Customer data enrichment: Completing the customer profile puzzle

Even the richest first-party data leaves gaps in your customer profile, and customer data enrichment is how you fill them.

Enrichment uses trusted third-party data to append the demographics, interests, household and purchase signals you can't capture from your own channels, turning a partial record into a unified customer profile. It's the difference between recognizing a customer and truly understanding them.

This article explains what customer data enrichment is, how third-party data completes the customer-profile puzzle and the signals worth appending to power sharper segmentation and personalization.

What is customer data enrichment?

It's hard to make informed marketing decisions when you're not quite sure if your customer database is powered by high-quality data—let alone if your records are accurate, privacy-compliant, consistent and granular.

When we talk about customer data enrichment, we're talking about enhancing your customer profile to clean up duplicates, fill in missing customer information and add new customer attributes to ultimately make your customer profile work for you. 

After all, when your customer database is as tidy and complete as possible, you're able to understand your audience better and reach them with timely and targeted marketing messages that resonate.

So how do you get started with customer data enrichment? It all starts cleaning and deduplicating your customer data to make sure data quality is at the forefront. 

Customer data enrichment 101: What customer data should you append?

Before we get into cleaning your data, let's level-set by making sure you understand the basics of first-, second-, third- and zero-party data. 

• First-party data is the data you already have from customers, like their name, email, purchase history and more.
• Second-party data might include that type of information, too, but you access it via trusted partnerships, purchase agreements or platforms like data clean rooms.
• Third-party data is data purchased from an external provider that's not the original data collector. Your business might purchase third-party data to add critical demographic information such as age, income, gender and interests to your customer file.
• Zero-party data is data your customers proactively share with you by filling out feedback surveys, interest forms or polls.

The data type that will help you the most when it comes to completing your customer profile puzzle is third-party data.

3 primary types of third-party data you can leverage

Now that we're all on the same page, we can get into the types of third-party data you might want to use to enrich your customer data as a part of your foundational data strategy.

There are three primary categories of third-party data:

• Psychographic
• Transactional
• Consumer data

When you enhance your customer profile with valuable third-party data attributes like these, you're one step closer to building a unified customer profile.

What's the value of a unified customer profile?

To help you understand the value of enriched customer data, let's take a look at how it impacted one of Epsilon's customers.

A retailer of teen casual apparel and accessories was struggling to understand the people behind their purchases. They had limited demographic data and address information and were relying heavily on email addresses alone, which just wasn't cutting it.

Their first attempt to find the missing pieces was a smart one: launching a loyalty program to build their first-party data. While the loyalty program accelerated customer data collection, there were still gaps.

According to the retailer's Senior Manager of CRM & Loyalty, “We not only wanted to understand how a customer shopped at [our store], but what they looked like outside of our store to tell a clear story of who each person is.”

Questions the retailer wanted to answer

• Who were their best customers?
• What did they look like?
• What do they value?
• How can the brand deliver it?

These questions guided the retailer as they engaged Epsilon to help find the remaining pieces.

Epsilon's data hygiene solution

The solution began with the foundational element of filling in missing contact information on the retailer’s customer file via data cleansing.

Using Epsilon’s data hygiene solution to cleanse and increase match rates, the retailer was able to add names and addresses to their email-only records.

This enabled them to grow their mailing address database from 1 million to 4 million customers. Then, they used Epsilon’s consumer database to enrich their customer profiles with key demographic and lifestyle data.

The retailer's results

After the puzzle pieces fell into place, the retailer was able to create and implement an extremely successful direct mail campaign. The campaign drove incremental sales, moved more customers from single channel experiences to omnichannel ones and grew overall customer spend and frequency.

The Senior Manager elaborates, “Prior to expanding our mailing address database, direct mail was out of reach for us. Now, we can create measurable impact with a disruptive marketing tactic. We’ve since introduced direct mail as an ongoing campaign.”

The retailer also used the newly discovered insights to inform other decisions across its business. For example, the team learned that more than 40% of their customer base is multicultural and are more likely to speak Spanish. They applied this insight to their brand-level strategy by choosing models that customers could relate to.

They also discovered that nearly one-third of their customer base was parents. This changed how they market their products, especially for the back-to-school season. The retailer made sure to tailor their messaging and offers to something parents would be receptive to as they were often buying for their kids.

Ultimately, investing in Epsilon's industry-leading data and identity resolution solution was a huge win for the apparel and accessories retailer, whose rep says, “Partnering with Epsilon helped us unlock who our customers are… and we were able to do some incredible things.”

Ready to unify your customer database? Learn how Epsilon Data can help.

This post was originally published on May 4, 2023, and has since been updated.