Most businesses today have invested in CRMs and marketing automation, yet, they are still working with incomplete data. At a glance, the gaps look small — a missing email address here, or an outdated phone number there. Those minor details alone can add up to costly inefficiencies—but there’s still a whole other universe outside your CRM, filled with incredibly relevant data that you don’t have. Think total household income, lifestyle factors, and spending patterns.
The cold, harsh reality is that good CRM data management takes a lot of effort—but this might actually turn out to be a good thing. If your competitors are among the many that aren’t willing to buckle down, any extra effort you put into it is an automatic competitive advantage. Let’s hope they don’t read this article, too, because if they do, they’re about to learn there are simpler methods available to maintain robust CRM data that’s ready for action.
The Blueprint for Smarter Data Enrichment
It’s important to think of enriching your CRM data not as a single project, but as a continuous discipline. It’s foundational to the success of every other marketing effort, so it’s important that the process is operational and sustainable.
Start with Data Health
Before adding new data, assess the quality of what you already have. Accuracy, completeness, consistency, and relevance are important metrics for understanding data health. It’s also important to identify common data degraders, such as duplicate records and potentially outdated contact info.
Taking a baseline assessment will help identify the important areas to fix first, whether it’s correcting addresses, reconciling duplicate identities, or standardizing formats. You can leverage tools such as B2E’s MotusBase DataTuneUp to automate much of this process and provide ongoing data hygiene.
Action item: Stop bad data at the front door. Go through your key forms, such as website sign-up or lead-gen forms, and make sure important information is required fields, and that the system validates the information before it’s fed into your CRM. For example, this might mean making sure an email address includes an "@" symbol.
Define Your Goals for Enrichment
Deciding to undergo data enrichment should always align with your marketing and larger business goals. Perhaps you’re interested in enhancing personalization to improve marketing performance, or improving your customer segmentation to grow within a certain demographic. Otherwise, your CRM data may look impressive on paper, but not move the needle on the performance that really matters for your business.
Data enrichment can transform your CRM into a source of deep intelligence, but it must enable strategic action. If your goal is to increase conversion rates, focus on enriching behavioral and intent data. If you’re trying to reduce customer acquisition costs, enrich household or location-level data. If customer retention is a priority, add demographic or lifestyle data that deepens your understanding.
Action item: Before undergoing enrichment, articulate the challenges you are trying to solve and the most important marketing KPIs. Then map these to gaps in your data.
Use Trusted Data Sources
The value of enrichment lies not just in the data itself, but in the quality and trustworthiness of where it comes from. The data must be accurate, recent, consistent, and maintain a high degree of integrity.
As an Experian Strategic Marketing Services Partner, B2E has access to detailed, high-quality data covering 95% of the U.S. population. The data is carefully gathered, aggregated, and analyzed from the most credible sources, while adhering to stringent data privacy and security standards.
Action item: Establish a data vendor checklist that includes verification of data quality assurance and compliance with SOC 2 standards.
Add Context with Geographic and Behavioral Insights
Enrichment is most powerful when it goes beyond static attributes. Adding geographic and behavioral context can turn simple records into highly actionable intelligence. For example, combining online and offline data can reveal regional buying patterns, commute behavior, or proximity to retail locations.
Layering in a deeper level of detail creates a whole new playing field of opportunities. Marketers can better localize their advertising creative, tailor offers more specifically, and measure engagement more accurately. In industries like retail, healthcare, or higher education, geographic enrichment can help refine target market strategies and competitive positioning.
Action item: Integrate at least one contextual enrichment layer, such as household geography or physical location visit data, into your next marketing campaign.
Make Enrichment Continuous
Consumer data isn’t static, so your CRM shouldn’t be either. Data enrichment can be done on an ongoing basis to keep your information and insights fresh without constant manual upkeep. Regular data refreshes can sync your data with verified updates such as household changes, economic shifts, or changes in purchase habits.
Continuous enrichment not only saves marketers precious time but also ensures that all the important elements of the marketing program, such as segmentation, personalization, and analytics operate on current and accurate inputs.
Action item: Set up subscription-based data enrichment to refresh your customized set of key CRM fields monthly.
The Payoff of Filling in the Blanks
When your CRM becomes a living source of truth, your marketing doesn’t just get more efficient, it becomes more relevant—and more profitable. Importantly, it transforms a static system of records into a dynamic engine that powers smarter marketing in every aspect.
With the right processes, tools, and partners, it’s possible to almost effortless build and maintain a CRM that keeps pace with today’s consumers and fuels superior marketing performance. Filling in the blanks isn’t just about cleaner data, it’s about closing the gaps between what you know today and the opportunities you can capture tomorrow. Reach out learn more about B2E Data’s subscription-based data enrichment services.
