It’s an important process to enhance your prospect data for analytical purposes or for targeted marketing. There are various best practices one needs to follow to generate maximum ROI by getting the right data, improving match rate and to have your data in a properly prescribed format which can be ready to use immediately.
Firstly, you need a plan regarding how you want to utilize your data after you add enriched information. Then standardize and enrich your database. Make sure your data is as per the security policies.
- Understand your database: Different types of organizations have several types of collection tools to accumulate customer data, like names, addresses, contact nos., email addresses, etc. Look at different types of customer data you have and then decide how would you like to go ahead with data enrichment.
- Standardize your own database: Stick to your top 100 or 150 targeted accounts, if you really don’t want to spend time on money on the data that hasn’t been to any use since ages. You can now yourself standardize your file with first name, last name, states, zip codes, etc. in the same format that you use for your marketing campaigns. Regular standardization will keep your file updated and usable, and your data vendors can get you better match rates.
- Choose a right data vendor: It’s very important to have a good data vendor who can append your customer or prospect information according to your requirements. Identify duplicate data from your CRM and marketing automation tools and get cleaner efficient data for effective campaigns. A good data vendor will help you, clean-up data which is relevant to your target universe. Your data vendor not just helps you in refreshing your prospect/customer database, but also helps in significantly improving your campaign ROI with correct data needed to improve your segmentation and lead nurturing efforts by regularly refreshing your data to fill in the gaps, replacing inaccurate data with accurate information
- Test & Validate: Once you have cleaned your CRM/MAP data and selected your vendor, run a sample test. For instance, say take 5000 records and ask your data vendor to run them through the data enrichment process to refresh the elements you want. This will let you know how great the match rate is, match rate will never be 100% but always be close to 95% if you have the best data vendor in town. And, because not all data elements are likely to be appended to all records, you will be able to determine how much coverage you will get of the data elements you want the most. Many vendors will provide a free test to show off their services, their turnaround time, the details of their data and the support they can provide in helping you interpret the results.
Finally, review the whole engagement. If you haven’t opted for a third-party data enrich before, it can be a little overwhelming. These best practices of understanding, cleaning and documenting your data, selecting a good vendor, and validating the processing will help you successfully enhance your file. Getting your data refreshed is important because adding the right information to your customer file will improve its use internally and make it a sound foundation from which you can grow your business.