How can Data Enrichment change the way you onboard and convert new users?

5 min readNov 24, 2016

TL;DR Being able to collect relevant data about your users and personalize the experience based on this data is the key to conversion optimization.

What is data enrichment?

Data enrichment is adding additional data on top of the already collected data.

In this post, we will focus on the enrichment of user and company data, which is the most relevant for conversion rate optimization.

The problem with signup forms

Typically, when a new user or lead signs up, the signup form collects several fields about the person (name, company name, company size, etc).

The number of collected fields has a negative correlation to conversion rate, so, usually, only 3–5 fields are collected.

Enrichment is knowing without asking!

We live in an era of data and social networks, there is a huge amount of data about individuals and companies publicly available online.
So, why not use it?

How to enrich your user data?

Many companies are starting to understand the power of data enrichment, however, often, the boring task of researching information about leads and users is done manually (usually by sales people).

Here at Kilometer.io, we make this process automatic for our users. We are connecting to CRMs and Marketing Automation tools, and every time there is a new user or lead, we will be looking at almost a hundred data points to find relevant information about the person and the company at which they work.

We look into social profiles, companies databases, job listings, news articles and much more.

We examine the website of the user’s company, check for the technology stack, run Machine Learning algorithms over the content to categorize the company (SaaS? B2B? Enterprise customers?) and follow more creative processes to bring useful information on which you can act.

How can enrichment increase conversions?

Being able to collect relevant data and personalize the user onboarding experience based on this data is the key to conversion optimization.

The opportunities to take advantage of the enrichment data are endless; below we will provide a few examples we have implemented ourselves in Kilometer.io. Yes, we eat our own dog food (drink our own champagne :-) ).

Welcome Email

Almost every product can be used for more than one purpose, usually even by different types of users.

Let’s take trello, for example:

It can be used by product managers to manage features
It can be used by developers to manage the development process
It can be used by salespersons to manage the sales pipeline
It can be used by marketers to organize ideas

Sending a generic one-size-fits-all email is what the majority of companies are doing, but think about how much better a targeted email referring to a very specific and relevant information can perform.

And the cool part is that you don’t even need to ask the user who he is to customize this email; instead, just use the enrichment data.

Webinar invitation

If you liked the welcome email example, think about a webinar.

It takes a lot of effort to conduct a webinar or a demo session. Unfortunately, the results are not always great…

The length of a webinar is usually less than an hour, so to make it effective, you must focus on a specific use-case and demonstrate it to the audience.

Having the ability to invite the right audience to the webinar and demonstrate a relevant use case dramatically increases the effectiveness of such effort.

Integration suggestion

Have you ever signed up for a tool and received a fancy drip campaign about integrations with tools you never used or heard about? It happens to me all the time…

Since the cloud revolution, companies have started using many tools; most of those tools leave some trace in their website code.

The information is there; it is public and visible to everybody who is looking in the source code of the website.

One of the enrichment data points Kilometer.io provides is the technology stack used by the company of your users/leads. Use this data wisely and dramatically increase your conversion rates!

Adding machine learning to the mix

Enriching data with descriptive data can be helpful regarding conversion rate optimization, but we can do even better by using predictive data.

More about this topic can be found in this post, but in general, the idea is that Kilometer.io can use all the enrichment data it collects, and predict if the new user or lead is likely or not likely to convert into a paying customer.

The provided “lead score” can be used to determine if greater sales and marketing resources are justified in attracting the user.
For example, you would not want to invite users who are not likely to convert to a personal product demo calls.

Can enrichment move the needle?

The best thing about enrichment is that probably your competitors are not using it (yet).

Data enrichment is still expensive, requires writing code and in general is not so accessible to most companies. That is why we are building Kilometer.io — the world’s first Plug & Play Data Enrichment and Machine Learning tool.

In 5 years, all the companies will be using Data Enrichment and Machine Learning, but today, quickly adopting those technologies can provide a real competitive advantage.