Shifting Customer Journeys with Customer Data Enrichment: A Marketer’s Guide

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Marketing leaders are experiencing a glut of customer data—with estimates from the IDC that the global datasphere will grow from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to 175 zettabytes in 2025. (One zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes or a billion terabytes). At the same time, customer journeys have been shifting rapidly as customers’ needs, technology, and new generations have radically altered the buying experience.

To put that data to use in building and nurturing an ongoing relationship with your customer, your data needs to be highly accurate, detailed, and up-to-date. In other words, getting just your customer’s name and email address won’t cut it anymore. Today’s marketers want to know, for example, if their best customers have recently moved or had a baby. They want to know what brand of tires they buy and what time of day target buyers typically do their grocery shopping. And they need to pull together a host of online activities and behaviors, and resolve them into one accurate profile per customer—especially since so much of each customer’s experience happens online, not in physical stores.

De-duping, Resolving, and Unifying Customer Data

Data enrichment is a requirement for today’s marketing organizations, especially if you rely on customers themselves as your primary source of data. In that case, it’s easy to end up with multiple phone numbers or fake names and email addresses. Or—if you’re running a big advertising campaign—you could end up with too small an audience segment.

By gathering and unifying second-party data and third-party data with your own data, you can remove that duplicate information, fill in missing or inaccurate attributes, and update the record with the most current information. That’s the power of data enrichment. And for best results, you’ll want to go through this process on a continuous basis.

Here are some common types of data to include in your data enrichment process:

• Social Media Profile
• Purchase and Transaction History
• Behavioral Web
• Mobile Data
• Loyalty Program Histories
• Geolocation Data
• CRM and Customer Support Data

Using data enrichment, you can create a detailed composite of your customer by gathering additional data and combining it with your own proprietary data, like email addresses, phone numbers, and mailing addresses. Once all the data is stored in one place—like Treasure Data Customer Data Platform (CDP)—you can analyze it to gain insights, inform your business strategy, and adapt as customers change the way they shop over time.

How do you gather the right second-party and third-party data? Many data providers specialize in certain types of information. Acxiom and Nielsen provide household demographic data. Experian and TransUnion provide credit score information. Bombora and Dun & Bradstreet provide business-related data. These data providers often collect and analyze data using a range of public and proprietary sources including census data, property records, warranty information, customer surveys, and store purchase panel data.

The real value of data enrichment, ultimately, lies in what you do with your customer data. Data enrichment helps with key business operations, such as prospect profiling, ad targeting, identifying look-alike prospects, and message personalization. Using powerful machine learning, you can build new customer segments and create advanced predictive models to analyze those segments. You can pinpoint key target groups of prospects and improve efficiencies across your campaigns.

For example, data enrichment helped Subaru identify the most valuable segments of prospective customers and tailor its marketing campaigns accordingly, boosting the “highly likely to buy” estimate from 26 percent to 73 percent.

How Data Enrichment Works

CDPs combine data sets—such as customer demographics and thousands of behavioral data points—into a single environment. Once that data is ingested and unified into a complete customer profile, it can be easily visualized or exported for modeling purposes. Marketers can also build segments with shared attributes and immediately activate them into campaigns designed to increase sales, boost engagement, and reduce churn.

For more information on how data enrichment can benefit your organization, download our new white paper, the Data-Driven Marketer’s Guide to Data Enrichment.

You’ll learn:

• Key considerations in developing data enrichment methods
• How to employ new processes for filling in the blanks and adding new data
• The advantages of a repeatable, continuous process for data enrichment

Lead generation is complicated enough without having to fight with your CRM and martech stack to correct your data. Data enrichment combined with a CDP can make all the difference.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]