Contact data enrichment helps you avoid costly mistakes like wasting marketing spend by chasing the wrong leads or wasting sales effort because your CRM data is stale.
Manual data entry is insufficient for many orgs. Fortunately, solutions like Cognism offer a range of capabilities to enrich and refresh contact and account data as it enters your CRM and ensures it stays clean afterwards.
Today, we’ll cover all you need to know about contact data enrichment.
How to enrich contact data?
Most companies use data enrichment tools or sales intelligence software to enrich their contact data. To do this effectively, follow the steps we highlighted below.
1. Evaluate your existing data
Are there specific key data points that your records are missing? Maybe you lack cell phone number data for your decision-makers, contact data in a particular region, or need to enrich IT decision-makers’ email list?
Knowing which essential data points are underserved by your current data will help you decide which tool to use because each tool specialises in different data types.
2. Pick a contact data enrichment provider
Find a contact data provider that automatically supplies you with the information you need.
Besides account and contact data, look for other B2B data points:
- Intent data
- Sales event triggers
- Technographics
All these data types help sales and marketing teams segment customers into personas for more targeted campaigns and increased engagement.
To save sales and marketing teams time, find a provider that seamlessly integrations with your existing tech stack.
Do your due diligence before committing to a solution. Most companies will offer free demos where you can see the platform in action and ask questions to a product expert.
3. Rinse and repeat
Data decays quickly. B2B buyers change email addresses, get promoted, and switch companies often. To keep your database accurate, consistently enrich your contact data as time goes on.
With Cognism, you can enrich contact data instantly to clean up historical records or schedule CRM enrichment at a set frequency to keep the data fresh on an ongoing basis. It also allows you to enhance specific lead lists with actionable contact data.
Why do 2000+ companies use Cognism to enrich contact data?
- Phone-verified mobile numbers with 98% accuracy (Diamond Data®)
- Verification service on request (Diamonds-on-Demand®)
- Validated B2B emails
- NAM, EMEA, and APAC coverage
- GDPR and CCPA compliance
- Unrestricted record views and page-level exporting (subject to our fair-use policy)
- Consent-based intent data, powered by industry leader Bombora
- Sales trigger events and firmographics
Cognism pricing
- The price of your licence depends on your company’s needs.
- Packages for individual prospecting and operational workflows.
- For a more detailed rundown, look at the Cognism pricing page or book a call with a data expert to discuss details.
Is complying with privacy laws important when enriching contact data?
You risk incurring serious penalties for failing to follow privacy laws regarding contact data. For example, breaking GDPR laws can cost your business up to 20 million euros or 4 % of your firm’s total revenue from the last fiscal year.
That’s why Cognism is committed to collecting and processing contact data in compliance with CCPA and GDPR laws.
How to evaluate contact data enrichment providers?
The main factors to consider when evaluating a contact data enrichment provider are:
- Contact data accuracy
- Data enrichment attributes
- GDPR/CCPA compliance
- Data verification methods (opt for manually verified)
- Integration capabilities with your tech stack
Why should you enrich contact data?
Data enrichment is usually used to fill in the gaps in contact data and to provide more context for marketing, sales, and customer success teams. But that’s not all. Let’s go over some of the results you can expect from enriching your contact data.
1. Remove inefficiencies and build pipeline faster
Bad contact data can hinder your ability to sell. First of all, false information can misdirect salespeople, causing them to spend time on fruitless activities.
Imagine a salesperson sees that a lead is the VP of Marketing. Trusting this CRM data, they spend five minutes crafting a perfect cold email speaking to common issues senior marketers face.
They send the email and follow-up multiple times but it’s all in vain. Unbeknownst to them, the VP actually became CEO a year ago and is now too high up the ladder to ever respond to a cold email about a marketing point solution.
Your CRM data enrichment prevents such waste of effort. It ensures that salespeople are making decisions based on sound information. And this reduces inefficiencies and improves your pipeline velocity.
2. Improve lead scoring and customer segmentation
Lead scoring is when you use demographic, behavioral, and other types of data to assess the qualification level of each individual lead. It helps you separate the wheat from the chaff.
For this process to give you accurate results, however, you need to feed your lead scoring tool accurate data.
A tool can’t judge a new lead’s qualification level if all it has on them is what they submitted in the contact form — usually just their name, email address, or phone number.
Automated contact data enrichment fills in these contact records with data that you can use to assign an accurate score. Additional information about leads improves the routing process as well.
On another note, your customer segmentation improves when you take data enrichment seriously. You can easily divide buyers into similar groups based on specified attributes, like job title or company size.
3. Reach company’s decision-makers
Contact data enrichment helps you contact decision-makers in your target accounts in two ways. First, it ensures that you have access to their correct, up-to-date contact information, like direct phone numbers or emails.
Access to these empowers your sales team to bypass gatekeepers and switchboards.
Second, with intent data and selling signals, that some data enrichment tools provide, you’ll have more visibility into the decision-maker’s situation and company. For example, you may find out when a new C-level executive is appointed or when the company receives new funding. This knowledge empowers you to create personalised emails that get their attention.
4. Deliver a tailored message
Customers and prospects all want tailored messages from the B2B brands they buy from. They want to feel like you know them and are privy to their specific needs.
In fact, in a Salesforce survey, 73% of customers agreed with the statement, “I expect companies to understand my unique needs and expectations.”
When you enrich marketing data, you’ll have more information about your buyers and be able to craft email campaigns, sales call scripts, and cold emails that anticipate their needs.
For instance, technographics give you insights into a company's workflow, how it can be improved, and what pain points the company might be facing. You could then contact prospects with a solution that complements their workflow or offer to replace a competitor technology.
5. Avoid compliance issues
Countries are instituting more regulations around B2B data compliance. It’s crucial that your business stays in line with these policies to avoid serious penalties and fines.
By using a compliant data provider, like Cognism, you can rest easy knowing that the B2B data you’re using has been lawfully sourced and processed. For example, our phone numbers are scrubbed against DNC lists in the US, UK, and multiple European countries to leave you with compliant numbers only.
Check out Cognism compliance checklist.
6. Increase email delivery and connection rates
Your CRM and other tools should always reflect any changes in your customers' email addresses. Otherwise, you’ll send too many emails straight into the ether.
Consistently enriching your B2B contact data ensures that your contacts’ email addresses are up-to-date. And this leads to greater email delivery and connection rates.
