The marketing and sales department plays a vital role in enhancing the business. To achieve this excellence they should have the right prospects that are accurate, complete, and relevant to reach out to their potential customers who are interested in their services or products. Without the proper and up-to-date data sets, marketing and sales teams may struggle to achieve their goal, and that impacts the business growth.
That’s why data enrichment, data cleansing, and data validation are essential processes for improving your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. CRM is a system that helps you manage your current and potential customers. It helps you store and organize intent customer information, track their needs, activities, interest, etc, communicate with customers across channels, and provide customer service and support. In this blog post, you will get to know how data enrichment, data cleansing, and data validation are essential for your business, How you can maintain your CRM in good health, Why they are important for your CRM, and How you can perform effectively with your marketing campaigns.
What is Data Enrichment?
Data enrichment is the process of enhancing your existing database with up-to-date/current information. It involves researching related data from external sources, such as social media platforms, public directories, websites, etc, and validating each field to find the current status of the data set. The goal of data enrichment is to enrich your data points with additional attributes that data can help you gain deeper insights to segment your audience, personalize your marketing campaigns and improve your customer service. For example, if you have a list of company names, contact names, and email addresses of your prospects, you can enrich it with their job titles, industry sectors, locations, phone numbers, social media profiles, etc. This way, you can segment the contacts and run an effective outreach based on their characteristics and preferences.
What is Data Cleansing?
Data cleansing is the process of ensuring that your data is accurate and all fields are in place. It involves identifying and resolving potential data inconsistencies, such as finding and removing duplicate data, identifying missing information, invalid entries, misplaced data points, etc. The goal of data cleansing is to keep the database with absolute data without any duplicates and incorrect information. For example, if you have an ICP contact list dataset that contains contact names of the customer, job title, email, address, etc, but all the fields are messed up or the information seems incorrect or a lot of duplicate entries, etc. You can cleanse it by going through the data points manually to remove the duplicates, and correct/remove the wrong information. This way you can keep your database clean for your upcoming marketing campaigns and strategies.
What is Data Validation?
Data validation is the process of ensuring that your data meets certain predefined criteria used to target your audience. It involves researching every record one by one manually. The eagle-eyed process should go through the data fields and cross-reference them with multiple reliable sources via web research and ensure all data points meets the target criteria. For example, if you have a list of companies, websites, and other fields, you can validate it by setting the required fields range, say, company size, revenue, etc, this will allow you to segment the target audience more precisely for your marketing campaigns.
Why are Data Enrichment, Data Cleansing, and Data Validation Important?
Data enrichment, data cleansing, and data validation are important because they can help you:
- Improve your data quality and usability: This process will give you a relevant, accurate, complete, and consistent set of data to improve your data analysis, reporting, and visualization processes.
- Enhance your customer experience: By enriching, cleansing, and validating your data, you can segment your target audience and reach the potential customer who are really in need of your services or products.
- Boost your business performance: You can uncover new opportunities that can help you optimize your business using a clean database. Up-to-date data sets can help you increase your efficiency, productivity, and profitability in your sales and marketing team.
How to Do Data Enrichment
There are different ways to do data enrichment depending on the type and source of the data you want to enrich. Here are some common methods:
- Open Web Research: The most common and reliable way of doing data enrichment is using manual web research. This research includes cross-referencing every data field with reliable sources and websites to append current information to the respective record.
- Use social media platforms: You can use social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to enrich your data with information about your customer’s profiles. Social media will give you the most precise current information as people tend to visit and update their profile frequently with their current status.
- Use third-party data providers: You can use online platforms or services that offer access to various types of external data sources, such as demographic, geographic, and behavioral data. You can either purchase or subscribe to these data providers and integrate their data with yours using APIs or other tools. Some examples of popular data providers are ZoomInfo, Apollo, etc. Using third-party data providers may get a chance of some outdated data.
How to Do Data Cleansing
There are different steps to do data cleansing depending on the type and complexity of the data you want to cleanse. Here are some common steps:
- Removal of duplicates: As mentioned earlier, The major process involves in data cleansing is deduplication. It is a proactive way to ensure that your data are absolutely unique. This will almost clean your data set by almost half to boost your marketing strategies.
- Screen your data for potential errors: You can use various tools or techniques to scan your data for potential errors, such as missing values, incorrect entries, data interchange, etc. You can perform more advanced data screening methods, such as sorting, filtering, grouping, or conditional formatting to identify the errors.
- Diagnose and resolve the errors: Once you have identified the errors in your data, you need to diagnose their causes and resolve them accordingly. You can use different methods to deal with different types of errors, such as:
- De-duplication: This involves removing or merging duplicate records in your database. This can be done manually by sorting, grouping the data fields. You can use a few tools or add ons to get this done easily.
- Orchestration: This involves filling in missing values in your data with reasonable estimates. You can carry the data enrichment process to append the real-time information.
How to Do Data Validation
There are different ways to do data validation depending on the type and source of the data you want to validate. Here are some common methods:
- Use manual validation methods: You can use manual validation methods to inspect that your data are aligned as per your criteria. For example, you can use visual inspection to spot any abnormalities in the values.
- Use external validation sources: The validation process can also be carried out via open web research by cross-referencing with multiple reliable sources as discussed before.
How Can Data Enrichment, Data Cleansing, and Data Validation Enhance Your CRM? CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a system that helps you manage your interactions with your current and potential customers. It helps you store and organize customer information, track customer activities and behaviors, communicate with customers across channels, and provide customer service and support. Data enrichment, data cleansing, and data validation can enhance your CRM by:
- Improving your customer segmentation: By enriching your customer data with additional attributes, you can create more accurate customer segments based on their characteristics and preferences. This can help your marketing campaigns and communications align to your customer needs.
- Increasing your customer retention: By cleansing your customer data of errors or inconsistencies, you can gain your customer’s trust and ensure that you have up-to-date and reliable requirements of your customer.
In conclusion, data enrichment, data cleansing, and data validation are unavoidable processes for businesses looking to achieve excellence in their marketing and sales efforts. These practices are essential for maintaining a healthy CRM system and ensuring that marketing and sales teams have access to accurate, complete, and relevant prospect data.