example 2:

You have a list of individuals’ emails. If you find their names, company names, cell phone numbers, job titles, ages, industries, or any other data, you have enriched your email list.

Data enrichment is essential for all types of B2B and B2C companies, from small to medium and large. It is not important that your company is a startup or a large enterprise; both need data enrichment. Without data enrichment, you cannot ensure that your customer data is complete and accurate or not.

It is worth mentioning that data enrichment does not mean only adding new contacts (such as email or domain) to our CRM. This added data can be broader. It can include many details like individuals’ job titles, skills, education, sectors, salaries, hobbies, companies’ revenues, industries, missions and visions, employee counts, etc.

Why Data Enrichment Matters?

Data enrichment matters as the more complete data and contacts you have about your leads, the more likely you are to convert the lead to a customer.

Data enrichment helps you maximize time, effort, and resources. Imagine you only have the emails of a group of leads. You start sending messages only through emails. What will happen if you also have their phone numbers or the links to their accounts on social media? If you enrich your data and get their phone numbers and social media links, you will have more ways to connect with them.

Then, it is more likely that you can convert these leads to customers because you have more ways to connect with them. Data enrichment opens new communication channels for you.

Or imagine that you have all the contacts (emails, phone numbers, social media links) of a group of people in your CRM, but you do not know any details about their background. If you enrich your data and add some details like the job title of each person, their skills, education, and hobbies, you can write a better email for them, or you know how to talk and what to say to that person on the phone.

The Benefits of Data Enrichment

First of all, enriched data provides various connecting channels for the marketer. They do not have to capture the leads’ attention only via a simple email. They will have so many other ways to reach and connect the leads, including phone and social media.

Second, if you know details about your leads, such as job title, skills, or education, you can send a tailored message based on this data. Personalized messaging is more likely to affect the audience. Data enrichment enhances customer understanding and helps you focus on details.

Third, data enrichment saves time. When you only have the emails of a group of companies, you have to send a message to them and wait until they respond. But if you get their phone numbers via enrichment tools, then you can call them to get faster responses. Time is limited, and we should connect leads from various channels to save them.

What are Data Enrichment Uses?

Data enrichment is done to complete the contacts of companies and individuals. By contacts, we mean their emails, phone numbers, domains, social media links, addresses, and more.

Moreover, data enrichment is done to complete the data and details of companies and individuals, including the companies’ revenue, number of employees, industry, or the individuals’ job titles, salaries, skills, education, and more.

The first one increases our ways of connecting with customers, while the second one helps us optimize, segment, and personalize our messages.

Data Enrichment Steps

If you decide to enrich your CRM data, you need to follow a certain procedure. The typical steps of data enrichment include the following:

• Data gathering: Data is collected from various reliable sources manually or automatically.
• Data cleaning: The gathered data is checked one by one to ensure that it is valid and accurate. Wrong information is deleted from the lists.
• Data integration: The valid data is synced to CRMs to complete the blank CRM cells.
• Analysis: You can analyze the data to see how accurate they are via charts, graphs, or dashboards.

Data Enrichment Rules

If you want to perform a successful data enrichment process, keep the following rules in mind:

• Clearly define what objectives you have in data enrichment. What outcomes are you looking for, and exactly what data do you need?
• Choose the way you want to use for data enrichment. Do you want to manually find the data or use automatic tools?
• Check the various data enrichment tools to find the best one based on your needs and budget.
• Enrich your data manually or with the help of the selected tool.
• Monitor and evaluate the results using A/B testing methods to ensure that you have accurate data.

Afterward, your enriched data is ready to change the way you connect with leads and the way you message them.

Data Enrichment Techniques

How do we enrich data in the best manner? Several tasks are involved in data enrichment, which helps you make the most of data enrichment:

• Appending Data: You bring some data sources together to make a more consistent database. For example, you get the postcode data of leads from a third party and add it to your database.
• Data Normalization: It includes standardizing data formats and structures to ensure consistency across different databases.
• Segmentation: In this technique, you segment data into various groups. For instance, you segment the leads based on their gender, age, job title, etc. In this way, you can provide tailored messages for each group.
• Derived Attributes: Let’s explain this technique with an example. You have the data of birth date in your CRM, but you do not have the age column. Age can be derived from the birth date and added to your CRM.
• Deduplication: This method includes finding duplicated data and omitting them from the sources and CRMs.

Data Cleansing vs. Data Enrichment

As mentioned, data enrichment is the process of adding data to customer lists or CRMs to make them comprehensive and detailed.

On the other hand, data cleansing is the process of checking CRMs and customer lists to find their errors and inaccuracies. These errors may include the following issues:

• Invalid or inaccurate contacts like unverified emails or phone numbers
• Duplicate entries are found and omitted.
• Formatting issues like variations in the date format are found and corrected.
• Outdated information is detected and replaced with fresh data.
• Inconsistent records across various sources or systems are harmonized.

What Does a Data Enrichment Manager Do?

The data enrichment manager is responsible for overseeing the process of completing CRMs with new data through manual or automatic methods.

The data enrichment manager should decide how to enrich the data. What are the best ways for data enrichment in their company, and how should they do it? Which parts of data enrichment can be done by manual search, and which parts have no way other than automatic tools?

The data enrichment manager should use various methods to find the most reliable data enrichment tool that is cost-effective, timely, and accurate.

The data enrichment manager checks the accuracy and legitimacy of the gathered data to ensure that all records are valid and top-notch.

How to Select a Data Enrichment Service?

You need to keep the following points in mind when you want to choose a data enrichment platform:

• Select a data enrichment platform that guarantees the accuracy of the data it provides.
• Use a platform that has a comprehensive database of both contacts and details of companies and people.
• Select a service that offers free trials for data quality testing and has transparent pricing plans.
• Utilize a platform that offers various tools and services for data enrichment.

Is there any service that has all the above features? Yes, CUFinder is what you are looking for. The next part will elaborate more on CUFinder.

CUFinder Data Enrichment Services

CUFinder is a professional data enrichment and lead generation platform with years of experience in prospecting and CRM enrichment. CUFinder maximizes leads’ potential with full contact data enrichment.

It has over 30 data enrichment tools designed and created to complete the data of CRMs and customer lists in bulk and real time. Let’s see how CUFinder helps us with data enrichment:

Tools for Email Extraction and Verification

• CEO’s email finder: It converts the company names to their CEO’s names, emails, job titles, company domains, etc.
• Company email finder: It converts company names or domains to their verified emails and other data.
• Company email to company name converter: It converts the emails of companies to their names on a large scale.
• Free email verifier: It checks the email syntax and performs DNS lookup and SMTP verification to find inaccurate emails.
• Person email finder: It converts the person’s full name and company names or domains to contact emails.
• Contact Email to Name Converter: It converts the emails of contacts to their names.

Tools for Phone Number Extraction and Verification

• Company phone finder: It converts company domains to their landline phone numbers in bulk and in no time.
• Person phone finder: It converts the full names of people and their locations to their cell phone numbers.
• Phone number to person name converter: It converts person’s phone numbers to their full names and countries immediately.
• Company name to phone converter: It converts the names of companies to their landline phone numbers.

Tools for Domain Extraction and Verification

• Company name to company domain converter: It converts company names to their corresponding domains in bulk and real time.
• Domain to company name converter: It converts the domains of companies to their names.
• Company LinkedIn to domain converter: It converts company LinkedIn URLs to its website addresses.
• Social media to domain converter: It converts the social media links of companies on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to their domains.
• Domain to IP converter: It converts domains to their IP addresses.
• Domain to page rank converter: It converts the website URLs to their SEO rankings.

Tools for Social Media Extraction and Verification

• Company name to company LinkedIn converter: It converts the company names to their LinkedIn URLs in bulk and real time.
• Contact name to LinkedIn converter: It converts the names of individuals to their LinkedIn URLs.
• Company name to employees LinkedIn converter: it converts the names of companies to their employees’ LinkedIn URLs.
• Domain to company LinkedIn converter: It converts the domains of companies to their LinkedIn URLs.
• Contact email to contacts LinkedIn converter: It converts individuals’ emails to their LinkedIn URLs in real time.
• Contact LinkedIn to info converter: It converts LinkedIn URLs to their full names, job titles, emails, etc.

It is noteworthy that CUFinder has some important features of a quality data enrichment platform that helps you get the best contact data:

Unmatched Data Accuracy: CUFinder prioritizes data integrity, guaranteeing over 98% accuracy through rigorous verification algorithms. Monthly database updates ensure you have the freshest and most reliable information.

Comprehensive Coverage: CUFinder boasts over 265 million company profiles encompassing all sizes and industries. Access a wealth of data on both global companies and individuals, empowering you to target your ideal audience effectively.

Effortless User Experience: CUFinder prioritizes user-friendliness. Navigate the platform with ease and receive data instantly, eliminating time-consuming manual efforts.

Flexible Pricing & Free Trials: Experience the power of CUFinder firsthand with free monthly credits. Explore their transparent data enrichment pricing plans on the website and discover a cost-effective solution for your needs. Sign up and experience how the cream of the crop works!

Best Data Enrichment Tools You Should Know

In addition to CUFinder, we have other B2B data enrichment tools for data enrichment, deduplication, and cleansing, which can enrich your data with a few clicks in the shortest possible time. Some of them include ZoomInfo, Apollo, Lusha, RocketReach, Lead411, Cognism, UpLead, etc.

If you want to maximize sales potential with lead data enrichment, it is better to choose a reliable automatic tool like CUFinder, which not only guarantees data accuracy but also focuses on fresh and complete data of leads.