You have a name and a company. Lead enrichment is what turns that into a name, a job title, an email address a mail server will accept, and a phone number that rings. It means adding facts to a lead you already have, so that you can write to the person or call them.
The part vendors leave vague is the price and the accuracy. Enrichment is usually metered in credits, and the data is never perfect. This page covers what gets added, how accuracy is checked, how vendors charge, and a worked example of what 150 leads buy.
What gets added to a lead
A bare lead is often just a company name or a person's name from a list. Enrichment appends some of the following, depending on the vendor:
- Contact details: work email, direct phone or mobile number.
- Person facts: job title, seniority, how long in the role.
- Company facts: headcount, industry, location, website.
- Optional extras: social profile links, tools the company uses, recent news.
Most small businesses need only the first two lines. A title tells you whether this is the person who decides, and a working email or phone number is how you reach them.
How accuracy gets checked, and how much to expect
Emails are usually checked by asking the receiving mail server whether the mailbox exists, without sending a message. Phone numbers are checked for line type and whether they are in service. Better vendors also cross-check several sources and drop a result they cannot confirm.
Three limits hold for every vendor. Some company mail servers accept everything, so an address there cannot be confirmed either way; how to verify email addresses before sending covers how to treat them. People change jobs, so a record that was right in January can be wrong in June. And coverage is thinner for small, local companies than for large ones.
So expect some misses and a few bad results, and test before you commit. Take 25 contacts from any source, send to the ones that verify, and count the bounces. A sample tells you more than a sales page does, and how to check lead data before you pay for it goes through that test.
Three ways vendors charge
Per record: you pay a flat price for each contact you export. Per seat: you pay a monthly fee for each user, usually with a cap on lookups. Per credit: you buy a pool of credits and each lookup spends some. The questions to ask are the same for all three. Do you pay when nothing is found? Is there more than one pool (one for email, another for phones)? Are there limits on exporting your own list? Prices are on each vendor's own pages and change, so read the current page before you decide.
In Rocketship, searching the lead database, counting how many people match, and previewing 25 of them by name cost nothing. A person you upload costs 1 lead. A person Rocketship finds for you with their email costs 2 leads, charged only when the email is actually found. A phone number is a separate phone lookup, 1 each, charged only when a phone is found. How leads are counted, explained plainly goes through it.
What 150 leads buy: three ways to spend them
Gus runs Northline Mechanical, two people who sell maintenance contracts to property managers in Columbus, Ohio. His plan includes 150 leads a month. Here are three ways he could spend them.
| Plan for the month | Leads | What he ends up with |
|---|---|---|
| Upload 150 people, nothing else | 150 x 1 | 150 named managers, titles and companies to work |
| Have Rocketship find 75 new people with their emails | 75 x 2 | 75 people he can email today |
| Upload 100, then have Rocketship find 25 new people | 100 + (25 x 2) = 150 | 100 names to work, 25 with an email Rocketship found |
If Rocketship finds a person who is already a lead you paid for, it costs 1 lead, not 2. Misses help you: if Gus asks Rocketship to find 25 people and only 20 turn up with an email, he pays 40 leads for those, not 50, and has 10 leads left. Phone numbers are separate: a phone lookup is 1 each, charged only when a phone is found.
The third plan is the one that tends to work, because most of a list is people you already know how to reach. Read the 100 names. Pick the ones worth a Tuesday afternoon. Spend the 2 leads only on finding new people like them.
When enrichment is not worth paying for
Skip it when the list is short and public. If you are writing to 30 local businesses whose owners are listed on their own websites, finding the company email format and checking one address by hand costs minutes. Skip it too when the phone number is a switchboard and the real route in is an introduction, or when you are working from referrals and already have the number.
Words that get used as if they were enrichment
Data cleansing fixes records you already have, such as typos and duplicates. A data append is another name for enrichment. Waterfall enrichment tries several vendors in a row until one returns a result. List building is finding the names in the first place, and a B2B database is the stock from which enrichment pulls. Pricing details for Rocketship are on the pricing page, and say goodbye to credit anxiety explains why counting is free.
Enrichment is only useful if someone writes to the people it finds. Rocketship finds the buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and both Launch and Frontier start with a 7-day free trial, card required.