Data Enrichment

Data is the lifeblood of contemporary businesses and is used to formulate marketing, sales and customer service strategies. It is at the core of every decision business leaders make to promote the growth and profitability of their organizations. Data empowers leaders to make precise decisions based on facts and trends rather than speculations.

Excellent business leaders use data wrangling to clean, structure and enrich data for decision making. Many forward-looking organizations are acknowledging that data has become diverse and unstructured and hence the need for data wrangling. Data wrangling has six steps including discovering, structuring, cleaning, enriching, validating, and publishing. In here, will examine the fourth step of data wrangling: data enrichment.

What is Data Enrichment?

Data enrichment is the process of combining first party data from internal sources with disparate data from other internal systems or third party data from external sources. Enriched data is a valuable asset for any organization because it becomes more useful and insightful. A majority of brands conduct data enrichment on their raw data so that they can use it to make informed decisions. In 2018, data enrichment grew by 80% and is projected to grow even more this year.

Customer data begins in raw form regardless of the source, whether site traffic, social media or email lists. When customer data is collected, it’s stored in a central data store and is largely useless. Raw data is cleaned and structured, before being enriched with external data to add additional useful information. Data enrichment makes the data more useful by adding value to it. It helps brands to better understand their customers and gain deeper insights into their lives. There are many ways of enriching data. An excellent example of data enrichment would be to enrich internal sales data with third party advertisement data to get a better understanding of advertising effectiveness.

Benefits of Data Enrichment

Data enrichment has numerous benefits that make it a great infrastructure for companies.

1. Cost savings of Data Enrichment
   A report by Global Databerg contends that an organization with one petabyte of data spends around $650,000 annually to manage the data, yet these companies only use a fraction of their data for any true benefit. Data enrichment saves you money because you don’t store information that is not useful to your business. Instead, you enhance the internal data with external sources of data for the benefit of your organization. The funds that would otherwise be used on databases are used on other activities that have a positive effect on the bottom line.
2. Data enrichment fosters meaningful customer relationships
   Enriched data promotes personalized communications and increases the likelihood of meaningful customer relationships and business opportunities. With relevant customer data, your business can develop communication strategies that meet customer preferences and needs. A customer is more likely to make a purchase when they feel that your company understands their needs.
3. Data enrichment maximizes customer nurturing
   Data enrichment maximizes customer nurturing by identifying segments of customers to be nurtured. A segment offers value-driven information that has the potential to evoke a purchase.
4. Data enrichment boost successful targeted marketing
   Targeted marketing is the future of marketing, and many businesses are realizing that a one-size-fits-all marketing approach does not work. They are turning to targeted marketing. For targeted marketing to be successful, an organization requires data enrichment to segment data effectively.
5. Get greater sales with data enrichment
   Imagine investing a huge sum of money on your contact list hoping to get customers and prospects only to discover that your contact list is outdated. Organizations cannot afford such losses. Data enrichment ensures you have a clean and accurate contact list to increase sales efficiency and boost ROI. Also, it offers opportunities for cross-sells and upsells because a business has the right data and knows its customers well.
6. Eradicate redundant data with data enrichment
   Redundant data costs a company significantly. It results in revenue loss, customer loss, and damaged reputation. Redundant data is common in organizations because they are uncertain of the data to let go and data to keep. You can get rid of redundant data using data enrichment tools like Alteryx. Data duplication is common in raw data and affects the quality of data. Data enrichment eliminates it and hence enhances data quality.
7. Data enrichment improves customer experience
   Customers have enormous expectations when it comes to their experience with brands. They expect companies to know them, anticipate their needs, and be relevant. Data enrichment enhances customer experiences by providing unique information on customers. Your business can anticipate customer needs and remain relevant through personalized marketing.

Keep data enrichment process ongoing

Like other data wrangling processes, data enrichment is not something you perform once and forget about it. Customer data is always changing no matter how detailed it is. For example, income levels are constantly rising and falling while marital status changes regularly. People relocate from one place to another regularly and thus changing customers physical addresses. Given these possibilities for change, it is essential that organizations conduct data enrichment continuously. When brands overlook continuous data enrichment, they provide customers with irrelevant information and offers. Rather than enriching data manually, technology has made the process easier and faster through data preparation tools and software.

A well-functioning data enrichment process is a fundamental ingredient to the success of a brand operating in the modern data-centric world. For data to benefit a business, it needs to be actionable, value-adding, and easy to understand—exactly what data enrichment offers. As you implement a data enrichment strategy, it is important to note that businesses benefit from data enrichment in different ways. Therefore, choose the right data enrichment strategy that meets your business needs and objectives.

Designer Cloud benefits businesses by offering efficient data enrichment at scale.

With Alteryx Designer Cloud, users can quickly blend disparate datasets from different source systems and assess the quality of the information being enriched. Alteryx also gives businesses the ability to monitor changes in quality or source of their data enrichment workflows and ensures that the strategy prioritizes data security and does not compromise customers’ personal information.

Alteryx is the leading company in data preparation and handles all things data from data wrangling to data enrichment and data cleaning. Designer Cloud offers fast, accurate and intuitive data preparation and can assist you in all your data enrichment needs.  Designer Cloud provides multiple tools for bringing data from other sources into your dataset including unions, joins, lookups, and aggregations. Enrich your data using Designer Cloud so that you can boost the value of your business’ data.