Customer Data Enhancement
Why Enhance Your Customer/CRM Database?
Enhancing Customer Data is becoming increasingly important as strategies and platforms for taking advantage of individual or at least segment-level insights are being deployed in the form of Marketing Automation software and especially Customer Data Platforms and as self-serve predictive analytics continues to grow.
But even with these new technologies — which can take advantage of vast amounts of first-party behavior and interaction data — knowing customer demographics, interests, psychographics and behaviors beyond what you can observe directly will help answer important questions such as:
- What other products are customers likely to want or need?
- Which customer segment do they fall into?
- How can we better personalize the user experience (via the Web, call centers, etc.)?
- What is their expected Life Time Value?
- What is their capability to afford or qualify for an up-sell?
- What priority should be assigned – overall and for specific products or services – for higher cost marketing campaigns (e.g., direct mail)?
These questions can be answered faster and with greater accuracy if data that is not knowable from first-party interactions is appended to the customer record. This is where third-party data enhancement from trusted, privacy-compliant sources can help tremendously.
Note that these questions also apply to new customers or prospects, for example someone who just signed up for a newsletter or loyalty program. In fact, these new customers/prospect, for which there is little prior interaction, will gain the greatest boost from third-party data enhancement.
Best Data Elements to Append to Customer/CRM Records
Clients often ask us which data elements should be the highest priority to append to a customer record. This depends on the product or service but there are a few core data elements that every business-to-consumer (B2C) database should probably include, such as:
- Age of the Individual and others in the household
- Estimated Household Income and/or Wealth indicators
- Gender and marital status
- Life Stage (or other data element from a Segmentation Model)
- Propensity Models that are a clear match for the product/service offered.
Beyond these, the best way to determine which data enhancement elements to append is to perform either a Look Alike Report or a Predictive Customer Analysis. Both will help prioritize which other data elements to select.
An example great foundational package of data elements offered at a very attractive price consists of: Estimated Household (HH) Income, Adult Age Ranges Present, Occupation, Gender, Education, Presence of Children, Children’s Age Ranges, Business Owner, Marital Status, Homeowner vs. Renter, Length of Residence and Mail Order Buyer, Donor or Responder. There are dozens of other package options available. Custom packages/bundles of any number from among the hundreds of data elements and thousands of propensity models.
Best Method to Enhance Customer Data
Depending on the timing and frequency of your need to append new data, there are several methods you can use to execute the enhancement process:
- Data Enhancement via Self-Service User Interface – great for infrequent need (e.g., monthly, quarterly or annually)
- Batch Data Enhancement via FTP – this process can be set up to automatically process files uploaded and works for frequent needs (i.e., daily or weekly)
- Real-time Enrichment API – designed for real-time use cases, such as when a new record is received. Has other advantages in that it can handle data in a variety of forms including name and address, email only and phone only in a single step. (For email and phone-only data records, either reverse-email or reverse-phone append would need to be performed first.)