Data enrichment is the addition of data from other sources to existing records. For company databases, this typically means adding industry, size by number of employees and turnover, legal form, region, ownership structure, financial indicators, or the technologies used on the website. The point is that a bare list of contacts cannot be segmented or prioritised, whereas an enriched one allows focusing on entities that match the profile of the ideal customer. The key is linking through a reliable identifier, since matching by name creates errors. Also monitor the currency of the source and its coverage – data added with a year's delay can be worse than no data at all. For data on natural persons, verify the legal basis for their processing.
See also: Record matching, Data audit, Legal aspects of scraping.
