You sell many products and services, but who buys these offerings? It might be challenging to answer these questions simply because you have many different customers and leads. Customer A might buy a product for a certain reason, while Customer B might buy a specific service for another reason. There might be some crossover, but these customers are still individuals and need to be treated as such.
Tailored and personalised marketing used to be very difficult to pull off. So difficult, in fact, that customers didn’t expect this level of customisation from businesses. But things have changed. Personalisation is possible in modern marketing. Customers know this. What’s more, they expect it.
Fortunately, data enrichment can help you achieve the personalised approaches the modern consumer wants to see.
Understanding Data Enrichment
There’s data, and then there’s data enrichment. So, what’s the difference? Data enrichment means taking the data you’ve collected and applying it to your customer profiles. Now, you don’t simply have data – you have customer profiles built on actual knowledge derived from real interactions.
This won’t happen all in one go. When you get to know someone in the real world, you’ll learn more about them over multiple interactions. You might remember their favourite food when you visit a restaurant together and then hear about a favourite holiday destination while reminiscing about past trips later. It’s the same with data enrichment: you’ll keep adding to your customer data pool with each interaction.
The Aim of Data Enrichment
The whole point of data enrichment is not simply getting to know your customers. It expands into communicating and connecting with them more consistently. For instance, multi- and omnichannel strategies have become essential aspects of modern client management and customer interaction, but this has made customer expectations more sophisticated and complex. The personalised experience you offer on one channel needs to chime with the experience you provide on another without fail.
What does this mean exactly? It means offering the same communications across all your channels – personalised in terms of content, method, volume, and more.
Content Personalisation
Some customers might prefer a more familiar, friendly, chatty communication style. Others might prefer something more formal and businesslike. The breakdown might be as simple as B2C customers in the former category and B2B in the latter, but it might be more complex than this. Data enrichment can help you understand how to reach out to different consumer profiles.
Method Personalisation
Different customers prefer to be contacted in different ways – through social media, text, email, or phone calls. Data enrichment gives you insight into the method you should use for each customer profile.
Volume Personalisation
How often do you need to reach out to your customers? This will depend wholly on their preference. Some will require close attention, while others will want you to leave them alone, only reaching out when you’ve got something important to say. Again, data enrichment helps here.
Value Personalisation
Maybe a customer needs a gift or an exclusive reward. Perhaps another customer is looking for expert, in-depth content to support them following a purchase. Another customer might want something different. You need data enrichment to light the way, telling you what each customer is looking for in terms of value.
Best Practices for Data Enrichment
You’ll need strong customer relationship management and data handling solutions to get the best results from data enrichment. But this is only part of the story. When building your data enrichment tasks, consider the following best practices.
Consistency
Remember that data enrichment is an ongoing, incremental process. This means you need to be able to repeat your data collection and management tasks again and again, achieving the same results each time.
Measurability
A clear set of metrics will help you immediately assess whether or not the data enrichment task is successful. Without these metrics, it’s difficult to know whether or not you are on the right track.
Scalability
As your business grows, so will the volume of data you’re working with. Make sure your processes and solutions can scale alongside your organisation.
Versatility
The best data enrichment processes can be applied to different data sets. We’ve already touched on data as a point of differentiation – i.e. some customers want to receive support content via email, while others want to receive special offers via text message. Data enrichment tasks should be set up to recognise these points of difference across multiple data sets.
Discover More About Data Enrichment, and Make It Work for You
Here at Impressive, we help clients across various industries as they get more from data enrichment and smart, personalised marketing.
Let us do the same for you – reach out to our team and schedule your consultation, or get your Free Marketing Plan today.
