How to Use Data Enrichment for B2C Marketing

Data analysis is the life blood of modern B2C marketing. In today’s digitally dominated world, there is no shortfall of available data. Indeed, there is a plethora of data bits connecting anything that is sold, used, serviced, or queried about in our 24×7 online lives. Discerning data that delivers true causal insight from random noise is at the heart of data science. Effective selection and application of “data enrichment” can save you both time and money in every marketing initiative.

Data enrichment involves the appending of data from an external data depository to first-party data. This involves layering supplemental data onto aggregations of customers, prospects, or other known lists. Enriched data can help you make better, data-informed decisions, improve contact rates and email send rates, and inform content creation.

Generally, the more data that you can append onto your contacts, the more detailed insights you can gather about individuals to whom you want to market. The more contact points you can achieve with data enrichment, the higher your contact or response rates will be with marketing messages (via email, digital ads, or direct mail). That said, limited marketing budgets require focusing attention on enhancing the most important data types. It’s important to think about what data points are necessary for creating content and for reaching the individuals in your lists.

What is the Right Data Enrichment Strategy?

Data enrichment is ideally implemented by finding the correct data source for your needs. That depends on your objectives and the type of data enrichment you need to achieve. To pick the right data for your enrichment initiative, first identify the relevant data that makes sense with your lists.  Useful B2C marketing data enrichment options include the following:

• Demographic data enrichment—Details about your customers/prospects, including information such as date of birth (DOB), age range, gender, ethnicity, marital status, number of children in the household, and occupation
• Contact data enrichment—Contact information such as phone numbers (mobile vs. landline), email addresses, and postal addresses
• Geographic data enrichment—Geography-specific data, such as zip codes, longitude and latitude, map insights, city, and state
• Lifestyle and behavioral data enrichment—Lifestyle or behavioral data such as types of customer purchases, donation propensity, and general interests based on web browsing activity or online purchases

Specific selection then depends critically on your end goal. Some examples of criteria that typically drive enrichment choices follow:

• Demographic data enrichment
• Credit-card companies might want to append credit score or income level before sending credit card offers.
• High-end car dealers might want to append income level or occupation before advertising to prospective customers.
• Clothing retailers might be interested in appending gender, age, and occupation and income level before advertising.
• Contact data enrichment
• Ecommerce retailers might want to increase online reach with paid social or display campaigns by adding email addresses and phone numbers to improve match rates when onboarding audiences.
• Retailers might want to send email and direct mail offers to past customers, but must first obtain contact information of customers who haven’t provided that information in the past
• Marketing and customer success teams might append mobile phone number data to set up text message alerts for different parts of their marketing funnel, offering support and discounts, or tracking alerts.

Data enrichment is all about optimizing your marketing budget. You can save real money with data enrichment by efficiently targeting individuals contacted. Data enrichment helps you to focus on the most relevant customers or prospects.

Learn more about how Versium’s REACH data-enrichment solution helps optimize B2C marketing data analysis.