Data is the key to reaching prospects, turning them into customers, and retaining them long-term. It allows businesses to make well-informed marketing decisions based on facts about their distinct audiences rather than generalized guesses.

In particular, first-party data (also referred to as 1pd or 1p data) collected through customer interactions can reveal powerful insights about your audience. In fact, 92% of marketers believe this data is critical to business growth.

However, most companies don’t have enough first-party data to exclusively rely on it for their marketing efforts. In other cases, their data is outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete.

That’s where data enrichment comes in. Whether you’re new to the world of customer data or have been leveraging audience insights for decades, we’ll dive deep into data enrichment and provide actionable tips to improve your data approach for better marketing.

What Is Data Enrichment?

Data enrichment is the process of supplementing your first-party data with third-party data to confirm you have the most accurate, reliable, and comprehensive database possible.

Unlike first-party data, third-party data comes from an external provider. It provides additional information about your customers, allowing you to expand your reach and improve your targeting.

The third-party data your company can obtain from data enrichment includes:

• Demographics, such as age and gender
• Contact information
• Education
• Marital status
• Home ownership and property data
• Presence of children in the home
• Income
• Net worth
• Lifestyle information, such as which magazines customers subscribe to, where they shop, and which charitable causes they donate to

By improving your first-party data with context pulled from external sources, your company can transform its existing first-party data into actionable marketing insights.

What Are the Benefits of Data Enrichment?

As part of the overall data hygiene process—which involves various methods of data cleansing and enhancement—data enrichment gives companies a deeper understanding of their current customers’ behaviors, needs, and wants.

This wealth of valuable customer information allows businesses to access the following benefits:

• Enhanced targeting. Data enrichment allows you to expand your customer profiles with attributes like age, marital status, geographic data, and income level. With a better understanding of your customers and their needs, you can target them with more relevant information.

• Effective segmentation. With detailed knowledge of your target audience, you can develop customer segments that personalize your communications. For example, a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company may group customers by geographic location and send customers information on where they can purchase a certain product in their area.

• Cost-savings. When you create more targeted, personalized marketing campaigns, you save resources by only focusing on the customers or segments who are likely to respond to your message. In fact, poor data quality costs businesses an average of $12.9 million per year, demonstrating the immense impact proper data hygiene and enrichment could have on your bottom line.

• Improved customer experience. Data enrichment doesn’t just help your marketing team. Better personalization creates messages that actually resonate with customers and their needs, pointing them to relevant products and services and giving them a better experience with your business.

• Meaningful customer relationships. Successfully catering to your customers’ needs allows you to build lasting relationships with them. When customers receive an individualized experience with your company, they’re more likely to continue supporting your business.

Ultimately, data enrichment bridges the gap between what your customers need and what your business can provide them. With better alignment between your customer preferences and communications, both customers and your company have a better experience, leading to higher customer satisfaction and profitability.

What Are Some Data Enrichment Best Practices?

If you’re familiar with data hygiene, you know that it’s an ongoing process. Data enrichment is no different. With data decaying at a rate of 30% each year, your database can quickly become outdated and inaccurate.

This statistic illustrates why you need to keep up with data enrichment and ensure you’re taking a methodical approach with the following best practices:

• Determine your data goals. Identify what goals you seek to achieve through data enrichment, including what data will most benefit your needs. For example, let’s say you’ve previously focused on print marketing but now want to expand your efforts to digital channels. You can append contact information like email addresses, Mobile Ad IDs (MAIDs), IP addresses, and social media handles to reach your audience online.

• Implement a data hygiene routine. When you create a data hygiene and maintenance routine, you can ensure your database stays in optimal condition. Start by conducting regular audits of your database to identify any areas for improvement. Then, you’ll have a better idea of what data to focus on for cleaning and enrichment. You can also develop procedures for data entry standardization, error resolution, and dirty data prevention to ensure your team is on the same page about database management.

• Follow data privacy compliance guidelines. Obtain datasets from sources that collect data legally and follow all applicable privacy and compliance guidelines. That way, you can protect your customers’ privacy and your company’s reputation.

• Work with a data provider. Partner with a trusted and verified provider like Deep Sync to ensure the external data sources you’re using for data enrichment are accurate and reputable. Additionally, a data provider has the expertise to assist you with other data solutions, such as data quality reports, customer profiling and analytics, and identity resolution.

When you invest in data enrichment best practices, it’ll save you time and resources in the long run by preventing the need for large data overhauls. Instead, a carefully planned approach to data enrichment, with the help of experts, will keep your company’s data accurate, reliable, and actionable.

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If you’re ready to kick off a data enrichment process, our team is happy to assist you. At Deep Sync, we have the data expertise, solutions, and industry-leading datasets you need to inform your campaigns.

To learn more about how your business can optimize its data, check out the following resources:

• First-Party Data: A Guide to Leveraging Customer Insights. Data enrichment involves supplementing your database to amplify the impact of your first-party data. In this guide, you’ll dive deep into the ins and outs of first-party data and how your company can leverage it.
• Lookalike Audience Lock-In: The Perils and How to Overcome It. While data enrichment enhances your existing data, lookalike models help you go beyond your current customer base to find new, similar audiences. Learn how to avoid lookalike audience lock-in and market to new audiences across multiple platforms.
• Boost Your First-Party Match Rates. Enhanced onboarding works by ingesting your customer data, enhancing it with online and offline identifiers, and delivering this file to Meta or TikTok as a custom audience. This allows you to improve your social onboarding results and reach more of your current customers on their favorite channels.