Data Enrichment enhances CRM records by adding missing or verified information, making them more complete and actionable, while Data Cleansing is the process of removing or correcting inaccurate, duplicate, or outdated data to maintain accuracy and consistency.
In this article, you'll get some tips on how to effectively enrich and clean your data, and explore the best practices and tools that can help your business make the best out of your CRM.
Data cleansing is done periodically to correct errors, remove duplicates, and maintain accurate records. Data enrichment, on the other hand, is ongoing or automated, filling gaps in your CRM with missing information. While cleansing ensures your existing data is reliable, enrichment makes it more complete and actionable.
| Aspect | Data Cleansing | Data Enrichment |
| Definition | Removing inaccurate, irrelevant, or outdated data from your database | Adding supplemental or missing data to strengthen your CRM |
| Purpose | Ensure data is accurate, relevant, and clean | Make data more complete, detailed, and useful for marketing, sales, and reporting |
| Timing | Before enrichment to prepare a clean foundation | After cleansing to fill in gaps and enhance existing data |
| Indicators to measure | Declining engagement rates, outdated or duplicate records, and errors in reporting | Gaps in CRM records, missing fields like company size, location, phone number, or social profiles |
| Frequency |
At least every 5 months or as needed, based on database health |
Ongoing or automated, depending on tools and integrations |
| Goal | Maintain high-quality, accurate data that represents leads and customers | Gather high-quality, complete data to understand better and engage |
Table of concepts
How do Data Enrichment and Data Cleansing improve CRM data quality?
Data Enrichment and Data Cleansing are two complementary processes that together ensure your CRM data is accurate, complete, and actionable.
Data Cleansing ensures that the foundation of your CRM is reliable, prevents errors in reporting, reduces frustration for sales and marketing teams, and enhances overall productivity. By maintaining clean data, businesses can trust their insights and make informed decisions.
Data Enrichment, on the other hand, enhances CRM data. Enriched data allows businesses to personalize communications, segment audiences effectively, and optimize marketing and sales strategies.
In short, Data Cleansing ensures your CRM is accurate and organized, while Data Enrichment makes your data complete and actionable. Together, they maximize the value of your CRM, enabling better customer engagement and smarter business decisions.
Data enrichment is the process of improving customer data to make it more accurate, complete, and up to date.
It involves adding new information and verifying it with reliable third-party sources. It’s part of overall data hygiene, the ongoing practice of keeping data clean and useful.
By enriching data in your CRM, businesses can gain a more complete picture of their customers, including demographic, geographic, and behavioral insights. This ensures your CRM accurately represents your audience, enabling personalized interactions.
Data enrichment answers the question: “How can I make my CRM data more accurate, complete, and actionable?”
You can enrich your data by following these best practices:
Set clear criteria
Create repeatable processes
Ensure scalability
Prioritize general applications
Treat enrichment as ongoing
Data cleansing (also known as data scrubbing) is the process of correcting or removing data that is inaccurate, duplicate, incomplete, improperly formatted, or corrupted within a dataset.
The main goal isn’t just to delete information, but to make the dataset as accurate as possible.
Cleaning data is important to ensure accuracy and organization, prevent errors, reduce frustration, and improve productivity.
Source: Hubspot
Duplicates usually come from inconsistent data entry or multiple data sources. They can be removed using tools like Google Contacts, Dedupley, or HubSpot’s automatic and manual deduplication features. In HubSpot Professional and Enterprise, duplicates can be reviewed, compared, and merged using the duplicate-management tool.
HubSpot also allows you to configure automatic merging of duplicate contacts and companies.
Access this blog to know other apps to eliminate duplicate contacts.
Mistakes such as typos, inconsistent naming, abbreviations, capitalization, or punctuation are usually caused by manual data entry and a lack of standardization. Create a plan to identify and correct which properties contain these errors and establish standards to prevent them from recurring.
Start by reviewing your database to identify which fields are frequently left empty. If these fields are important for your ideal customer profile (ICP), prioritize enriching them to make your data more complete. For the remaining missing data, you can either remove irrelevant records, fill in the missing values using available information, or simply mark them as missing for future updates.
Databases naturally become outdated, with about 30% of company data changing each year due to new emails, phone numbers, job titles, or employee departures. To keep data accurate, use parsing tools, which are software that automatically scans emails or documents to extract and update contact details, and regularly remove bounced or opted-out addresses. This helps maintain current records and improves email deliverability.
Check this guide to better manage your database and handle non-marketing contacts in HubSpot.
To achieve data quality, HubSpot’s new Data Quality tools help businesses maintain an accurate and organized CRM. These tools enable you to:
Manage duplicates: Identify and merge or remove duplicate contacts and companies automatically.
Correct formatting: Standardize names, emails, dates, and other fields to ensure consistency.
Source: Hubspot Academy
Enrich records: Fill in missing information and keep contact and company data complete. Data quality's smart enrichment automatically adds missing information to customer records by intelligently pulling details from email conversations, meeting notes, and verified third-party sources.
Monitor property insights: Check which fields are underused, contain unusual values, or are redundant.
Track data quality: View reports on data completeness and consistency across your CRM.
HubSpot’s Data Quality tools are available with the Starter, Professional, or Enterprise subscriptions of Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Data Hub, and Content Hub, as well as with the Professional or Enterprise subscriptions of Smart CRM and Commerce Hub.
Watch this HubSpot Academy video to gain a better understanding.
If you have any questions or need support about Data Enrichment and Data Cleansing, don't hesitate to reach out to us!
You can schedule a call with Lisa Freitas, our Senior HubSpot Consultant. She'll be happy to help you create marketing strategies that drive business growth.