It's hard to do without data to make a strategic decision in business.
Data has become a powerful weapon for organizations that want to remain competitive in their field of activity. Data is everywhere!
Whatever the department in which you work, data has become indispensable for developing strategies, management methods, implementing automation, etc. Whatever form it takes, data is constantly being enriched, and for it to be reliable, it must be updated regularly. Why has data enrichment become so essential and how do companies enrich their data? Tale of Data gives you the different processes to establish to enrich your database.
What is data enrichment?
Data enrichment is a set of processes for combining data from various internal and/or external sources.
In fact, enriching Data means, for example, completing a CRM with value-added information in order to better know its customers. Let's take the example of a company specialized in electronics. It has an interest in knowing the preferred technological brands of its customers to target its communication. It should also track their engagement by referring to click-through rates, conversion rates, time spent on the site, etc.
In a nutshell, data enrichment is an activity that consists of collecting a large volume of disparate data, structured or not, and transforming it into qualitative data. Enrichment also consists in completing its data with information from external repositories (Open Data) or internal repositories.
How is the data enriched?
There are two channels for data enrichment:
- Exploit existing data in the company's internal databases.
- Obtain data from external sources from third parties.
How to use an internal database
Your company collects a large amount of data on its customers every day. It collects them directly through its offline or digital channels: its website, its pages on social networks, its mobile applications, its points of sale, etc. The data can be raw and unstructured. This is why the internal database must be cleaned, which consists of checking the quality of the data, correcting errors, homogenizing the information, etc.
This phase of cleaning and transforming raw data into enriched qualitative data must respect a certain standardization or a detailed reference system. For example, it is necessary to define how telephone numbers with a national or regional code should be entered, how to write the gender (female or f only), etc. With this kind of harmonization, the data becomes usable for everyone. This way, a single version of an internal database can be created, which can then be fed with external information.
How to enrich your database with external services?
Sometimes the information you might need is not in your possession. Whether it's data created by third-party services or institutions, it's quite possible to aggregate and integrate it into a dataset.
You can find missing information by retrieving it from partners, purchasing it from outside vendors, or making it self-service in open data. Whichever method you use, you must ensure the quality of the exported data.
Moreover, when retrieving external data, it is important that this data can be easily integrated with other existing information. Tale of Data allows you to find all your data organized and standardized in one place, which allows all collaborators to enrich it later.
How do you clean up your data with Tale of Data?
The data preparation process is done in several steps: with the Tale of Data platform, you can first clean and consolidate your different information sources to create a new data set. However, we'll remind you of a few crucial steps in data cleansing.
Data integration to enrich your data
You need to integrate your data directly into the Tale of Data platform by connecting your data sources. The interest of this exercise is to save time and eliminate all manual extractions.
Data profiling
This is an essential step in data cleansing. Data profiling allows you to assess the quality of your data and identify various problems and errors in the rows of your dataset. In other words, data profiling is about analyzing the content of an information source in advance and ensuring that it is up to the task of further processing.
What needs to be cleaned up before enriching data?
We do what we call dirty data profiling. Generally, the raw data internally is flawed. This means correcting spelling errors and format inconsistencies, removing all unnecessary or misleading punctuation marks, invalid emails, dealing with missing information (NAN), etc.
To spot these problems, you need to "clean" the data and see what types of data make up the rows and columns of the dataset. This step is really crucial, because without this cleaning, the enrichment process cannot be done in good conditions.
How is duplicate data handled?
If you consolidate different data from several sources, you will most likely notice duplicates. The first thing to do is to compare the existing data to remove these duplicates. It is highly recommended to use a technological solution to help you in this type of processing. Our Tale of Data platform allows you to audit the data to deduplicate and merge the data between them. Indeed, duplicated data is problematic, because it hinders future data processing. They cannot be exploited correctly either because they are not reliable.
What is a merge purge function?
To achieve successful data enrichment, a data merge purge is essential to obtain a single version of the data. Merge purge is a process that brings multiple data sources together in one place. At the same time, it removes duplicates, unnecessary fields and records. To avoid wasting time purging data by hand in Excel for example, Tale of Data is an effective solution in this regard and allows you to create a single source of truth. Such a tool overwrites old records by exploiting new data. Moreover, it is an easy-to-use tool without the need to be a computer programming professional.
Why do we talk about data survival?
The final step in the enrichment process, data survival, is the final creation of a single, reliable file containing only cleaned and usable information. This file can then be used for future enrichment purposes.
Is it important to keep your database up to date?
Once your dataset is clean and reliable, you have to think about feeding the data flow regularly. It is a question of animating and feeding it by assigning people in charge of doing so with appropriate tools. This work has become essential, because the behavior of consumers is increasingly variable, their situation changes as their needs. This is why it is necessary to update the information by enriching the source of data. We also talk about information watch to have real time data. In the same way, as you progress in your objectives, you will need to enrich your data sources.
What are the reasons why companies are enriching their data?
Enriching means giving value to data.
Data enrichment can increase the effectiveness of marketing strategy. Indeed, data can be a great source of targeted traffic and qualified leads. Another opportunity is to offer an autocomplete service in online registration forms. Different results are then automatically proposed to users to fill in the different fields of a form. With enriched data, you are able to better segment your prospects and develop more personalized communication plans according to the different profiles. You will then obtain a better interaction with your prospects and a better conversion rate afterwards.
Enriched data greatly helps salespeople to better convert customers. With more relevant and complete information, a sales representative can more easily adapt his speech and approach to each customer. Indeed, he will have a more elaborate and targeted argumentation that will better meet the customer's needs.
Qualitative data also allows for a general improvement of customer knowledge. Moreover, if this data is updated regularly, it creates serious advantages in the company/customer relationship. The latter can anticipate customer needs and react quickly in case of changes in consumer buying behavior.
Open data enrichment in a nutshell
In conclusionThe success of your data enrichment program will enable you to develop strategies that are as close to the market as possible, and to better control your costs. But if you want your data enrichment to be a real success, don't forget that data quality is the key! For more details on the enrichment features of our solution, please consult our dedicated page: enriching your data with Tale of Data.