Data enrichment: 5 ways enrichment can improve marketing outcomes

Businesses use data enrichment to help their sales, marketing, and customer care teams to better understand customers and to improve the quality of engagement with the customers. Data enrichment provides a depth of context to help better understand your leads, qualify them, and allocate sales and marketing resources to those who offer the best odds of success.

If your leads come from forms or account signups, you want to know who's knocking at your door. Data enrichment fills in the details, automatically turning a work email address (or corporate domain name) into a full customer profile with company, job, and contact information.

Data enrichment is a game-changer for sales and marketing teams. Without it, you’re wasting precious time and effort researching who your contact is and how you can help them. But when you're equipped with consistent context on each lead, you can act faster and provide a better experience from the start.

Jump ahead to:

• The benefits of using data enrichment
• Increase lead form conversions by shortening forms with data enrichment tools
• Send leads to the right reps with automated lead-routing solutions
• Use lead scoring to automatically find the best leads
• Develop a better understanding of your ideal customer
• Get more data for precise personalization in marketing campaigns
• Data enrichment tools aid marketing optimization at scale

The benefits of using data enrichment

The more customer data you have, the more you know about them and the better equipped you are to reduce friction during your interactions. The data quality also enhances the customer experience by helping you find opportunities to delight them.

However, customers may be reluctant to share data. In fact, researchers in the School of Economics and Business in Norway have observed that “willingness to share personal data decreases when consumers need to share more personal data.”

Furthermore, nearly half of consumers are uncomfortable with sharing their data even when it could help improve the personalization of their experiences. Data enrichment removes the awkwardness that comes from asking for “too much information” by sourcing additional data points from public sources such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Google mobility data, or data syndicators like GfK or Nielson to create a richer profile for your contacts. Data enrichment helps enhance your engagement with customers by asking for less personal information while still fetching the data you need to make an effective sales pitch.

Clearbit’s data enrichment tools help to leverage 100+ data attributes such as company name, emails, phone numbers, tech stack, social media accounts, and other data to better understand your customers and make informed decisions about their needs — without asking them for too much information.

You can also incorporate the attributes into the tools you use daily (like Salesforce, Marketo, and HubSpot) to unlock deeper insights that can transform your sales and marketing efforts.

Here's our guide to five of the most powerful ways to use data enrichment tools.

1. Increase lead form conversions by shortening forms with data enrichment tools

Increasing your lead form conversion rates is often as simple as reducing friction on your forms. You can start by reducing the number of fields, but if you delete the wrong ones, you’ll miss out on the data you need to understand and qualify leads. That’s where our data enrichment tools save the day. Our optimized web forms are designed to increase form conversion rates and get the precise customer data you need.

With Clearbit, you'll get a full profile of the customer from just an email address. The algorithm also dynamically shortens forms so fields can be auto-filled or hidden based on the information the user provides. And the best part is that because this data is automatically appended as lead types, there's a much lower chance of adding inaccurate information to your CRM or marketing automation platform (MAP).

How Mention increased form conversions by 54%

Media monitoring company Mention needed to increase signups and identify promising leads. They turned to Clearbit to get qualifying lead data while asking fewer questions in their form — just an email address and first and last name.

With our optimized form, Mention reduced friction in the user experience, all while getting more data. The best news: they were able to boost signup conversions by 54% — thanks to data enrichment.

2. Send leads to the right reps with automated lead-routing solutions

Many companies have sales reps manually evaluate every incoming lead — an inefficient use of their time and expertise. To make a big sales impact, your reps should be spending their time selling rather than doing research and data entry.

Automated lead routing systems take care of this initial footwork. Clearbit’s data enrichment solutions make automation possible by using aggregators to populate accurate company and contact details directly in Salesforce. With consistent data on every lead, you can build an automated routing system based on territory and other rules to assign leads. Reps can then quickly dive into working the right leads, who won't be left hanging at a time when they're most interested.

How to automate territory detection for routing

To build a lead routing system, use native features in your CRM (like Salesforce's Assignment Rules), automation platforms (like Tray.io), or lead routing software (like Chili Piper and LeanData). Routing rules are then built using data points.

Clearbit's 100+ firmographic and demographic attributes give you the maximum flexibility in deciding how to slice up territories. Useful attributes for lead routing include:

• location (zip code, state code, country code, etc.)
• company size
• estimated annual revenue
• industry, sub-industry, or vertical
• tech tags (the software vendors that the lead’s company already uses)

How Heap routes leads by company size

The product analytics company Heap uses data enrichment to keep its forms short while getting useful data from signups. This helps them process leads based on industry and size — perfect for their plan to route leads by territory. Rather than dividing by geography as many teams do, they'll divide rep attention into three groups by company size: startup, mid-market, and enterprise.

Demand generation expert Charlie Liang explains, "It [Clearbit] saves a lot of time on lead research and gives the team a better hit rate. Even if it’s just two or three minutes per lead, that adds up."

3. Use lead scoring to automatically find the best leads

Not all leads fit your ideal customer profile, so your lead routing system is only as good as your lead qualification system. Lead scoring filters leads before routing them to your sales reps to ensure that sales doesn't waste time on leads who will never convert or who become costly customers.

First, you need information about leads to create and run models to identify who's most promising. Without this, your top rep could waste time talking to a student who just signed up for a free trial and can't afford your product. Plus, manual qualification is slow and typically done in batches, so identifying qualified prospects could take hours or even days, extending beyond the optimal window of opportunity to reach out and convert.

With real-time data enrichment, you can instantly score the likeliness of conversion and then route the lead to the right rep. This system is not only faster but more accurate — less vulnerable to human error and variations in judgment.

How to use data enrichment to score and accelerate qualified leads

Clearbit's firmographic and demographic data points provide a simple yet comprehensive way to filter through the noise. Data points useful for scoring include:

• number of employees
• industry
• geography
• job title, role, or seniority
• marital status
• technology the company uses
• estimated annual revenue
• Alexa rank
  

How Proposify and Gong use lead scoring to qualify leads

The proposal software company Proposify uses a combination of Clearbit-enriched data (attributes like job title, industry, number of employees, and estimated annual revenue) and behavioral data (like website activity and trial usage) to score leads in Marketo. Upon reaching a certain score, MQLs get passed to Salesforce and routed to sales reps.

With the one-two punch of automated lead scoring and routing, marketing teams can drive traffic and nurture leads without overwhelming sales — and sales teams have a faster, more reliable way of identifying high-value prospects.

The sales intelligence platform Gong even set up an entirely automated flow that qualifies and routes leads, and for their very best leads, they offer immediate meeting scheduling. This system relies on Clearbit to provide all the necessary data in real-time to be able to shorten their Marketo form and automate a lead's path with Chili Piper.

Automated lead scoring removes the unknowns, speeds up evaluation, and gets priority leads into conversations faster without stretching reps too thin.

4. Develop a better understanding of your ideal customer

To gain insights to improve your business, like knowing which attributes make prospects more likely to convert, you need consistent data. Customer data enrichment enables data-driven analysis, customer segmentation, and reporting so that you can define an ideal customer and identify concrete areas for improvement.

Clearbit's Salesforce integration provides 100s of data points for you to slice and dice in reports. For example, you can run a report to surface top attributes, like industry and company size, from your closed won opportunities — and then use that to prioritize future sales and marketing campaigns.

Constantly refreshing and collecting customer data results in a living ideal customer profile that also improves the precision of your targeted marketing as opposed to relying on a static buyer persona. As new signups occur, new patterns tend to emerge. This means you can keep your ideal customer profile up-to-date without manual effort.

Defining the qualities of a good lead aligns and focuses your marketing sales teams. Key attributes from an ICP inform everything from designing how to score and qualify prospects and selecting ABM target accounts to refining pricing and figuring out who to personalize marketing for.

It's like getting blueprints for how to best segment, find, target, and prioritize leads using existing data.

5. Get more data for precise personalization in marketing campaigns

Manual lead research is slow and time-consuming, and it gets significantly more challenging if you have to reach out to leads manually. Automation makes lead outreach more efficient, but without accurate customer data and precise personalization, your outreach might fall short..

Data enrichment tools handle the lead research and information-gathering, providing the context you need to personalize how you talk to leads. Clearbit's data points can help to target high-fit leads and guide your conversations toward the best solution for their business needs. For example, you can use:

• company size, industry, and other key attributes of your ideal customer profile to segment your campaigns
• attributes like role, seniority, and company size to personalize your pitches based on details like whether they’re a decision-maker or not and to determine their goals based on their team size or the stage of the company
• tech stack information to point to relevant use cases and integrations

Initiate more productive conversations based on quality data

Here's a sneak peek at Clearbit Sales Manager Cliff Marg's sales workflow. To get a full picture of who he's dealing with and their fit, he heads to Salesforce to see 100 data points about a lead's company and role right in Clearbit's Data Enrichment widget.

Cliff hones in on details like whether they use tools we integrate with, like Salesforce, Marketo, or Drift, to personalize his outreach. Then, when he reaches out to someone who's a great fit, he spends time crafting a customized email. He might tailor his message around Marketo or Salesforce use cases based on what he sees in their tech stack or role or call out a certain integration they could try.

Enhance the depth of personalization in email templates

Automated email sequences are one of the best ways to manage sales and marketing at scale. Data enrichment tools help improve the personalization in templated sales emails across tools like Outreach to tailor email campaigns, from outbound to onboarding to nurture sequences.

When you introduce personalization to email sequences, you’ll reduce subscriber churn in email marketing and connect with your audience in a more authentic way.

With Clearbit’s personalized emails, you can not only address the recipient by name but also use their company’s name and industry and the person’s role within the company to target their specific needs.

Better data = improved focus

With additional and consistent context for every lead, account, and customer, you get data-driven answers to the quintessential sales and marketing questions: "Who should I talk to right now?" and "What's the best way to talk to them so they convert and close?"

Data enrichment tools aid marketing optimization at scale

When prospects go through your marketing funnel to become leads, data enrichment provides a depth of context around a contact to help you understand their needs, deliver targeted marketing campaigns, and forge strategic customer relationships.

Clearbit enrichment tools help you enhance the usefulness of customer records to infer whether a new signup is a student who only needs your tool for an assignment or a decision-maker who is currently evaluating your company and five other alternatives.

Data enrichment is one of the key ways to optimize your sales and marketing process — leveraging first-party data and third-party data to build comprehensive customer profiles. Give your sales team better outcomes and ultimately help your business grow its top and bottom lines with data enrichment.

Lead capture is great. It shows that you are doing something right in your demand and lead generation campaigns. But if you pass off the leads to your sales team without contextual data, their efforts could be wasted.