From an early age, we’re told by our parents never to talk to strangers. In business, however, it’s the opposite.

Talking to strangers is the key to driving business growth. The challenge is to talk to strangers in a personalised, relevant way, even if we don’t know anything about them. This is increasingly possible with data enrichment.

Imagine if you were able to automatically greet any random user on your website with hyper-personalised content: case studies perfectly relevant to their needs, services and product suggestions that answered their business goals, and maybe even put them in touch with a team member that was familiar with their business in their timezone? And none of it requiring the customer to input any data?

This personalised communication is currently being achieved through a process known as data enrichment. It is a growing field within digital marketing, underpinning more sophisticated approaches to customer relationship management, marketing automation, lead generation, data segmentation, and personalisation. It is improving sales conversion rates, reducing “friction” for customers and improving the way in which companies communicate.

How does it work?

It’s a relatively simple approach that evolves from a single source of data, the website visitor’s IP address — a numerical label assigned to each device connected to the internet. This is a string of numbers separated by full stops, and typically will look something like this: 210.8.197.62.

By using sophisticated software to automatically understand the IP address of each visitor’s device, we can match that IP address to the host company name and users. With the business name known, we can make certain automated inferences about the visitor, and personalise content on that basis. Further, if the customer inputs their email address, we can use data enrichment services to auto-populate their name, address, social media handles and other information we might automatically glean. This can make the customer experience faster and more enjoyable for the customer.

All of this requires a modern approach to data capture. If your customer database has a focus on capturing data such as: Name, Email, Company Name and other basic information, then it limits your ability to capture other data that may allow for greater personalisation. Further, if that customer is a stranger, then it may be that they visit your site a number of times without ever handing over their data. However, just because they haven’t given you their personal details, it doesn’t mean that you can’t still market to them. It simply requires a broader approach to gathering and storing data. Not just personal data from identifiable customers, but anonymous data from anonymous potential customers.

How does it add value?

There are many ways to use data enrichment to improve customer experience. Some examples:

Lead generation
A financial firm’s website had a visitor from an IP address that matched a large manufacturer. The PENSO-designed system used data enrichment to understand who the manufacturing firm was and the system showed them a relevant website home page. Behind the scenes, the system found out who the manufacturer’s CEO was, what the CEO’s email address was, worked out the company size and category, and then if it matched the predetermined criteria for an “ideal client”, it sent an automated email from the CEO of the financial services firm to the CEO of the manufacturer’s firm, seeing if they might be interested in meeting.

Cross-sell
A visitor to a retail website examined a range of black handbags. The PENSO-designed system cross referenced their IP address with the retailer’s customer list, and as it matched, automatically intercepted the user with a personalised live chat invitation suggesting a range of black handbags to match other previous purchases.

Retargeting
Segment anonymous website visitors into industry categories and retarget with personalised advertising.

How is this implemented?

There are a number of pieces of the data enrichment puzzle, including platforms like Clearbit, Leadfeeder, Demandbase and Snitcher. PENSO uses these data enrichment services and augments them with a range of other marketing automation software and existing client software. We then build a range of “recipes” to ensure client success. Despite this seemingly complex approach, PENSO delivers low-effort implementation; generally a simple snippet of code on your websites, apps and digital channels and you are ready to go. PENSO does the rest.

PENSO has vast experience working with IP Enrichment services and a range of other marketing automation services for our clients in order to drive increased awareness, greater sales, improved conversion and lower cost per acquisition.

Please get in touch if you would like to discuss how this might work for your business.