B2b data provider

Data Append: What It Is and Why It Matters for Nonprofit Growth

IInfotanksDeveloper

January 7, 2025

It is well-known that data is the main tool for addressing your audience and sending the appropriate messages. Explain to them why a particular product fits their requirements. They want a specific focus on their pain points and how a particular product or service would meet those needs. In an average database, an estimated 85% of contacts need to be completed, and approximately 60% of records are stale and require changes for them to be useful.

But there is a remedy to this- conducting a data append. In this guide, we will analyze how data-appending services can help enrich the information in your database so that you can confidently apply data-driven marketing strategies.

To understand this concept fully, let’s first break down the term “data append” into its constituent parts.

Understanding the Meaning of “Append”

The term “Append” can be understood as adding something in the form of an attachment or as a supplement to something else. As a marketing professional, a few examples of appending that you may have encountered in day-to-day life are:

Sending out a flyer that adds an explanation of the topics discussed through emails about marketing communications.
Send out an agenda for a client meeting and provide links to any deliverables included on the agenda.

By appending data or information in this case, understanding the topic of discussion in a better way is made possible because more information is provided. Such comprehensive knowledge enables you to enhance your marketing efforts, be it by offering a more informative level of customers on its products and services or by equipping your internal team with sufficient knowledge to understand more about the target audience for accurate marketing strategies.

For this guide, we shall focus on one particular kind of append, whereby data append will be covered.

What is a Data Append?

“Data append” refers to the process of adding outside information to a brand’s internal database’s already existing data. In other words, if the marketer has additional information from other sources, he can gather it and strengthen his existing database.

There are a few reasons why a business may choose to append external data to its existing records:

To update missing contacts or any information gaps that may be available within the customer relationship database, let us consider an instance where and when you want to encourage a survey after your most recent product launch. In the case of missing contact information, they only use an email address or a phone number. Later on, you change your mind and decide that you want to have both phone number and email to use. In that case, you can source and add the missing contact details by means of a data append to make sure that all the information is captured for all the customers.
To enable customer segmentation to be more accurate than otherwise would have been the case. Customer segmentation or targeting can help ease the pressure on restaurants and make their customer service efficient, considering you are solving the problem of representing a restaurant that previously did a hyperlocal targeting strategy for its flagship outlet. That’s why target segmentation is important now, as the restaurant plans to establish three more outlets in the neighborhood. You can target specific customers by sending them offers that apply only to their nearest ones when you include geographic facts such as the neighborhood in your existing dataset.
To implement any potential modern forms of outreach. For example, you’ve been doing quite a bit of digital marketing; however, you still want to experiment with some direct mailing. You can now supplement address data to ensure your messages get to their mailboxes.
To segment your audience. You may be in the moving truck business, and marketing’s been on all homeowners in the past, and he has yet to see worthwhile returns on investment (ROI). In this instance, your target demographic is quite probably much too broad – not all of the homeowners who are among your potential customers will want to move in the near future. This challenge can be handled by appending lifestyle data to find out which customers would be willing to move and make them your target customers in order to improve your ROI.

Data appending helps you see the data, understand your customers, and reach out to them with messages that will ultimately convert them into loyal clients.

What Does the Data Appending Process Look Like?

The data append process includes the following steps:

Sending data to a data append service.
Searching a third-party database for the verified records.
Select the additional data that you wish to append to the records.
Data will be retrieved from a third-party database and appended to your records.

Hence, each customer record that you augment with additional data will be clearer and more complete in terms of its accuracy and information content.

It is essential to remember that data applications only come after plans, which assist in constructing a holistic marketing approach for the business as a whole. Although such considerations pertaining to what data has to be appended and how a particular data append strategy will be implemented occur outside this process, a data append is the task that answers the question as to what strategies are necessary to implement this overall strategy.

The process of appending data can vary slightly depending on the information needed to supplement your specific marketing efforts. The two main types of data append processes are batch appends and real-time appends, with each of them being applicable to particular marketing circumstances.

Batch Append

Batch Append refers to gathering data and appending it to your records or your client’s database in batches. This process is similar to the one discussed in the previous section, but the data append happens in one go.

Real-Time Append

A real-time append is a continuous process, unlike a batch append. With a real-time append, data is appended to your records in real-time, targeting a single name, phone number, or even postal address.

What Types of Data Can You Append to Your Records?

The data you append will vary depending on your marketing goals. However, most companies append demographic, phone, email, firmographics, and geographic information to better understand their target audience and optimize their marketing efforts.

Demographic Data

ABM thrives on personalization. It’s a high-impact strategy where marketing and sales teams collaborate to create tailored experiences for a handpicked list of high-value accounts. This method allows healthcare companies to focus their efforts on the prospects that matter most. In contrast, inbound marketing casts a broader net. It’s about drawing in leads through valuable content and meaningful engagement, sidestepping the inefficiencies of intrusive outbound tactics.

Age
Gender
Income
Net worth
Marital status
Educational attainments
Children involved at home
Attributes of their lifestyle (hobbies, student, occupation)

Spending habits (Online Product Purchase, New movers, Online Gift Registries, Ailment Buyers, Television Followers)

Phone Data

Does your organization have gaps in their customer data records that prevent them from being able to contact a customer via phone call or SMS? Appending phone data to your database is one way that one can contact customers. A phone append can be any one of the following:

Phone Append: This is the basic process of appending phone numbers to customers’ accounts by utilizing existing customer data to populate the gaps.
Reverse Phone Append: It is possible to possess just a phone number and then use a Reverse Append to fill in the gaps, such as using that phone number to acquire the customer’s name and email address.

Email Data

You can also add email records to your database to fill in the gaps in case there are not enough or contact details are missing. Nevertheless, as emails tend to become stale faster, data providers focus on getting valid, recent, active email addresses; doing this reduces the bounce back and maximizes the chance of the intended recipients paying attention to your email messages.

Your database can be suffixed with email-related data in two ways:

Email Append: The standard procedure used to add missing email records of clients who have been partially filled with low contact details.
Reverse Email Append: The information appending practice where an email address exists but a few pieces of information, such as a name and phone number, are appended in the record.

Firmographic Data

Firmographic data is used to describe businesses. That is, it refers to the data that applies to entire organizations as opposed to targeting specific individuals. For example, firmographics can tell you about a company’s clientele. Let’s say your agency or a brand does not focus on consumers but rather markets to other businesses, i.e., organizations with firmographics that will help them to market B2B.

Such a supplement enables you to enhance your data in your database in relation to the businesses you have on your records with the following information:

Industry
NAICS Classification
Internal Structure
Annual Sales
Gig Size
Market Segment
Location
Phone Numbers
Website
E-mail
Key Contacts

Geographic Data

Incorporating geographic data such as latitude and longitude coordinates into your records gives you the ability to employ more targeted marketing strategies.

How to Maximize the Success of Data Append

Working with a reliable, credible data provider is critical for the data add process to run successfully. For the greatest outcomes, work with a data provider that has the following characteristics:

Holds experience and professionalism in information about the industry. Apart from CTV targeting and TikTok advertising, there are many other new data-oriented marketing trends. By hiring such a provider who has immense experience, use the latest and the best in the data marketing universe to make the best out of your data.
Adheres to all the implementing practices pertaining to data privacy. Since, as a global average, 80% of adults are extremely worried about their privacy and the culture is changing to meet the needs, more and more data privacy laws are being put into place well. Look for a provider who adheres to the applicable laws, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), when doing business.
Provides multiple options regarding data services. Most probably, there are other data services that would help your organization. Thus, sourcing all the data requirements from a single provider optimizes the workflow and grants the provider opportunities to customize their services for your enterprise. As an illustration, IInfotanks not only adds data but also provides data cleansing, customer insights, and analytics, as well as digital marketing solutions.

The data append you utilize will only be as good as the supplier you sourced it from; notice there are reputable suppliers that offer the data that you want at a reasonable price, then contact them.

Discover IInfotanks Data Appending Services

Through a data append, you can start communicating, understanding the customers better, and designing more customized advertisements that result in converting one-time customers to interested patrons.

If you are ready to enhance your database and increase your marketing return, use IInfotanks as your only resource. IInfotanks features a complete set of data enhancement packages that can be combined in different ways to meet your targets. Get in touch with us today to learn further regarding these solutions and how you can make them available.