What is Data Enrichment?
Data enrichment is the process of adding key information to a specific platform or tool. In most cases, this consists of capturing information like product data, billing data, marketing data, etc. in alternative sources (i.e. Amplitude, Marketo, Salesforce, etc.) and pushing that information back into the tools your sales and marketing teams leverage on a daily basis. Generally, this tends to be your CRM.
The goal is to ensure that every member of your team has access to the same information so that they can work towards the same goal. Data enrichment helps to create a 360-degree view of your customer to ensure this goal is met. I actually just wrote a more in-depth guide on data enrichment if you are interested in learning more.
Understanding Data Enrichment: A comprehensive Guide | Hightouch
Why is Data Enrichment Important for Sales and Marketing Teams?
COVID has completely changed the sales and marketing landscape. I experienced this firsthand working as an SDR in the data space for a small consulting company. As the second sales hire, I was tasked to outbound new accounts and prospects in order to generate new leads.
Every day I would send out personalized emails/Linkedin messages and make phone calls to various prospects, with my goal being to schedule qualified meetings. During this process, all of my interactions were captured within Hubspot, which was our CRM.
Before COVID happened I was having some decent success. Then suddenly every outside/face-to-face salesperson became an inside salesperson like me. All of my previous strategies across Linkedin, email, and phone stopped working as salespeople from every industry surged to each medium. As my lead generation stagnated somewhat, our business quickly adapted, developing several open-source utilities.
These were able to generate a substantial amount of inbound leads, but I struggled to personalize my messaging because all of the data we captured around these tools was pretty one-dimensional. To be specific, in Hubspot, I could only see properties like first name, last name, job title, form submission, last conversion, email, etc. I ended up only being able to personalize my messaging around our recent conversion events (forms submitted) and the information that I dug up on Linkedin.
This meant I was limited to the information that was captured with our CRM. For most companies, a ton of additional information like product analytics, marketing analytics, web analytics, etc. is acquired through other operational systems or data sources. This data is then typically transformed and fed into a data warehouse like Snowflake for analytics purposes. If this type of information had been added to Hubspot when I was working as an SDR it could have been a gamer changer for me.
When data enrichment is analyzed through a marketing lens, this type of information is even more important and relevant. Enriching your CRM data gives your marketers the ability to quickly launch ad hoc campaigns. These campaigns could be something as simple as sending automated emails when a customer reaches a certain threshold on product usage, clicks a specific link, or visits a certain page on your website. Data enrichment is valuable for your marketing and sales teams because it generates a 360-degree view of your customer so that your teams can be personalized, timely, and intentional with their messaging.
How to Use Hightouch to Enrich Data in Hubspot?
Hubspot is an extremely popular CRM. However, enriching data within the platform is actually much easier than you think. Hightouch gives you the ability to begin syncing data from a variety of different sources into a destination of your choosing and set how frequently you want the data to update. Here is a step-by-step guide to get started:
Step 1: Connect Hightouch to Your Data Source
Among our many integrations, we support data warehouses like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery, in addition to spreadsheets like Google Sheets and Airtable, and production databases like PostgreSQL. In this case, I have chosen Google Sheets, but we support a ton of other data sources in addition to the ones just mentioned.
Step 2: Connect Hightouch to Your Hubspot Instance
We support a variety of different destinations including Hubspot, Marketo, Mailchimp, Braze etc. In this case, we are connecting to Hubspot.
Step 3: Create a Data Model or Leverage an Existing One.
Data aggregation has never been easier because you can leverage your own in-house data models using SQL or dbt. Additionally, with our Visual Audience Builder, SQL is no longer a barrier, because marketers can now visually filter audiences based on specific properties or events. This means that both your data teams and marketers can easily leverage this tool.
Step 4: Choose Your Primary Key to Match Your Records in Salesforce.
We let you map on any unique key. Other iPaaS and Salesforce solutions only give you the ability to map data to the HubspotID. While this is doable, it requires a substantial amount of effort to set up leveraging an assortment of “if/then” clauses in various workflows. Creating these workflows can take a substantial amount of time. Hightouch handles all of these details behind the scenes so you can worry about what matters most, which is gaining access to the data. In this scenario, I am leveraging email as my primary key, but this can easily be changed in mere seconds.
Step 5: Create a Sync
Once you have created a sync all you need to do is choose the appropriate columns that you would like to include and map them to the proper Hubspot fields. I am using contact properties, but these columns could be changed depending on the type of data you are looking to ingest.
Step 6: Schedule Your Sync
Hightouch is unique in that it lets you choose how often you want to run your syncs. You can choose to run your syncs in a variety of ways. Most companies do this manually or on a set interval (i.e. every few minutes or hourly/daily).
All of this can be done in less than five minutes and you can choose to schedule your syncs or run them manually. It’s simple, easy, and efficient. Best of all, you can enrich all of your Hubspot data with product analytics data, marketing data, billing data, etc. The use cases are nearly endless and you can choose exactly what data you want to ingest into Salesforce. If you don’t believe me, check out our documentation.
