Data append: creating high-definition customer understanding

If knowledge is power, then customer knowledge is the power to personalize marketing engagement. People expect to be understood by brands whose products they buy. They expect to be served with relevant content at every stage of the customer journey. Personalization is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity.

Brands leading the way in individualized customer experiences have a 1.5 times higher customer loyalty rate than their competitors. Reaching the right customers with the right messaging also drives marketing efficiency and maximizes ROI.

That’s why so many seek to validate, augment, extend, and refresh their customer data – and therefore their customer understanding – with insights from partners providing data append services.

What is data append?

Data appending is simply the introduction of new and more nuanced customer data into a brand’s CDP, CRM, or customer database. Brands append data via collaborations with external data providers and identity resolution experts (like Acxiom). This process helps organizations fulfill four key functions:

• To update customer records with current, accurate information.
• To plug any gaps in customer records such as individuals missing contact details (or firmographic data like NAICS codes for B2B data append services).
• To enhance customer information with additional insights such as purchase behaviors, interests, or preferences.
• To gain insights about anonymous users of their apps, websites, social media platforms, or advertising inventory – from basic demographic details to browsing behaviors.

Providers of data append services match the brand’s PII-based known data to their own anonymized consumer data before moving on to the brand’s anonymized customer records and identifiers using enterprise identity resolution services. The provider can then generate updates for customer records, layering in the additional demographic, lifestyle, or behavioral attributes the brand has requested.

Types of data appending services

There are different approaches to how data is appended and types of data appends that are commonly adopted. Popular data parameters for data append include:

• Demographic append – enriching a customer record by adding age, gender, income, buyer behaviors, budget details.
• Email append – using an individual’s contact details to add verified and ethically permissioned email addresses.
• Reverse email append – flipping the data flow 180 degrees with customer email addresses used to source other missing contact information (like name and address).
• Phone append – using verified customer contact data to append phone numbers to incomplete records.
• Reverse phone append – similar to the reverse email append, this approach uses customer phone numbers as the root to generate comprehensive contact details.

In truth, any significant customer data point has the potential to provide valuable insight and the potential to be appended at scale. To the list above you might add customers’ firmographic variables, geographic region, social media footprint, or employer append.

How data is appended falls into two main approaches. First, a brand may opt for a batch append to supercharge its customer database with specific insights ahead of standalone campaigns or for initiatives such as data analytics, attrition modeling, lifetime value analysis, or next best product projects. Data is appended to the brand’s database in discrete batches. For example, if a direct-to-consumer business wanted to encourage people who receive paper bills to switch to electronic billing it might seek to append email address details to its customer records.

Alternatively, as part of ongoing data hygiene initiatives, brands might opt for real-time appends. In this scenario, the brand and the data append service provider establish an interface that allows an ongoing flow of customer information enhancements. As new fragments of customer or prospect data hit the database (for example, a mobile phone number) the append mechanism can be employed to build on this single data point to form a more comprehensive customer record.

This approach is also great for encouraging cross-sell/upsell conversions at the point of sale. From a single data point (such as an email address confirmation), brands can unlock all its intelligence about individual customers and use it to drive a multi-bag buy. For example, that one data point might reveal a customer is keen on fishing, giving the person (or system) the opportunity to highlight fishing-related merchandise that is on sale.

Why is data appending important?

Data appending is vital because without it customer databases, CRMs, and CDPs, which should be sources of competitive advantage, become stale, inaccurate, narrow in scope, and ultimately a strategic liability.

As any analyst will tell you, customer data is not static – because people change. People move homes, change jobs, change phone numbers, change contact details, their tastes evolve, and their budgets change. Email marketing databases, for example, are estimated to naturally degrade by approximately 23% every year. At such a rate it doesn’t take long for database value and efficacy to plummet (taking marketing efficiency with it).

Benefits of data appending

The insights provided by new or expanded customer data from data appending can be used for a wide range of purposes. Here are some of the key benefits brands can experience after a data append:

• Data accuracy: Maintenance of accurate, comprehensive, up-to-date customer records is the keystone of every engagement strategy, and appending fresh data on a regular basis gets that job done. Accurate data is the raw material that provides the insights that shape the campaign that fulfills the strategy. It enables brands to make more informed decisions based on a high-definition understanding of their customers.
• Customer insights, understanding and loyalty: A data append helps brands redefine its customer relationships. Every added node of customer understanding, and each behavioral nuance provides the insights to deliver a more individualized service. This personalized customer experience drives loyalty and extends lifetime value.
• Understanding anonymous audiences: Data appending also enables brands to analyze anonymous visitors to their online platforms. This means they can build a more holistic understanding of audiences and their onsite behaviors (such as who is buying and who is abandoning a cart), but also factor in their wider interests and create more personalized content. This analysis can support measurement efforts and determine whether marketing is driving the correct audiences to the platform. Lastly, being able to define audiences accurately enables publishers to sell advertising inventory backed up by detailed audience profiles.
• Lead generation: Data appending enhances new business efforts by populating lead generation lists with prospects more likely to convert (based on their buying behaviors) and the channels via which they will be most effectively engaged.
• Marketing efficiency and effectiveness: The data accuracy and enhanced customer understanding data appending delivers helps create a lean marketing machine with little or no waste. Clearly defined audience segments, with their behaviors, interests and channel preferences baked in, maximize the likelihood that each campaign will reach the right people and resonate with them.

Challenges of data appending

There are two main challenges to a successful data append. The first is the management and hygiene of a brand’s customer data. Before contemplating adding new data, it’s important to have logically and consistently structured data architecture, with databases free from duplicates or inaccuracies. If data quality is poor, if data cleansing is required, adding further information is unlikely to yield positive results.

The second major challenge involves data privacy and compliance. Any data appended must comply strictly with privacy regulations such as the GDPR or CCPA. Brands need to be certain they have explicit consent to append and use individuals’ data. This means ensuring their data append services provider can demonstrate compliant, privacy-first data provenance and procedures.

How Acxiom can help

Acxiom is a trusted data append partner for many well-known brands. As a leader in data and identity services for more than 55 years, we optimize the outcomes of any data append initiative in an ethical, privacy-conscious manner.

To get your data quality, hygiene, and architecture in shape before appending new data, we can help you assess any data health issues. Our proprietary data management and identity resolution services enable you to address data quality, data matching, or consistency issues. With the same solutions and just a single customer touchpoint, we can help you understand the characteristics, behaviors, and motivations of your audiences.

And when it comes to enhancing and augmenting customer data, Acxiom can provide the highest-performing audiences and data enrichment services along with the largest catalog of more than 12,000 global data attributes.

For more information on how we can supercharge your data append with actionable insights, contact one of our experts now.