You may have a hatful of good leads to pursue but just having names and an email address may not be enough to define these leads as either an MQL or SQL. It’s all too easy to craft an email designed to grab the attention of a particular prospect and then have it bounce back as undelivered. The address was obviously inaccurate, leaving you scratching your head about what to do next.
What’s needed is more information about the lead. This is the idea behind lead enrichment, which gathers supportive data around the leads in your database.
Using lead enrichment gives you a better chance of being sure that the data you have on your leads is as up-to-date and accurate as possible.
The Value of Enriching Lead Data
Lead enrichment usually entails getting information such as industry, company size, job description, and contact details such as phone number and email. Beyond these details, lead enrichment can be any information that you add to help your sales team qualify their contact as an SQL and alter their approaches to be more successful.
This information can take the form of demographic data such as age, gender, education and interests. You may also find it useful to have more detailed geographic data about prospects, such as ZIP or post codes, the country they reside in, their home city, and the time zone they operate in.
Time zone can be particularly important if you are planning on holding live online events for an international audience, such as webinars or panel discussions. It can also help in the timing of email distribution.
Information about the contact’s professional life can also be valuable. This could include information on the business sector they work in, the size of their company, their position and responsibilities in the organization, their experience and career path and membership of professional bodies or standards organizations. There is also the possibility of capturing so-called behavioural data, which would include data such as the challenges, desires, needs and pain points of the individual.
Having this data to hand helps marketing and sales staff be more productive, ensuring they can tailor their approach to the lead and thus stand a better chance of achieving a successful outcome.
This additional information makes the basic data more useful by providing deeper insight into the needs, expectations and ambitions of the target audience. This allows you to target prospects with much more personalized and relevant messages.
Some of the other benefits include building more meaningful customer relationships. It also helps you identify those customers who are more likely to make a purchase. Lead data enrichment can therefore boost responses to your marketing activity or improve sales growth, while at the same time improving your customers’ experience, and enhancing your company’s reputation.
Lead Data Enrichment Providers
There are many companies and platforms that can help you gain this enriched data. However, you will want to be sure they can provide the information your team are actually looking for and will find useful. It is also good to know what your ideal customer profile/personas look like.
Knowing this helps you zero in on the providers that will offer what you need and won’t provide information that is of little or no use. For example, if you work primarily with B2B companies that provide automation solutions, you will want to find a data provider that specializes in those types of contacts and profiles.
Providers include LeadIQ, a software platform that makes it easy to capture and analyse LinkedIn prospects. LeadIQ allows you to capture leads easily while browsing LinkedIn, or indeed any other site. It also offers an analytics dashboard to keep track of performance, and can interface with other sales tools, avoiding the need to manually re-enter data from one platform to another.
A similar tool is Lusha, which provides accurate contact details from LinkedIn profiles. These include work and personal emails and even prospects’ personal phone numbers. It also allows you to search for employees and companies on a wide variety of sites, and contacts can be saved to your own CRM.
Another leading tool is Clearbit, which allows you to quickly extract lead information from a wide range of social media sites. These include Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Clearbit can also integrate with your existing CRM.
Pipl is a powerful data enrichment software, able to turn any email address or domain into a complete profile for a person. The data captured includes name, size of the company, job information, demographic data and social profiles.
Similarly, FullContact provides a complete vision of the contact, offering a variety of data based on their name, email, phone number or location
Gathering leads is an essential activity – if you ensure you also enrich that data by using one or more lead enrichment tools, you can make your marketing or sales activity much more focused and help turn those prospects into lifelong customers.