Technologically sophisticated. Powerful. Precise. Just plain cool. No, we aren’t talking about laser technology, although we could be; we’re talking about data enhancement.
While self-reported data and behavioral analytics can tell you a lot about your prospects, you can learn more. No matter how well you know them, you always benefit from knowing your customers a little bit better. Data enhancement lets you do just that, filling in the inevitable blanks any customer or prospect record contains using third-party data. With this new information, you can construct a detailed image of your prospects. From there, you develop clearer, sharper market segments and can then customize your approach for each lead with laser-like precision.
Enriching Your Data
When leads subscribe to your newsletter or join your mailing list, you get valuable primary-source data, but there are things your prospects can’t tell you about themselves. They may not know some of the data that’s vital for you to have – annual company income, previous buying history, SIC code, and other details that help you better serve your leads. Data enrichment overlays information from quality sources – we use ReachBase, which now contains more than 72 million verified and continually updated records – to add what your leads may have missed.
Turning on the Lights
Marketing research has consistently shown that people are more receptive to sales offers when they feel the seller has a good rapport with them. In a face to face encounter, it’s easy to be personable, but large corporations have millions of leads to get to know. MARKETING AI® lets even the largest companies talk to each prospect one-on-one and create a personalized user experience for them, but that level of customer care only happens with regularly cleansed and updated data.
If you’re using marketing automation without the data to back it up, you’re using a dim flashlight to seek out your leads, not a laser. Precision is the difference between a lead who feels uniquely valued and one who assumes you were talking to someone else.
Hard Data
There’s another reason to keep up with data enhancement assiduously: It’s where you get quantitative support for the quality of your lead scoring algorithms. (You can read more about lead scoring this week in our article on finding your VIP clients.) To know if your lead scoring system is working, you need to watch prospects over time. The more closely you watch, the more you can learn from them, and the more you learn, the more closely you can model future leads’ behavior.
An Education in Customer Care
The beauty of MARKETING AI is that it gets smarter over time, and its learning process requires plenty of data. Enhancement ensures that it learns the right lessons, ones rooted in fact and highly specific to your organization. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions in business today, and data enrichment helps you tailor your marketing message to any number of leads. Marketing automation is a scalable solution, so no matter how much you grow, your system can still give customers individualized, personalized care.
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