Back in the 1980s, NBC had a series of Public Service Announcements titled “The More You Know” that provided useful information on relevant topics to their viewing audience.
Fast forward to today and the First Party data movement. It feels like there should be a Public Service Announcement for marketers that points out the necessity of maximizing the knowledge companies have about existing and potential customers and their interactions with their brand(s).
Today’s hyper-personalization and omni-channel campaigns with customers and prospects requires a robust and trusted set of data. Marketers are realizing that there is an increasing need to enhance their existing first party data with additional attributes from trusted and proven sources. This augmented data set provides marketers with a more complete profile and deeper understanding of their customers required to provide more relevant communications at different points during each individual’s engagement journey.
Data augmentation – also often referred to as “data enrichment”, “data enhancement” or “data appending”– typically fulfills 2 critical pieces of the customer profile puzzle:
- to “fill in” missing values for existing attributes on customer records
- to append new attributes to existing customer records thereby providing a richer view of the customer
The most common types of data augmentation are:
- Demographic
- Lifestyle/Behavioral
- Intent/Browse
The key benefits realized include:
- More targeted and personalized communications
- Enhanced customer and prospect segmentations
- Optimized acquisition/retention models and strategies
- Improved response rates and ROI
There is no mistaking the fact that marketers having a more complete profile of their customers and prospects will realize higher customer satisfaction, higher levels of engagement and, higher ROI for their marketing spend.
