How to Do Data Enrichment the Right Way

Your CRM is full of gaps, and it's costing you deals.

Empty fields where job titles should be. Missing phone numbers. Outdated company information. Every incomplete record is a missed opportunity — a cold email that lands flat, a call that never happens, a perfect-fit prospect you can't properly qualify.

For sales teams racing against quotas, these data gaps aren't just annoying. They're deal-breakers. While you're manually hunting down contact information or guessing at company details, your competitors are already on their second touchpoint.

That's where data enrichment comes in — the process of filling those gaps with accurate, actionable information that turns bare-bones contacts into complete prospect profiles. Done right, it transforms your database from a liability into your most valuable sales asset.

This guide walks you through exactly how to implement data enrichment that actually moves the needle. You'll learn what types of data matter most, how to build a sustainable enrichment process, and which tools can automate the heavy lifting so your team can focus on what they do best: selling.

Data enrichment is the process of enhancing, refining, and improving a data set with information from additional sources.

Data enrichment is all about contextualizing raw data to make it more useful.

But what does that really mean?

Consider for a moment a single Lego brick.

A Lego brick has unlimited potential. It could become the wall of a building, the wing of an airplane, a seat of a chair, or maybe a piece of a life-size replica of a Volkswagen Bug! Well, you get the picture…

But before it can become any of these things, it must be joined (or "enriched") with other Lego pieces and parts. As each additional brick is combined with the first brick, its complexity increases, and so does its value.

Raw data is similar.

Before its potential can be unlocked and before it can become helpful in a larger sales or marketing situation, it needs to be joined with other data. As the data is slowly expanded and shaped into a specific context, it becomes something so much more valuable for the organization as a whole.

This is the entire purpose of data enrichment.

With enriched data, companies have better and deeper insights into exactly who their customers are and can use this information to personalize messaging and target ideal prospects.

Data enrichment has a number of benefits that make it an indispensable practice for data-driven companies.

Here are a few:

Data enrichment saves money

A report by Global Databerg found that an organization with one petabyte of data spends around $650,000 annually to manage the data, but only a fraction of their data is used for any true benefit.

When you use data enrichment practices, you don't store information that isn't useful to your business. Instead, you enhance the data that you already have, making your data more useful and saving you funds.

Data enrichment improves customer segmentation

Customer segmentation is the practice of separating prospective customers into different categories based on a set of shared characteristics. It leverages customer data to help sales and marketing teams create targeted and effective outbound campaigns.

When this customer data is enriched it deepens the understanding of these segments of customers, giving all your prospects a more personalized experience and boosting conversion rates.

Data enrichment fuels marketing campaigns

Your marketing campaign is only as good as the data that shapes it.

Data enrichment appends raw data and gives marketers actionable insights, data points that can be directly impactful in marketing campaigns, such as annual sales information, budget trends, behavioral patterns, user demographics, etc.

Data enrichment revamps your CRM

70.3% of B2B data decays every year.

Without proper management, CRMs can become inaccurate and unreliable in the blink of an eye.

Data enrichment tools not only help you increase the volume of contacts in your CRM but can help you analyze your active database to find inaccuracies (e.g. duplicates, wrong emails, incorrect business titles, job changes) and fix them.

Data enrichment saves time

Data enrichment not only increases seller confidence in their organization's database but spares them from having to spend hours manually cleansing and updating existing data. Their time can now be spent engaging with customers, qualifying leads, booking meetings, and on other revenue-generating activities.

There are three predominant types of data enrichment:

1. 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, or credit score. It's any data that helps you get a better understanding of who your customers are.

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 a targeted marketing campaign.

2. Geographic data enrichment

Geographic data enrichment, on the other hand, is enriching your consumer data with information on 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.

3. Behavioral data enrichment

Behavioral data enrichment applies a customer's behavioral patterns to their customer profile. This may include past purchases, browsing behaviors, previous objections, etc.

This type of data enrichment often involves monitoring a user's purchasing path to identify where the key areas of interest lie for each customer. It can help companies identify which advertising campaigns work best and what they can expect from the return on investment (ROI) of each campaign.

Doing data enrichment the right way isn't a one-time task — it's a cycle. While every company's needs are different, the process generally follows a few key steps to turn raw data into a reliable asset:

1. Define your goals: Start by identifying what you want to achieve. Are you trying to improve lead scoring, personalize outreach, or identify new markets? Your goal will determine what data points you need to add.
2. Standardize and clean your data: Before you can add new information, you need to clean up what you already have. This involves fixing typos, removing duplicates, and standardizing formats to create a solid foundation.
3. Append data from a trusted source: This is the core of enrichment. Using a third-party data provider, you'll match your existing records and append new information, like job titles, company firmographics, or contact details.
4. Validate the results: Don't assume the enriched data is perfect. A good process includes a validation step to check for accuracy and consistency, ensuring the new information is reliable.
5. Integrate and automate: Finally, the enriched data needs to flow back into your key systems, like your CRM. The best tools automate this process, providing real-time enrichment to keep your database up-to-date without manual effort.

Choose the right data enrichment tool

First and foremost, you need to choose the data enrichment tools that are right for your specific business needs.

The data enrichment tools that are worth their weight offer accuracy, reporting, alerts, integrations, and automation.

Every B2B business will have its own unique needs when it comes to data, but these are a few non-negotiable attributes that data-driven companies should look for in their data enrichment tools.

Use your ideal customer profiles to enrich data

Data enrichment providers offer hundreds and thousands of data points.

For some teams, this can be overwhelming.

The best teams use data from data enrichment providers based on their ideal customer profiles (ICPs). They use whatever data is needed to identify and engage potential best-fit customers.

This not only keeps databases more lean and structured but also helps with GDPR compliance since you're not holding on to personal data without purpose.

Outline your data mapping

Data enrichment is not solely about identifying and sourcing data. You need to understand how different sources of data interact with each other and where to go for each data type.

Here is a brief overview of enrichment data sources:

• First party data is the information that you collect directly from your audience or customers. It includes data from behaviors and actions, data in your CRM, subscription data, social data, customer feedback, etc.
• Second party data is someone else's first party data and it's purchased directly from the company that owns it. It's another company's purchase history, survey response, website data, etc. that can be used to predict future patterns for your own audience.
• Third party data is data that you buy from outside sources (like those data enrichment providers/tools we've been talking about!).

The best teams have a clear strategy about how these different sources interact and how to prioritize them within a data flow.

For more information on data mapping, check out this article from Hubspot.

Enrich your data across all tools

When you focus on enriching only one tool (such as Salesforce, HubSpot, or other CRMs) it can create undesirable data silos.

In an ideal world, you want every tool to share a common view of each lead and customer. This promotes positive sales and marketing alignment as well as a cleaner, more manageable CRM.

As you're enriching data, consider how you will enrich contacts across your email, advertisements, web pages, sales calls, and analytics and reports.

The best data enrichment providers don’t just hand over numbers and charts.

They offer robust data tools, real-time enrichment solutions, and make it easy to have your data flow between multiple tools.

And when you use Apollo.io for data enrichment, that’s exactly what you get.

Streamlined, integrated, upleveled data across all of your tools.

Some specific data enrichment features Apollo offers include:

• Robust and searchable databases fully equipped with verified phone numbers, email addresses, company info, industry insights, location data, funding and revenue data, etc.
• Trouble-free integrations so that data cleansing and enrichment can happen directly in your current technology stack
• Advanced sales automation capabilities that free up your sales reps from tedious data entry
• Real-time enrichment solutions such as CRM enrichment and job change alerts
• The ability to seamlessly operate in and through prospecting and scheduling platforms with the LinkedIn Extension and Google Calendar integration
• Comprehensive data security and compliance measures that your team can trust

If you want to be more productive, more data-driven, and an all-around more impactful market leader, data enrichment is a necessity.

The right data enrichment tool paired with data enrichment best practices shape unstoppable databases and, more importantly, shape unstoppable businesses.

Apollo helps you create better personalization, align team members on critical tasks and contacts, assist users down the funnel, have confidence in your CRM, and ensure that hard-earned data remains fresh, updated, and relevant.

See what users are raving about and sign up for a free Apollo account today!

What's the difference between data enrichment and data cleansing?

Think of it like this: data cleansing fixes what you have (like correcting typos in an email address), while data enrichment adds what you're missing (like finding that contact's job title or phone number). You need both, but enrichment is what adds new value and context to your database.

How much does data enrichment typically cost?

Pricing varies widely based on data volume and provider. Some tools charge per record enriched, others offer monthly subscriptions. Most B2B teams find the ROI justifies the cost — especially when you factor in the time saved from manual research and the revenue gained from better-targeted outreach.

How often should I enrich my customer database?

Since B2B data decays so quickly, continuous or real-time enrichment is the gold standard. If that's not possible, you should aim to enrich your key segments at least quarterly to keep your data fresh, accurate, and reliable for your sales and marketing teams.

Can data enrichment integrate with any CRM platform?

Most modern data enrichment tools are built to integrate seamlessly with popular CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot. A good platform will push and pull data automatically, keeping all your systems in sync without requiring manual work from your team.

What ROI can sales teams expect from data enrichment?

While results vary, teams typically see improvements in key metrics like email open rates, meeting book rates, and overall pipeline velocity. The biggest ROI comes from time savings — reps spend less time researching and more time selling, which directly impacts revenue.