CRM data enrichment: Key to better customer insights

What is data enrichment?

Data enrichment is the process of automatically adding more data points about the customer and their company from various sources, including publicly available information. Lead enrichment involves collecting more information about customers, including demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data.

Some examples include:

Job title: This helps you identify decision-makers within your ideal customer profile (ICP) and understand their roles.

Interests and online presence: Gives you clues about their professional focus and how to connect with them.

Company details: Provides insights into their industry, size, buying intent data, and overall potential.

Why is it essential to enrich your CRM?

Let’s look at an example. Acme Corp is a company that sells an AI-powered project management solution. They have a lead, Olivia, who runs marketing campaigns for her company.

Using her basic contact data like phone number and email, data appending reveals:

• Olivia is a marketing campaigns manager at a mid-sized tech company.

• She follows AI trends on LinkedIn.

• Her company recently secured funding.

Using these details, you can find out whether Olivia is an ideal customer. Understand Olivia’s pain points, what solution she might be looking for, and how you can position AI-driven project management to appeal to her interests. You can tailor your product messaging according to her pain points. Here are the benefits you get by enriching data:

Better customer experience: Craft communications and outreach that target Olivia’s pain points with relevant information. Have meaningful conversations and improve customer experience and, ultimately, customer loyalty.

Improved segmentation: You can group customers based on industry, job function, company size, or a combination of factors. Highly targeted segments lead to more relevant campaigns and a better chance of conversion.

Productivity boost: Your sales team spends less time on research if they have real-time, enriched lead data. This allows salespeople to focus their efforts on making their lead convert and improving their lead generation efforts.

How to enhance your CRM’s effectiveness through data enrichment

1. Set the right objectives

Define what you hope to achieve. Do you want to use data enrichment tools to improve lead qualification? Drive more personalized marketing efforts? Set clear, measurable objectives. Based on these objectives, define which data sets are critical. For instance, your must-haves might be job title, company size, and industry. Your nice-to-haves could be getting customers’ social media profiles.

2. Perform regular data audits

Regular data audits are essential to maintain your CRM data quality and ensure you have accurate data across the board. Schedule periodic checks and data cleansing to identify and correct inaccuracies, remove duplicate entries, and fill in missing information from multiple data sources.

Let's say a regular data audit shows that an important contact's email address at your client's company bounces. This is a red flag that your contact might have left their previous job.

Here's how you can tackle this situation:

Confirm the change: Reach out directly to your client company to verify if your contact is still there and, if not, ask for the new point of contact.

Take it a step further: Use platforms like LinkedIn for data collection. track down where your previous contact has landed. This opens up the possibility to re-engage and introduce your product to their new company.

3. Ensure compliance with data privacy regulations

While enriching data can be beneficial for your company, you also need to ensure that you are following data privacy regulations to protect your company from potential legal repercussions. Examples of data regulations include:

GDPR: Emphasizes user rights such as the right to know what data is collected, the right to update data, and the right to be forgotten (data deletion).

CCPA (California): Gives consumers the right to access their data, know whether their data is being sold, opt out of their data being sold, etc.

SOC2: Cybersecurity and compliance framework that ensures third-party service providers store and process client data securely.

Different regulations have varying rules about obtaining consent for collecting and using client data. Ensure you comply with the strictest regulations that apply to your business.

4. Embed CRM data enrichment across all workflows

Whether you are getting customer data from a marketing campaign or you’re performing a sales action, it’s best to embed data enrichment tools throughout the workflow. This ensures data-driven insights are available at each customer touchpoint. Here are some ways you could do this:

Marketing: As a lead fills out a form, their data is instantly enriched, allowing for highly targeted nurture campaigns based on accurate job role, company size, etc.

Lead qualification: Integrate CRM data enrichment with lead qualification tools, so as soon as a lead lands on your plate, you have a complete picture for better lead scoring and prioritization.

Sales outreach: Sales reps work within a CRM that automatically populates all enriched customer data, saving time and focusing on relevant pain points.

5. Use automation to enhance efficiency

Manual lead enrichment is time-consuming, prone to error, and doesn't scale well for enterprise and B2B data . Automation makes the whole process faster and more reliable.

As new data is entered or updated, automated lead enrichment tools can instantly look for data from public domains and get additional information, ensuring your CRM never has outdated details.

You can also automate regular processes to find and fix duplicate records, flag inaccuracies, and fill in missing information.

With features like batch updates, you can enrich large sets of data in one go, ideal for updating existing contact lists or importing new leads from spreadsheets or other sources.

Using CRM for data enrichment

CRMs like Freshsales offer built-in data enrichment features that streamline the process, saving your sales and marketing teams valuable time. Let's look at how this works:

• Automated enrichment from key fields: With just a few essential data points, your CRM can significantly enhance your customer records:

  • Email address: With email address, Freshsales automatically pulls in a person's full name, profile picture, and social media links (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook).

  • Company website: This simple input can trigger the enrichment of company details such as logo, employee count, address, phone number, and social profiles.

• The best CRM systems go beyond this base-level enrichment. They offer integrations with dedicated data enrichment platforms like Uplead, Zoominfo, etc. This unlocks a deeper pool of potential data points including job titles, industry insights, technographic information, and more.

• The benefit: Data enrichment directly within your CRM eliminates manual research, providing comprehensive customer profiles with minimal effort from your teams. This ensures sales and marketing teams are always working with the freshest, most accurate data, giving them a significant advantage in personalization and effective outreach.