Customer Relationships Management (CRM) is one of the top analytics and data tools. Businesses use this system to efficiently store and use customer data. This allows sales and marketing teams to use the data whenever needed.
However, the data stored in CRM could become outdated or irrelevant. To cope with this issue, you need to enrich your CRM quite often. If you don’t know what is CRM data enrichment or how to do it, this is the article for you.
If you want to keep your CRM data updated and fresh, just continue reading!
What is CRM Data Enrichment?
CRM data enrichment is referred to as a process that involves adding more data points to the existing data stored in the CRM system of a company. For this purpose, companies collect data from both external and first-party sources.
The data appending process is another name for data enrichment, which companies use to refresh their data. The major reason behind the enrichment of CRM data is to enhance data quality. Once enriched, the data becomes well-rounded and more accurate.
How to Enrich CRM Data
Keeping in mind how important is CRM data, you should find effective ways to enrich your data. Here are the ways that could help you enrich high-quality data:
Third-Party Sources
This approach relies on buying external data from trustworthy third-party sources. For this purpose, you should find professional data providers offering correct and authentic data. Hence, try finding one of the best data enrichment tools providing high-quality data for exceptional-quality outcomes.
Internal Data Collection
This process relies on using your internal sources to collect the data. Customers can offer first-party data upon request, either directly or indirectly. Usually, visitors navigating your website can provide correct information, including their name, email address, phone number, company name, etc.
No doubt, buying or collecting data isn’t an easy process. If you are looking for promising outcomes, it would be better to combine both these procedures. Combining different data sets can help you find clear, more accurate insights about your prospects.
How Inaccurate or Incomplete Data Lowers CRM Performance?
Data accuracy and completeness are two of the most essential aspects associated with data enrichment. Accurate data offers facts about the current scenarios. On the other hand, it is related to the overall value of the dataset and the completeness of the data points.
Therefore, accurate and complete information is crucial for the performance of a CRM system. The lack of both these factors can be damaging to your business. Here is how inaccurate or incomplete data can lower CRM performance:
Results in Making Bad Decisions
The database of customers serves as the primary reference point for generating sales. Marketing teams rely on this type of data while making a decision. Irrespective of the task, your marketing teams will need complete and accurate data. This ensures making the right choices.
For instance, wrong and outdated intent data will result in working on least effective lead-scoring decisions. This means that the sales team won’t get the right prospect. Customer data with inaccurate information will cause your marketing team to make wrong moves while attracting prospects.
Costs Time and Money
Relying on wrong information is a waste of time and money. To follow a lead, your sales team would have to trust the accurate data. In addition, the incomplete data doesn’t give the right information about the segment of the customer base you want to target.
The inability to target the prospective customer costs a lot of precious time and money. Your sales and marketing teams will continue to target the people who are not interested in buying your product or service. In other words, the absence of accurate data keeps your company in the dark.
Besides, inaccurate CRM data drains out a company’s financial resources in a variety of ways. Even after investing a huge amount, your data analytics don’t offer actionable insights. This also results in wasting your technological resources.
Damages Reputation
When a company uses low-quality data for its marketing purposes, it could hamper its reputation. The decisions made on inaccurate data not only leave your marketing strategy less effective but also destroy your company’s image.
One of the most essential purposes of a marketing campaign is to build a strong customer relationship. If you don’t have relevant and accurate information, your prospects won’t consider interacting with you, and repeated marketing calls will result in their displeasure.
Hindrance to Automation
For a smooth communication with a prospect, you need accurate and reliable data. Automation is among the most straightforward paths to boost your business. With an automated CRM capable of integrating with the other tools, you can streamline the Marketing process.
This allows your sales and marketing teams to perform at their best. They can spend more time on key aspects like lead nurturing and screening potential customers. However, this is possible only if you trust your data.
In fact, it’s the quality of your CRM data, which can affect the outcome of your automated procedure. Errors and low-quality datasets will lower the overall performance of an automated process. This makes the process inefficient and defeats the true purpose of automation.
Types of Data to Use for Enriching CRM
There are numerous types of data that are considered crucial for adequate CRM data enrichment. Listed below are the most popular types of data used for CRM enrichment:
B2B Contact Data
It is a common misconception that contact data is only a basic data type used for CRM enrichment. In fact, B2B contact data doesn’t need to be restricted to only company name or email. On the contrary, it includes information like job title, duties, company’s annual revenue, etc.
Contact data, such as a phone number or LinkedIn profile, is of great importance. It allows you to communicate with the prospect directly and generate leads. You also need this kind of information to enter into a nurturing relationship with your prospective clients.
Regarding the sources for B2B contact data, you can count on platforms like LinkedIn, company websites, business directories, third-party data providers, etc. Some of these platforms might restrict the data collection process, yet you can manage to retrieve a good amount of data about your prospects.
Technographic Data
This amounts to another considerable source to enrich CRM. It allows you to understand more about the issues or pain points of the customers. You can get a clue by taking into account the technical gadgets or software used by the prospects.
When you enrich CRM data with Technographics, it’s much easier for you to identify the solutions that are relevant and compatible with the needs of your prospects. Technographic data offers information regarding tools and technologies used by your prospective customers.
This allows you to understand the technical requirements of your client and allows you to offer them tailored solutions. The major sources for technographic data include web scraping tools, technology usage surveys, third-party data providers, etc.
Firmographic Data
This type of data allows B2B companies to enhance their CRM enrichment. Firmographic data includes information like company type, industry, sales, revenue, and kind of ownership. This data is essential to learn about the key pain points of the prospects.
Firmographically enriched data will also offer solutions to address the pain points. This data is highly recommended for sales strategies and B2B marketing. It also helps businesses to target particular industries.
The noteworthy sources for Firmographic data include LinkedIn, business directories, and industry reports.
Demographic Data
This data offers basic information like gender, age, education, income, location, and occupation. It helps you create a segmented list of prospects and build customized marketing strategies. The sources for demographic data include third-party data providers, customer surveys, and social media profiles.
Intent Data
This is among the most effective and widely used data. It helps you determine the buying intent of the prospects. Knowing what your prospects love to buy is beneficial in many ways. For instance, it allows your sales teams to offer a personalized customer experience, generate more leads, and enhance conversion rates.
This is why intent data is referred to as the most prominent solution for CRM data enrichment. It includes signals that indicate a customer's buying intent. This data lets you seek insight into your prospects' preferred products or services.
With this data, you can engage with your customers using a proactive approach. Since these customers pass through the buying journey, you can persuade them to buy your products. The sources for intent data include website behavior, marketing automation tools, and third-party data providers.
Transactional Data
Transactional data is all about the transactions conducted by the customers. These include purchase frequency, purchase amounts, and payment methods. With this data, you can perform revenue analysis and understand buying patterns.
This data helps identify high-value customers and boosts revenue. The major sources for transactional data include financial software, point-of-sale systems, and E-commerce platforms.
Behavioral Data
This data helps identify the actions of customers including email opens, website visits, clicks, social media interactions, and purchase history. It offers valuable insight into engagement levels and customer interests.
As a result, you can create customized marketing and sales strategy. The sources for behavioral data include email marketing platforms, web analytics tools, and CRM system activity logs.
Geographic Data
Geographic data offers information about the physical location of a prospect. For instance, you can identify the country, region, and city of a prospective customer. With this type of information, you can target the location-based market and learn about the market trends.
The sources for collecting geographic data include customer addresses, IP geolocation data, and third-party data providers.
Best Ways to Maximize Your CRM Performance
While doing CRM data enrichment, you can take advantage of a reliable and efficient CRM system. It should have the potential to drive maximum sales and ensure customer satisfaction. Below are the most popular ways to get the best possible outcomes:
- Track your CRM Performance: This process helps you track down the CRM performance. The methodologies for this procedure have evolved over time. Hence, you can now expect the best possible results.
- Automate: This involves creating a uniform system for automating the basic tasks associated with management and data entry.
- Use Personalize Approach: You can use personalized data sets for CRM enrichment. This helps create customer profiles and buyer personas, allowing you to continue with tailored marketing and sales strategies.
- Cleanse Data: For the desired outcome, you need to cleanse the data before using it for CRM enrichment. This ensures that your data stays updated and free from unwanted content.
Key Benefits of CRM Data Enrichment
The following are the major benefits of enriching CRM data:
Improved Customer Insights
Enriching your CRM data helps integrate additional details such as social media activity, demographics, and buying behavior. This brings you a comprehensive and accurate view of the prospective customers. Besides, it allows for understanding the needs and preferences of your customers. For this purpose, you need to rely on a top-notch data enrichment tool.
Enhanced Personalization
Enriched CRM data makes it possible for you to create more customer-oriented and tailored campaigns. For instance, you can send personalized messages based on customer profiles. By doing so, you can expect better customer engagement as well as higher conversion rates.
Better Segmentation
Enriched CRM data helps create precise and accurate customer segmentation. With updated, relevant, and complete information, you can easily target the best prospects.
Increased Sales Efficiency
Your sales team can take advantage of accurate and comprehensive customer information. This helps improve lead scoring and sales prospecting. Furthermore, you can also create tailored sales pitches to grab the attention of specific customers.
Enhanced Data Quality
Whether it’s about B2C or B2B data enrichment, data quality tends to be a critical aspect. CRM data enrichment helps clean and update your data. For instance, you can remove duplicates, fill in missing details, and correct errors. To enhance the overall quality of your CRM data, make sure to find one of the best CRM data enrichment tools.
CRM Data Enrichment Best Practices
To create better marketing strategies, you can rely on the following best practices associated with CRM data enrichment:
Outline Your Goals
To start with, you need to be clear about your CRM data enrichment goal. For this purpose, identify and outline the critical aspects of your goal. For instance, you can make it your goal to improve the accuracy or improve the relevancy of your data. Your goal must also align with your business objectives.
Use Multiple Sources for Data Integration
By combining the information from numerous internal and external data sources, you can improve the efficiency of your CRM data enrichment process. You can use different sources like customer support systems, automation platforms, email lookup tools, social media, etc.
Leverage Data Enrichment Services
You can use third-party data enrichment services, which offer specialized CRM data enrichment services. This ensures a deeper understanding of your prospect, allowing you to boost your sales and marketing efforts.
Pay Attention to Customer Feedback
Carefully monitor customer interactions or feedback from sources like reviews, customer records, surveys, and support. This gives you an idea about the satisfaction level of your customers. It also offers insight into the needs and requirements of the customers, making it possible for you to improve customer relationships.
Implement Data Standardization
Make sure to create and enforce strict data entry standards. This would help you to categorize and record data in a synchronized way. It allows enriching your CRM with high-quality and accurate data. So, you can easily draw insights from your highly enriched CRM data.
How Often Should You Enrich Your CRM Data?
To keep your CRM performing at its best, you need to enrich its data regularly. For instance, you can perform regular data audits, integrate reliable data sources, and cleanse data to maintain its relevance and accuracy.
Furthermore, you should also enrich your CRM before launching sales initiatives or marketing campaigns. This ensures you get the most updated and comprehensive customer insights. To make informed decisions and improve engagement, be sure to enrich your CRM data regularly.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to the availability of CRM data, the internet offers plenty of information to get started. One of the most common methods of collecting CRM enrichment data is web scraping. However, you need to follow ethical rules and general regulations while scraping online data.
Using any of the above-mentioned data enrichment processes can be beneficial in numerous ways. However, for higher conversion rates, you need to rely on trustworthy and efficient ways of CRM data enrichment.
