Most companies that have an online business are not able to figure out where to start from when they collect user data.

Instamojo’s Head of Analytics, Ankur Sharma, hosted an online meetup where he explained how his team does data enrichment. He further shared how they managed to increase their revenue by 50% after implementing certain methods of lead qualification, segmentation and personalized marketing to attract leads a.k.a. potential customers.

Before going into the details of how you can convert leads into customers, let’s talk about what data enrichment is, why companies collect data and what kind of companies need it.

What is Data Enrichment?

Also known as lead enrichment or augmentation, it is the process of enhancing and verifying the data collected for lead generation. When a company has a digital presence and generates a massive amount of traffic, the scope of that traffic converting into leads and further converting into customers increases considerably.

An increasing amount of leads coming in does not determine the quality of these leads. The quality of a lead is determined by the company’s buyer persona.

Buyer Personas

Buyer persona is the profile of the person (in case of B2C) or company (in case of B2B) you target your product or service to. It is also known as data profiling.

Different companies have different ways in which they profile their data. It depends on what kind of product or service you offer and to whom you offer it.

Collecting detailed information about your lead helps in assessing lead quality. The lead quality refers to the relevance of a lead.

Instamojo being a B2B company, looks at four features in the lead to determine how relevant they are. Let’s take a look at them below.

Features of profile data

1. Business size and structure to understand whether it’s a one-person company or a multinational.
2. Online Presence of the company shows how active they are on the internet. This helps in understanding if the company is present offline in the form of showrooms, shops and offices or they have built their business online.
3. Social Media. When the company uses social media channels to promote its business, it is important to know where the major traffic is coming from. For example, the company’s Facebook would be highly active but their Instagram could be dead. This helps in assuming most of the leads generated in the company are through Facebook.
   Understanding this will help your company to target leads by tracking their social media. This can be through ads, banners, emails or popups.
4. Technological Prowess of the company. This is particularly useful to know when you are selling software products like SAAS. Understanding the level of technical literacy the employees of that company have, determines how much they will be interested in buying a software product.

Listing these features makes it easier for the sales team to see the potential, figure out the level of interest and prioritise leads accordingly.

It becomes difficult to manually track each lead that shows interest in the product or service. Therefore, the company must use data analytics tools either by building a team or outsourcing to third-party sources, depending on their budget and preference of how much control they want over their data.

Who needs data enrichment?

Not all companies need data enrichment. Companies getting five to ten leads in a day don’t need a data analytics team as they can manually handle and track their potential customers.

Google Analytics is the cheapest way to track and analyse traffic.

Companies that have all their business online, who get hundreds and thousands of leads every day find it difficult to track the leads and connect with them. Those are the ones that need data enrichment.

At the end of the day, the aim of a company is to efficiently connect with valuable customers.

How and why do companies collect data?

Big Data

All companies that use data to improve their marketing and sales strategy keep in mind the users’ data privacy policies. They don’t look at customers’ private data but collect the information that is already on the internet, for example, their website, Facebook likes, Youtube subscribers etc.

They look at the user behaviour by tracking the cookies. They also look at the details they receive when people fill forms on their landing pages or click on an ad or banner on Facebook or other websites.

Connect with potential clients

Collecting data is useful when companies cannot have direct contact with their potential customers. Data helps you know more about your customer and the more you know, the better you can understand their needs and offer them products and services according to their preferences.

Improve Customer Experience

With all this information, you can improve the customer’s experience by implementing a marketing strategy that is personalised to a particular set of customers thereby giving them an enriched experience which they haven’t had anywhere else.

How does it work?

The traditional way of collecting data was to directly call people to get their information. Sales teams would manually check on each lead to verify if people would be interested to buy their product. Nowadays these methods are obsolete.

They are no longer feasible and are quite challenging when the number of leads coming in is high.

Instamojo follows a two-step method for data collection and enrichment.

This method has helped them acquire extremely high profile leads and successfully convert them into customers.

1. Collecting lead information

• With the collaboration of data analysts and sales teams, companies have come up with much better ways to extract lead information. Especially in B2B businesses, if one knows the company name and website, they can collect most of the lead information online for free.
• Google custom search. This advanced functionality of Google gives detailed information when you type a company’s name in the search bar. Understanding the online presence by looking at the Facebook page, Instagram profile and the website will help in knowing a lot about the company.
• Company Website. It shows how much effort a company puts in their online branding. The quality and popularity of the company are analysed by looking at what others have said about them. Analyzing the reviews on their website and customer feedbacks show the reliability of the company
• Company’s social media handles. This also helps in knowing the popularity of a company. Looking at Facebook likes, Instagram followers, Twitter followers and Youtube subscribers shows how active a company is online.
• BuiltWith, SSL Detection and Website Scraping are paid softwares that also help in knowing the quality and reliability of a company.

Another way of collecting the data is through third-party sources. If you have a budget to spare on data enrichment or you don’t want to do any of the above steps mentioned, then third party sources like FullContact, Clearbit, Refiner (to name a few) will make your work easier. Some of them will give you limited access to the data.

Keeping in mind your priorities and how you want to use that data will help you in choosing the best option for your company.

Tip: Transferring all your data to a data warehouse helps in the better qualification and analysis of leads. Again, there are third party data warehouse softwares that will make you work easier.

2. Transforming (Enriching) Data

Transforming the data is essential when it is collected from different sources. When the data is transferred to the data warehouse it is not ready to be worked on. Usually, when the data is collected, it has a lot of information that is missing or even outdated.

• Data warehouses can help in transforming the data.
• Using SQL is an easy way to work on the transformation. Learning SQL is a lot easier compared to other softwares. You won’t require an engineer to work on transforming the data. Your marketing or sales team can easily work on it if they know SQL.

How data enrichment solves several purposes

After collecting, transforming and enriching the data the most important step comes is how the sales and marketing teams use it.

Enriched data improves several purposes:

1. Qualification of Leads

Ranking the leads according to quality helps in differentiating the ways of targeting them. When a company gets several leads, they cannot spend the same time with all of them. Following the 80/20 rule is the best approach here.

Aim to spend most of the time on the top 10–20% of the leads.

Typically in every business, the top 10% leads give you all of your revenue.

2. Segmentation of Users

Engage differently with different users depending on which bucket they fall in. Buckets can be based on the online and offline presence of the user. If a user is active online, then reaching out to them through social media ads and emails is the best way.

On the other hand, if a user has more offline presence i.e. they do most of their business offline then using print media, phone calls or even physically meeting them is the way to go.

The technique one follows depends on the amount of time and money they can spend on a particular user.

3. Personalized Targets

Apply a personalized marketing tactic depending on the preference of the user.
For example,

• offering discount codes when pitching to a startup or SMEs as their budgets might not be high.
• Showing testimonials of other clients and case studies to big enterprises who would be interested to know how others profited from the product or service.

How Instamojo benefited from Data Enrichment

Problem

When there are too many leads coming in and the sales team is lean, it gets difficult to reach out and provide value to them. It becomes highly expensive and time-consuming to manually segment and rank the leads.

Solution

By combining the information collected through the enriched data (profile variables and behaviour variables), the team was able to divide the leads into three segments; from high quality to junk leads.

Give maximum priority to high quality leads through phone calls or meeting in person and comparatively less priority to low quality leads through emails and social media marketing.

Tip: Junk leads are those that don’t match the company’s profile data. These leads won’t bring any business, therefore, can be ignored.

Result

• The sales team spent less time filtering leads and more time talking to high-quality leads which resulted in leads converting into customers.
• This led the sales team to engage in meaningful conversations with leads that were genuinely interested in the product.
• It also resulted in being a motivation for the team. The team no longer spent time in filtering or shuffling the data which saved a lot of time.
• The final list of leads they received was of high priority and quality.

An A/B test showed a 50% increase in revenue when some leads were personally contacted by the sales team compared to some being contacted through social media.

With lean teams and a high volume of data, companies need to start investing in data enrichment tools. This will not only improve the quality of information but it will also help in working efficiently.

Did this blog help you? Share your thoughts in the comments and share it with your sales and marketing friends.