What is data enrichment — and which half of it do you need?

What is data enrichment?

Appending attributes you never captured, bought from outside your own systems.

You start with something thin — an email address, a company domain, a name and a postcode — and append what you do not have. That is the whole mechanic, and it is what separates enrichment from the neighbouring categories: a CDP assembles data you already own, identity resolution decides whether two records are the same person, and enrichment buys facts you never had.

What the term does not tell you is which kind of facts, and that turns out to be the whole decision.

The two halves do not co-occur in buyer stacks

Not one buyer in market for this category runs a tool from both halves.

That is the finding, and it is the reason the definition above is worth the space. Among buyers in market for data enrichment, tools from the B2B half are common and tools from the consumer half are rare — and the overlap between them is not small, it is empty.

Share of buyers in market for data enrichment running a tool from each half. The remainder — about half the group — run neither yet, which is the ordinary pattern for being in market.

A zero is worth stating carefully: this counts the tools buyers name in their stacks, across the interviews where enrichment is a live requirement. Within that group, the two halves do not co-occur once.

Which half enrichment buyers lean toward

Despite the name, enrichment buyers run consumer-data tools less often than any neighbouring group here.

The category is tagged data enrichment and consumer data, which suggests the consumer half is at least an equal partner. Run the same count against the neighbouring categories and the opposite shows up.

Enrichment buyers run B2B contact tools at more than ten times the rate of identity-resolution buyers and roughly fifteen times the rate of CDP buyers, and run consumer-data tools less often than either. So the consumer half of the label is real — those buyers exist and their vendors are well rated — but the enrichment buyer population here is much more strongly associated with B2B sales-and-marketing data than with consumer-data platforms.

The stacks say the same thing another way. The tools most distinctive to enrichment buyers, measured against how common they are across all interviews, are a B2B contact database and a B2B advertising channel — not anything from the consumer side, and not the analytics platform that shows up near the top simply because it shows up everywhere.

How buyers rate the platforms

Ratings are the average score buyers give a product across verified interviews, so they span both halves and every use of the tool, not only enrichment.

Average buyer rating (1–10) for the platforms buyers name in each half.

Platform	Avg rating	Half, and how buyers talk about it
TransUnion	~8	Consumer. Rated by too few buyers for a decimal to mean anything.
LiveRamp	7.5	Consumer. The most-rated platform in this table, and the one that also anchors identity resolution.
Acxiom	~7.5	Consumer. The long-standing audience-data option; too few ratings for a decimal.
Demandbase	7.4	B2B. Bought as much for account targeting and intent as for the data itself.
ZoomInfo	7.2	B2B, and the most-owned purpose-built tool among buyers in market for this category.
Experian	~7	Consumer. Named for demographic and household attributes; too few ratings for a decimal.
6sense	6.9	B2B. Appears alongside Demandbase where intent data is the driver rather than contacts.
Epsilon	6.3	Consumer, and the lowest-rated platform in this table. Also appears in loyalty and identity stacks.
Apollo	not rated	B2B. Named by too few buyers for a rating to mean anything.
Clearbit	not rated	B2B. Named by too few buyers for a rating to mean anything.

So what should you ask for?

Name the half before you take demos, because the vendor sets and the data being purchased are materially different.

About half the buyers in market here own nothing in either half yet, which is ordinary — being in market usually means not owning one. What is not ordinary is how cleanly the category divides in current stacks, and a shortlist assembled from the phrase "data enrichment" will mix vendors that answer completely different questions.

The implication is ours rather than a practice buyers describe: work out which record you are trying to complete. An account or contact you want to sell to points at the B2B half. A customer you already have and want to understand better points at the consumer half. The consumer path also raises privacy considerations around person- and household-level attributes that differ from the B2B contact-data case.

For the neighbouring decisions, the companion reads are what identity resolution is — the question of whether two records are the same person — and what zero-party data is, which is the option of asking customers directly instead of buying attributes about them.