Techopedia defines data enrichment as “processes used to enhance, refine or otherwise improve raw data.” Raw data is just the seed, and data enrichment is the light needed to grow it into a strong, useful, and valuable mechanism for your business.
Ultimately, the goal of data enrichment is to boost the data that you are currently storing with secondary data. Whether it is at the point of capture or after the data is accumulated, adding insights from reliable information sources is where the real value is gained. In other words, data enrichment is journey of transforming your raw, commodity data into a true asset to your organization, project, or research.
Refining raw data should include the following steps:
- Removing errors such as null or duplicate values
- Using data profiling to clarify the content, relationships, and structure of the data
- Improving the data quality overall to increase its reliability and analytical value
- Strategically adding additional attributes, relationships, and details that uncover new insights around your customers, operations, and competition from secondary data
Data refinement avoids the negative outcomes of attempting to work with bad data. Low quality data can have serious negative impacts on your project. It can needlessly increase costs, waste precious time, cripple important decision making, and even anger clients or customers.
During or after the refinement of your data, enriching it with advanced data dimensions such as detailed time frames, geography details, weather history, and even a wide variety of customer demographics from multiple secondary data libraries is key to unleashing its true value to your company, customers, and shareholders.
- What if you could predict which clients are most likely to buy, and exactly how much they will spend, just from their initial lead profile?
- What if you could identify the key success characteristics of a new market or store location, just from viewing the demographics of the area?
- How much easier would day-to-day decisions become if you could consider all of the factors involved, instead of just a few?
You will acquire a better and more complete understanding of your prospects and target market. You will learn more about your market by appending business information to the records that you capture and store, pinpointing key sociodemographic groups of business prospects, or improving efficiencies across your business units.
Most would agree that data enrichment with secondary data is valuable, but why do less than 10% of companies do it? The simplest answer is “it’s hard.” It’s time consuming and labor-intensive to gather and maintain all of these various enrichments. It’s hard to thread and blend data together AND keep it all accurate and organized. Let’s face it, most business professionals barely have time to analyze the data in front of them, much less go out and find other sources.
Let’s Talk About Inzata
Inzata is a data analytics platform designed to change all of that. Inzata offers a growing list of more than 25 separate enrichments, ranging from things like geospatial and location enrichments, to weather data and advanced customer demographics down with street level accuracy.
Data enrichment is a core function with Inzata, it’s designed as an integral part of our Agile AnalyticsTM, the workflow that uses technology to turn raw data into digital gold.
Secondary data is the key concept of data enrichment, such as advanced customer demographics, which is arguably the strongest data enrichment a company could use to add an immense amount of value to their customer data. Unlike any other data analytics platform, Inzata has over 150 customer demographics from the entire nation built right into the platform for one-click access at all times. Some of these enrichments include:
- Income brackets
- Employment
- Occupation
- Housing occupant/valuation
- Marital Status
- Education level
- Industry facts
Enriching your customer data in this way greatly increases the value and precision of your analysis, and allow you to answer much more complex questions about your business. Inzata makes enriching your data as simple as selecting which attributes you want to add, and instantly adding them to your data.
These enrichments are absolutely priceless for companies with big data on their hands. Being able to slice and dice your large datasets by these detailed demographics and behavioral characteristics makes them more precise, more manageable, and better able to tell you what’s actually going on inside your business. Think of enrichment as a force-multiplier for your big data initiative. Knowing more about your customers, your transactions. Failing to enrich a mass amount of simple customer data for your own benefit is like choosing a 2005 flip-phone over a 2018 smartphone.
A Harvard Business Review1 article mentions two very important statistics that easily prove why data enrichment is absolutely crucial:
- On average, 47% of newly created data records have at least one critical & work-impacting error.
- Only 3% of the data quality scores in their study can be rated “acceptable” using the loosest-possible standard.
Any business can easily avoid falling into these negative statistics by investing in the correct data analytics platform that provides powerful enrichments for top-notch data refinement and enhancement through a variety of secondary data sources.
Inzata’s platform is the first and only of its kind to include one-click enrichments for any data, from any source, for any business. Stay ahead of the curve in data analytics and invest in the best, invest in Inzata.
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Sources
1Only 3% of Companies’ Data Meets Basic Quality Standards, https://hbr.org/2017/09/only-3-of-companies-data-meets-basic-quality-standards
