Accurate, abundant data is essential to informed business decisions without guesswork. This doesn’t only go for marketing and sales but everything from day-to-day operations to long-term investments and strategies.
With this in mind, efficient data collection can uplevel systems and processes throughout your business. In this guide, you’ll learn about the most common data enrichment use cases to see precisely how this happens.
As the enrichment process can be tedious if not done correctly, we’ll also show you how to make it as effortless as possible. You’ll learn how hundreds of our clients are leveraging automation to gather countless data points without hassle or huge investments. 🔠
What Is Data Enrichment?
Data enrichment is supplementing existing information with additional data points, typically using specialized software. It provides more detail and context to the existing data, helping you turn it into actionable insights.
Think of the data enrichment process as filling the gaps to get the full picture of a prospect, customer, employee, etc. Such complete data offers many benefits, such as:
- Resource optimization ✔️
- Confident decision-making ✔️
- Increased conversion and sales ✔️
- Accurate trend forecasting ✔️
The specific benefits you’ll enjoy depend on your data enrichment technique and purpose. Many business owners are unaware of the full scope of business functions they can improve with it, so let’s explore the key ones.
Top Five Uses of Data Enrichment
Data enrichment can be a valuable ally in many processes, most notably:
- Market research
- Employee retention
- Prospecting
- Scoring and segmentation
- Campaign personalization
Below we’ll explain how data enrichment supports the above processes to help your business scale in the right direction.
Market Research
When planning your GTM strategy, you can use data enrichment to get invaluable information, such as:
- Competitor performance ⚔️
- Market share data 📊
- Recent product launches 🚀
- Future trends 📈
This data is particularly useful in the early stages of your strategy as it can inform the next steps and key GTM activities you’ll use for a successful launch. You can then plan your budget and other resources accordingly to ensure they’re optimized and put to good use.
Numerous market intelligence platforms offer data enrichment tools, which you can integrate with your existing software to get accurate data without too much legwork.
Employee Retention
Keeping your sales reps happy is essential to successful GTM strategies and the long-term viability of your business. With data enrichment, you can go beyond internal data points to pull information such as:
- Job market trends
- Industry salaries
- Workforce availability
Gathering such data ensures that you don’t fall behind when it comes to compensation packages and other important aspects of employee satisfaction. 🧑💻
Data enrichment can also be used internally in many ways. For example, you can implement employee satisfaction surveys or profiling questionnaires to understand your sales reps’ motivators and needs. This way, you can connect with them more deeply and increase employee retention.
In this context, data enrichment solutions typically come as a part of a robust human resources information system (HRIS) platform, so you can consider adopting one.
Prospecting
Prospecting is by far one of the most prevalent use cases of data enrichment. This doesn’t come as a surprise, considering the amount of data you need to connect with a cold lead in a way that fosters strong relationships. 🤝
Whether you want to enrich an inbound lead who signed up for your newsletter or someone your sales rep found on LinkedIn, you’ll want to know everything about them, most notably:
- Which industry they’re in
- How much experience they have
- Where they work
- Does their company have a budget for your product
You can find out all of this and much more through efficient data enrichment. If you opt for a capable platform from a reputable company, you can get a complete prospect profile from basic data like their name and location. The only thing left to do is figure out the best way to approach them, which we’ll touch on a bit later in this guide.
Lead Scoring and Segmentation
As mentioned, data enrichment lets you turn raw data into actionable insights—and lead scoring is a perfect example. When you collect enough information about a lead, you can score them to prioritize those with the highest chance of converting. 🎯
Besides external prospect information, you can also collect insights on the following:
- A lead’s online behavior
- Interactions with your content (website, emails, etc.)
- Lead source
While some of this data might be available with your CRM, dedicated data enrichment services typically offer more comprehensive data coverage, giving you all the prospect information you need for effective scoring and segmentation.
Campaign Personalization
When sending out cold emails, sales teams typically encounter one of the following two issues:
- The email ends up in spam and nobody reads it 📦
- The recipient ignores the email because it’s too generic 🚧
Data enrichment can help fix these issues. By leveraging prospect data, you can craft highly personalized emails that will show the prospect you’ve done your homework and have a good reason to email them.
The best part is that a solid data enrichment platform allows you to find the data you need at scale. This is done through numerous automation features that eliminate mundane work and free up more time for your sales reps to focus on high-impact activities.
How To Take Full Advantage of Data Enrichment
Regardless of your data enrichment goals, you can approach the process in several ways. Those with a coding background can pull data using a custom web scraper made in Python, though this process can be laborious and time-consuming.
An easier alternative is to opt for a third-party data provider that handles the heavy lifting and lets you find the data you need with minimal input. Still, such solutions suffer from two issues:
- They’re often too expensive, especially for budget-conscious users ❌
- The hit rate might be poor, forcing you to spend more money on another provider ❌
A third option is a data enrichment solution that brings together multiple data providers to maximize data availability. If this sounds appealing, you should check out Clay. ✅
Enrich Data Effortlessly With Clay
Clay is a data enrichment and sales automation platform that helps fill your sales pipeline with high-quality leads and set up effective outbound campaigns. Finding all the data points you need is as easy as one-two-three:
- Open a Clay table and go to Enrich Data
- Choose between 75+ integrations dedicated to data enrichment
- Toggle the data points you want to collect
That’s it—Clay will browse the selected data provider to find the information you need, and you’ll have it in no time. ⏰
If you don’t want to stick to a single provider, no problem—you can leverage Clay’s waterfall enrichment to scour several data sources at once. All you need to do is select the providers you want Clay to browse, and the platform will take care of the rest.
Thanks to Clay’s integrations, you don’t need to create a separate account with any data provider. You don’t even need to leave Clay at any point during enrichment—everything happens within the app, so you don’t need to juggle a bunch of tools and spreadsheets. 🤹
Besides people data enrichment, you can find plenty of information about companies. For example, you can use the Clearbit integration to get company data like:
- ✅ Contact information
- ✅ Social links
- ✅ Domain aliases
To further simplify your enrichment process, you can use dozens of pre-made templates. They come with Clay tables and custom workflows that let you avoid doing everything from scratch.
Reach Prospects Faster With Clay’s AI Features
Besides native features and integrations that enable streamlined data collection, Clay lets you enrich data with AI—enter Claygent. 🤖
It’s a robust AI assistant and researcher powered by ChatGPT that can answer all your questions about people and companies in seconds.
Claygent helps you collect any information you need to qualify a potential prospect and target them with the right message. For example, using a simple prompt, you can find a company’s:
- ✅ Key decision-makers
- ✅ Staff
- ✅ Funding
- ✅ Compliance
You can seamlessly export this data to your CRM and start planning your campaigns.
Speaking of messages, you don’t need to waste time on writing them yourself. Instead, you can let Clay’s AI Email Builder do it for you.
It automatically draws data from the Clay table to write personalized emails in minutes, so you can get entire sequences in no time. Send emails to your sequencer, and you can kick off a high-performing outreach campaign. 👋
These features trim the fat from your sales workflow, making it significantly more efficient. Here’s how one of Clay’s users feels about them:
Transparent Plans for Everyone’s Budget
Clay’s core features are available at no cost, thanks to a rich free plan. You get 100 monthly credits to explore different integrations, write emails with AI, and complete various other tasks without time limits.
If you want more credits, you can upgrade to one of the following paid plans:
Each plan offers flexibility by letting you choose your preferred number of credits so you can put every dollar to good use.
Create a Free Clay Account
If you want an effortless data enrichment process, you can get started with Clay in three steps:
- Visit the signup page 👈
- Enter your name, email, and password
- Explore Clay’s many features
To learn more about Clay before making your decision, visit the University for detailed product walkthroughs. You can also join Clay’s Slack community and sign up for the handy newsletter to receive useful tips and updates.
💡 Keep reading: Want to know more about effective data enrichment? Check out these articles: