Data Cleansing and Enrichment: Renew your Data with Apollo.io

How good can your contact list be if your phone numbers and emails are outdated? Is your client list actually extensive if your best ones are listed twice?

Chances are your organization and databases suffer from some level of bad data quality. And according to Gartner, poor data quality is costing organizations an average of $15 million dollars per year.

Gartner Lead Researcher, Mei Yang Selvage says that not only are organizations taking a financial hit from poor data quality, but it is also undermining digital initiatives, weakening competitive standing, and decreasing customer trust.

“On the other hand,” says Selvage, “innovative organizations like Airbnb and Amazon are using good quality data to allow them to know who their customers are, where they are and what they like. Good quality data empowers business insights and starts new business models in every industry. It allows enterprises to generate revenue by trading data as a valuable asset.”

Good quality data and a trusted data provider make all the difference. But how can you transform all of your faulty and outdated information into something useful and actionable?

The answer: through data cleansing and enrichment practices and tools!

Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about data cleansing, data enrichment, and how you can use these processes to revamp your customer databases.

What is data cleansing?

Data cleansing is the process of identifying and resolving corrupt, outdated, and/or irrelevant data. It boosts the overall reliability and value of your company data by identifying mistakes in your database.

Some of the most common inaccuracies found in databases include:

• Missing values
• Misplaced entries
• Typographical errors
• Duplicate information
• Outdated contact data
• Poor data governance

Marketing and sales professionals say that over 30% of their records have outdated attributes, and 42% of these professionals say that this data inaccuracy is the biggest barrier to multichannel marketing.

Data cleansing is an essential process for preparing data for further use.

Whether it’s for revenue generation or downstream analysis, data cleansing practices boost SDR confidence in your organization’s database and enable them to execute data-driven selling.

Data cleansing vs. data enrichment

Now that we understand data cleansing, it’s important to understand how and when data enrichment comes into play.

After you finish cleaning up your data, you’ll have fresh customer data. The raw data will be accurate, but it might not be too useful outside of very specific situations.

Data enrichment contextualizes your customer data points.

It is the process of enhancing an existing dataset by appending additional information from third party data. The goal of data enrichment is to give companies better and deeper insight into who exactly their customers are and use this information to personalize messaging and target ideal prospects.

There are many different types of data enrichment, but here are two of the most common:

Demographic data enrichment

Demographic data enrichment is a process that involves gathering- you guessed it- demographic data and entering it into an existing customer dataset.

This could be anything from marital status, income level, education, number of children, median home value, credit score, and so on.

It is anything that helps you get a better understanding of who your customers are as people and consumers.

Data enriched with demographics is especially important for marketers. Personalized marketing is more important now than ever, and a database enriched with customer demographics can make all the difference in executing a targeted marketing campaign.

Geographic data enrichment

Geographic data enrichment, on the other hand, is when you enrich your consumer data with information pertaining to a contact’s location, such as postal data, customer address, ZIP codes, county lines, mapping insights, etc.

Enriching using geographic data is beneficial in many contexts. Retailers could use location data to determine their next store location and marketers could use it to decide where they might place physical advertisements or send bulk mailing for direct mail.

Whether demographic, geographic, or another data category, the type of third-party information you choose to enrich with should be driven by your business goals. This way your enriched data directly helps you in meeting your mark.

The power of clean and enriched data

Data cleansing and data enrichment have numerous benefits for a company’s infrastructure, internally and externally.. Let’s take a closer look at exactly why you should invest in cleansing and enriching your data:

Improved decision-making

When SDRs are confident that their database is clean and updated, they can rely on it to make important decisions.

And, according to Forbes, businesses that base their decisions on data - not instincts or experience - are 19x more likely to be profitable!

Processes like data cleansing and enrichment that directly contribute to more usable, higher quality data have an amazing ROI for their decision-making support alone.

Cost savings

A report from Global Databerg revealed that an organization with one petabyte of data spends around $650,000 annually to manage and store the data, even though a majority of them only put a fraction of their data to use. The report estimates that if business data is left untamed it could cost the world a cumulative of $3.3 trillion a year to simply store their data.

Data cleansing and data enrichment practices will ensure that you’re not one of those companies.

Data enrichment saves you money because you won’t waste resources storing and managing useless information. Instead, you strengthen the data you already have.

The funds that would otherwise be spent on maintaining your databases can now be used on revenue-generating activities.

Now, that’s good data management!

Personalization

In a world that is constantly demanding the attention of consumers, personalization is king.

Consumers now expect companies to know them and constantly anticipate their needs. It’s reported that 74% of American customers feel frustrated when messaging isn’t targeted to them.

Data cleansing eliminates the chance of incorrectly targeting customers and data enrichment enhances the customer experience by providing you with unique and relevant information on the people you are prospecting.

When these two practices work in tandem, your business can deliver effective and personalized marketing campaigns that result in paying customers.

Improved engagement

Internal Crime Report found that businesses lost a total of $675 million in 2017 from having their emails marked as spam.

When your data is messy and outdated, it affects more than your efficiency, it damages your brand. The last thing you need is your expensive and effective marketing emails going straight to the spam folder.

When your data is clean and enriched, your conversion rates improve and your outbound engagement becomes more valuable.

Step-by-step data cleansing and data enrichment with Apollo.io

If you follow the right processes, you can be confident in the integrity and quality of your B2B data. But, even the best data managers won’t be able to fully execute these processes without a data tool to help.

And with one million users and hundreds of millions of verified contacts, there’s a reason why Apollo is the best data tool for the job…

Let’s take a closer look at the steps of data cleansing and data enrichment and how Apollo is there to support you through each one:

Identify data fields that need to be cleaned and enriched

The first step of data cleansing and enrichment is to identify exactly which data you want to refine. Now, this may seem obvious, but if you’re storing decades’ worth of data, it’s important to form a narrower scope.

And to do this, you’ll want to sync your CRM with Apollo.

This will allow the information in both apps to auto-sync with each other, and allow you to view your data alongside all of Apollo’s additional tools and features. You can now fill your CRM with 65+ firmographic data fields for scoring, routing, research, analytics, and more!

This is the base for your data cleansing and data enrichment process.

And, a bonus of a CRM sync, is when a sales rep makes a sale in Apollo in the future, it will automatically record itself in your CRM data. This eliminates potential data entry mistakes and ensures that your data stays continuously clean and cleansed.

Clean up existing data

According to the 1-10-100 data rule, it is 100x more expensive to fix the impact of bad data on your business than it is to clean and verify your data from the beginning.

This means that you need to invest in the proper tools and processes to clean up your existing data before something breaks.

With all your existing data in Apollo, it’s time to correct those inaccuracies among existing customers. This one might take some time, but Apollo helps you streamline this process.

When your CRM is synced, Apollo identifies inaccuracies and refreshes your CRM in real-time. For example, Apollo automatically notifies you if there is a probable duplicate. You can then merge the duplicates into one contact to clean up your contact list in seconds.

Apollo also offers Job Change alerts, integrations with your Google Calendar, and other data housekeeping features; all to ensure that the data you are using in your current workflow is helping (not hindering) you.

Collect data

Now that your data is squeaky clean, it’s time to enrich it.

A well-functioning data enrichment process is essential for brands looking to keep up in an information-centric world.

Among all of its other functions, Apollo can serve as your data enrichment services provider, helping you source quality data from external sources and seamlessly add it to your database.

FIrst, you’ll want to download the Apollo Chrome Extension for easy data collection from LinkedIn and beyond!

The Apollo Chrome Extension allows you to prospect and collect accurate contact information during lead generation without ever leaving your LinkedIn screen. You can look at current activities in any account, the current data on a particular sales sequence, whether or not a contact is in your CRM, and even what other contacts within a single account are in your CRM.

Most importantly, saving prospects’ information in your CRM and Apollo account only takes a click of a button.

You can also use the Chrome Extension beyond LinkedIn! Enable Apollo Everywhere to access Apollo insights across the web.

To use this feature, all you have to do is install the Apollo Chrome Extension, launch the Apollo Chrome Extension and toggle ‘on’ Apollo Everywhere.

Standardize the cleansing process

As we’ve learned, data cleansing isn’t a one-and-done deal.

To have a consistently clean database, you need an ongoing and standardized data process that is transparent and accessible.

Keeping your team in the loop and giving them the tools they need to upkeep customer data will help your business develop and strengthen customer segmentation and send more targeted and personalized information to customers and prospects.

One way Apollo can help with this is Job Change Alerts.

When Apollo detects a prospect’s job change, their new title and company will appear beneath their contact in your Apollo account. Now, you never have to worry about having the wrong data for a contacts’ employment status and you can capitalize on the opportunity to sell to a fresh employee who is looking for new tools for the job.

A data manager can also utilize Apollo’s Rules Engine. Rules Engine is a hub for automation and it can easily be used to keep your database clean and enriched.

Set up a series of “triggers” and actions for Apollo to automatically carry out. You can tell Apollo to remove a contact from a list if an email bounced, or assign Apollo to set a contact field after a contact is updated.

Now, that’s working smarter, not harder!

Learn more about using Rules Engine to start standardizing your data processes with Apollo.

Review and optimize

Last but certainly not least, your data quality needs to be consistently revisited and optimized.

Gaining visibility into your data health can improve your data cleansing processes and give you the valuable insight you need to make data-based decisions.

Run data health checks with Apollo Analytics and Reports.

Analytics opens up a whole new world of actionable reporting. With customizable reports and dashboards, you can view an ever-growing list of data analytics. From bounced phone calls and emails, to open rates, reply rates, and sales success rates, you can answer every question you can imagine about your data performance.

Over 60% of organizations don’t measure the cost of poor data quality. Failing to measure this impact results in reactive responses to data quality issues, missed business growth opportunities, increased risks, and lower ROI.

By implementing the proper data and enrichment tools, you’ll never miss a business opportunity due to poor data hygiene.

So, what are you waiting for?! Try Apollo for free today and scrub your B2B data clean.