Though it has myriad uses, data enrichment is becoming increasingly popular as a tool to spot high-value customers. By enriching data like phone and email addresses, marketing teams can learn a whole lot about their customers. This can include spotting influencers that businesses might benefit from collaborating with.
The profitability of high-value and loyal customers
While every customer is valuable to your business, spotting high-value customers can be incredibly profitable. For example, a recent study suggested that influencer marketing was set to grow to $13.8 billion by 2021. This makes it extremely lucrative for businesses to tap into – and that is merely one of the various types of VIP customers out there.
How to spot high-value customers
There are multiple ways to build a profile of a high-value customer. For example, consider using KPIs – customer purchases per month or lifetime value can be useful metrics to work with here.
You can also deploy surveys and ask for customer feedback. Some customers might even come forward and tell you if they’re an influencer looking to collaborate.
Finally, a marketing team can monitor social media to see if any popular users have mentioned company products, or a positive service, on their page.
At SEON, our main goal is to help companies protect their operations, revenue, and customers from fraud. As part of this, we study social signals that make up someone’s digital footprint. This helps us gauge whether they are a legitimate user or a fake persona created by a fraudster or scammer.
However, these social signals created through data enrichment can also help marketing operations spot fraudulent and high-value customers. The result is more data to use for clustering, cohort analysis, and even customer communication. Let’s take a closer look.
Where does data enrichment come in? And how?
The process of starting with a single data point and automatically gathering additional information to enrich it is a challenge. Data enrichment software can help you find high-value customers. Repeat customers provide companies with 65% of their business. And when it comes to potential high-value customers, the top 10% of them tend to buy 3x more than other customers. The more efficiently you can spot them, the better.
We almost always know certain things about a shopper, whether legitimate or not – their email address, IP address, and phone number. Data enrichment will take and use these data points to find, source, and collate social signals linked to them.
In practice, this means finding out which social media platforms an email account has signed up for. If the owner has fallen victim to data leaks, as well as whether they have accounts on specialty platforms. This may include Airbnb or Telegram, for example.
As we’ve touched upon, fraud software uses data enrichment on their primary data to find a customer’s digital footprint. The findings of this can then be used to assign customers with a risk score. High risk-users might be banned or need to provide further identification to show they’re not a criminal.
But companies can also use a digital footprint gained from the data enrichment process to indicate whether a customer is high-value or not.
One should not just look at points such as whether a customer’s email is disposable or deliverable. Instead, look at whether a customer logs in from a high-value area. How expensive their hardware/brand of phone is? Have they have signed up for platforms such as Github, which high-earning programmers often use?
Start with an email address.
Data enrichment starts with an email address or phone number and data points gathered during device fingerprinting. These could give useful information that helps segment our customers, including but not limited to the following:
- Are they legitimate users?
- Are they a fan of online social media?
- Do they have a large following (where available)?
- Do they travel often, as evidenced by public Airbnb profiles, TripAdvisor reviews, etc.?
- Are they up-to-date with the latest hardware releases from high-end companies such as Apple?
- Do they have multiple accounts with paid services such as Netflix, Disney+, etc.?
- Do they live in high-value areas?
- What is their job title, and does it reveal a lot of disposable income?
Making enriched data actionable
Answers to the above questions are subject to whether the individual has chosen to make such information public. However, the information we do receive can be valuable and easily actionable.
For example, accounts with large followings can be considered influencers or micro-influencers. They have a dedicated follower base engaging regularly with their content and often collaborate with brands. This might be especially interesting to businesses looking to tap into new customer bases. Research by Oracle highlighted in Enterprise Times found that 37% of consumers trust social media influencers over brands themselves.
Marketing teams use data enrichment to determine whether an email or phone number is connected to social media accounts like TikTok or Instagram. Or, as mentioned above, the location of their IP address. Although these clues can’t confirm for certain that a customer is of high value, they give a strong indication that they may be.
From there, a marketing or lead generation team might look at segmenting customers based on these data points. This may include by device or which social media accounts they use. Moreover, data enrichment can be used to spot users likely to have more purchase power than others.
Data enrichment and friction
Data enrichment works under the hood and does not require asking a customer for any extra information. As such, no friction is introduced into the customer journey, and there is no additional risk of churn.
As it happens, data enrichment works with the primary data that customers provide in the form of their email or phone number, which is generally considered typical of signing up for any account. As for their IP address, it is publicly available. The enrichment itself involves no friction at all. Since all the supplementary data is gathered from publicly available databases and the internet, often called OSINT sources.
This process doesn’t add any friction, as there’s no reason to slow down the customer experience. You don’t have to ask them for any extra information. You’re merely working with what you can learn from the enriched data. So, before a customer even buys anything from a site, you can find out quite a lot by just following this process.
How can targeting high-value customers benefit your business?
There are three main ways that targeting and working alongside high-value customers can benefit a business.
By offering these customers discounts, special offers, or marketing messages, you might be able to help retain them. Existing customers are more likely to spend money with you – so the more repeat high-value customers you have, the better.
Secondly, you can partner with high-value customers, particularly if they are influencers. You could contact these customers to find out if they would be interested in reviewing your products. This then has the potential to attract more customers if they positively review your product on their account for their followers to see.
Furthermore, by segmenting customers into different personas using data, you can tailor the messaging you deliver to make it more convincing across each group.
According to Shopify, influencer marketing is “the best way to reach new audiences, build brand awareness, and work with collaborators… who can create sales for you.” Using the latest data enrichment technologies for this purpose can be the key to a company’s future growth.
SEON is an online fraud prevention platform that detects and stops fraud in real-time through transactional data analysis.
