It's hard to make strategic business decisions without data.
Data has become a powerful weapon for organizations that want to remain competitive in their field. Data is everywhere!
No matter what department you work in, data has become indispensable for developing strategies, management methods, implementing automation and so on. Whatever form it takes, data is constantly being enriched, and for it to be reliable, it needs to be regularly updated. Why has data enrichment become so essential, and how do companies enrich their data? Tale of Data takes you through the various processes involved in enriching your database.
What is data enrichment?
Data enrichment is the process of combining data from various internal and/or external sources.
In practice, enriching data means adding value-added information to a CRM, for example, with the aim of getting to know customers better. Take the example of a company specializing in electronics. It needs to know which technology brands its customers prefer, in order to target its communications. It also needs to track their engagement by referring to click-through rates, conversion rates, time spent on the site, and so on.
In a nutshell, data enrichment is the activity of collecting a large volume of disparate data, structured or unstructured, and transforming it into qualitative data. Enrichment also involves supplementing data with information from external repositories (Open Data) or internal repositories.
How are data enriched?
There are two channels for data enrichment:
- Exploit existing data in the company's internal databases.
- Obtain data from external third-party sources.
How to use an internal database
Your company collects a huge amount of customer data on a daily basis. It collects this data directly via its offline or digital channels: its website, its social networking pages, its mobile applications, its points of sale, and so on. Data can be raw and unstructured. That's why it's important to clean up the internal database, which involves checking data quality, correcting errors, homogenizing information, and so on.
This phase of cleaning and transforming raw data into enriched qualitative data must respect a certain standardization or a detailed reference system. This involves, for example, defining how telephone numbers with a national or regional area code should be entered, how gender should be written (feminine or f only), and so on. With this kind of harmonization, data can be used by everyone. In this way, a single version of an internal database can be created, which can then be fed with external information.
How can you enrich your database with external services?
Sometimes, the information you need just isn't there. Whether it's data created by third-party services or by institutions, it's quite possible to aggregate it and integrate it into a dataset.
You can find the missing information by retrieving it from partners, purchasing it from external suppliers or making it available as open data. Whatever method you use, you need to ensure the quality of the exported data.
What's more, when retrieving external data, it's important that this data can be easily integrated with other existing information. Tale of Data lets you find all your data organized and standardized in a single place, enabling all your collaborators to enrich it at a later date.
How do you clean up your data with Tale of Data?
The data preparation process is a multi-step process: with the Tale of Data platform, you can first cleanse and consolidate your various information sources to create a new data set. However, we'd like to 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. This saves time and eliminates the need for manual extractions.
Data profiling
This is an essential step in data cleansing. Data profiling enables you to assess the quality of your data, and identify any problems or errors in the rows of your dataset. In other words, data profiling involves analyzing the content of a data source in advance, to ensure 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 speaking, the raw in-house data is imperfect. This means correcting spelling mistakes and format inconsistencies, deleting all unnecessary or misleading punctuation marks, invalid e-mails, dealing with missing information (NAN), and so on.
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 is a crucial step, because without it, the enrichment process cannot proceed smoothly.
How are duplicate data handled?
If you're consolidating data from different sources, it's highly likely that you'll notice some duplication. The first thing to do is to compare existing data to eliminate duplicates. It is highly advisable to use a technological solution to help you with this type of processing. Our Tale of Data platform enables you to perform a data audit to deduplicate and merge data. Indeed, duplicate data is problematic, as it hinders future data processing. Nor can they be properly exploited, since they are unreliable.
What is a fusion purge function?
For successful data enrichment, a data merge purge is essential to obtain a single version of the data. Merge purging is a process that brings multiple data sources together in one place. At the same time, it removes duplicates, unnecessary fields and records. If you don't want to waste time purging data by hand in Excel, for example, Tale of Data is an efficient solution that lets you create a single source of truth. Such a tool overwrites old records by exploiting new data. What's more, it's easy to use, with no need to be a computer programming professional.
Why do we talk about data survival?
The final stage in the enrichment process, data survival, refers to the final creation of a single, reliable file containing only cleaned, 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 need to think about feeding the data stream on a regular basis. It's a question of animating and nourishing it, by assigning people to do this with the appropriate tools. This work has become essential, as consumer behavior is increasingly variable, and their situations and needs are changing. That's why it's necessary to keep information up to date by enriching the data source. This is also known as "information watch", to ensure that data is available in real time. Similarly, as you progress towards your objectives, you'll need to flesh out your data sources even further.
What are the reasons why companies enrich their data?
Enrichment means adding value to data.
Data enrichment increases the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. Indeed, data can represent a formidable 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 various fields of a form. With enriched data, you'll be able to better segment your prospects and develop more personalized communication plans according to different profiles. You'll get better interaction with your prospects, and a higher conversion rate as a result.
Enriched data greatly helps sales reps to better convert customers. With more relevant and complete information at their fingertips, sales reps can more easily adapt their sales pitch and approach to each individual customer. In fact, he'll be able to develop a more polished and targeted sales pitch that better meets the customer's needs.
Qualitative data also helps to improve customer knowledge in general. What's more, if this data is regularly updated, it creates serious advantages in the company/customer relationship. The latter can anticipate customer needs and react quickly to 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 functionalities of our solution, please consult our dedicated page: enriching your data with Tale of Data.