Why B2B Companies Need Data Enrichment
Let’s take a look at some of the top ways enriching data points about your customers can improve your business.
Enhance Lead Quality
Data enrichment allows you to not only add crucial contact information like names and email address and phone numbers to your dataset, it also allows you to get a better idea of who your potential customers and clients are. This makes lead generation more effective and helps you build stronger, more lasting relationships with your potential clients.
Improve Customer Segmentation and Targeting
For existing customers, enhancing data can provide you with additional details that allow you to more finely categorize your mailing list, meaning your advertising and email campaigns can go to the perfect target market and yield better results.
Customer profiles can be segmented by demographic information like age and gender, geographic location, online spending habits, social media profiles, and more.
Ensure Data Accuracy and Consistency
Low data quality leads to wasted ad spend and high bounce rates for email campaigns because your messaging doesn’t reach the right people. Data enrichment improves your ROI and streamlines your B2C and B2B marketing campaigns.
Review of the Best Data Enrichment APIs
We reviewed these data enrichment tools based on pricing, customer reviews, data accuracy, our own firsthand experience using the product, and what type of person or company each product is best for.
1. AbstractAPI - Best for Company Data
AbstractAPI’s Company Enrichment API can be used to source firmographic information for companies - things like industry, employee headcount, year founded, etc. The simple REST API returns results from over 175 countries and has good documentation, including code snippets that can be copy-pasted directly into your application code.
Although this API can’t be used to look up email addresses for specific employees, it does provide a lot of useful information, has a CSV upload for bulk queries, and is backed by bank-level security via API keys.
Pros
- Generous free tier
- Clear documentation and tutorials
- REST API returns clear, easy-to-use results in JSON format
Cons
- Doesn’t do email enrichment
Customer Reviews
"Love the simplicity and the pre-built code snippets.”
"Lots of beneficial tools here that every maker should be bookmarking and using."
"This is nice. Well executed. I was fiddling with the idea for a long. Have signed up. Sharing one Lookup API idea which I had made. All the best. Looking forward to more lookup APIs. 👍"
Pricing and Usage Limits
Abstract API offers free credits that can be used to test out any of their API services. Plans range from $9/month for 3000 requests to $399/month for 100,000 requests.
2. Clearbit - Best for General Data Enrichment
Clearbit is a machine-learning-powered data enrichment API backed by a human-led QA team dedicated to ensuring data accuracy. They are one of the best-known data enrichment companies.
They are on the pricier side, so if you’re not ready to commit, check out the free Chrome extension which does real-time enrichment for websites like LinkedIn and other social media platforms. Their API supports official client bindings for Ruby, Node, Python, Go, and Java.
Pros
- Powered by machine learning
- Data is guaranteed fresh by a human-led QA team
- Well-documented API
Cons
- Pricey
- No mobile app
Customer Reviews
"I find it very useful that I can extract the email ids of any person required very quickly and email them using my tools."
"Sometimes it fails to provide the exact email address as the data uploaded on their website is somehow 2-3 years old."
"Page view to form submission conversion rate. We've now got it to a place that we never ask a visitor for data we already have, which has been great for conversion rates and a smooth visitor experience on any conversion pages."
Pricing and Usage Limits
Clearbit’s free tier gives you access to a few features, such as de-anonymizing site traffic, determining ideal prospect profiles, and enriching email address data through the API.
A business-level tier with customized pricing plans is available for enterprise clients seeking more. Contact Clearbit for pricing options or to request a free demo.
3. Zoominfo - Best for Enterprise
Zoominfo offers more than just an email enrichment API. They offer a feature-rich set of solutions for automating sales, cross-channel marketing, branding, and talent acquisition. Their data quality is known to be high.
We found it very difficult to get up and running with the service - it is clearly aimed at large, enterprise companies who already have a clear idea of what they want. Small businesses will probably find their solutions overkill and the fact that you need to speak with a representative just to view pricing or sign up for an account might turn away those who are simply looking for a quick way to fill gaps in their dataset.
Pros
- Can be used to automate nearly all marketing, email, and data concerns
- Dedicated customer support through chat and phone
- High data quality, sourced from multiple streams
Cons
- UI cluttered and not intuitive
- Must speak with a representative in order to test the service or get started
Customer Reviews
"ZoomInfo helped us to pull out the contacts from Linkedin and use the intent of the organizations to target the right accounts that helped us in cracking named logos."
"...the UI is cluttered and I believe that can be worked upon in the next update"
"Excellent customer service that provides prompt responses. Every response is quick and courteous."
Pricing and Usage Limits
Contact Zoominfo for pricing information
4. People Data Labs - Best for Startups
People Data Labs’ Person Enrichment API allows you to fill in gaps in your customer data using information you already have. They boast over 3.1 billion profiles that can be searched, sourced, and used to augment your existing data.
People Data Labs began as recruiting software, and has been building a database of raw data on people and companies since 2015. We tested the API via a free trial on their homepage and found it easy-to-use, with thorough, well-written docs.
Pros
- Hands-on experience sourcing leads for recruiters
- Good support and one-on-one help even for startups and small companies
- Lots of data, pulled from many sources
Cons
- No GUI for querying the data - just a GUI for building a querystring
- Can be too reliant on data pulled from LinkedIn
Customer Reviews
"People Data Labs has managed to build an extremely extensive data platform with their innovative data co-op approach. The applications that can benefit from this resource are uncountable and really only bound by their creators' imaginations."
"Not by any means unique to PDL's products, the problem of data recency is one area for constant improvement."
"Allows us to easily enrich our leads with extra firmographic information."
Pricing and Usage Limits
PDL is free to use for up to 100 requests per month. Their Pro plan starts at $98/month for 350 requests per month plus email support. Their Enterprise plan is custom pricing and allows access to a tailored set of features.
Best for: startups
5. Lusha - Best for Big and Small Business
Lusha provides sales, RevOps, recruiting and marketing solutions primarily aimed at enterprise companies but also adaptable to small business models. They are trusted by Google and Zendesk, and have delivered staggering results to companies like Oracle and InsightGlobal.
We liked not only that their UI was so clear and intuitive, but also that they provide blogs and additional tools like a revenue calculator, sales script generator (backed by AI) and jargon glossary for familiarizing yourself with important terms and phrases.
Pros
- More fun and approachable platform than any others on the list
- Additional tools are useful and simple to work with
- Trusted by big names like Google and Oracle
- Pricing much cheaper than some others on the list
Cons
- Don’t use standard labeling for company size and industry (like LinkedIn)
- Not enough free credits to get started
Customer Reviews
"With just a few clicks, I can access my prospects' direct phone numbers, email addresses, and even social media profiles."
"The filters are limited compared to ZoomInfo and Apollo"
"The user interface of the Lusha platform is incredibly intuitive and user-friendly. I appreciate how seamlessly it integrates with other tools and platforms. The Chrome extension is convenient, as it provides instant contact information while I'm browsing websites or LinkedIn profiles. It's a true time-saver and significantly enhances my productivity."
Pricing and Usage Limits
Lusha’s free tier offers just 5 credits per month, but the free tier does give you access to almost the complete suite of data enrichment tools. The Solo plan is $28/month and allows up to 480 credits, and the premium plan is $51/month and allows up to 950 credits. Custom plans are also available.
6. Klazify - Best for App Developers
Klazify is a content classification API, making it slightly different from the other APIs on this list. It gives you domain data like website or company logos, company data, social media profiles, simply by inputting a URL or email address.
We tested several of their APIs, including the parked domain API (which allows you to see whether a registered domain is actually being used or not), the website tech stack API (which returns information on how a particular site was built), and the company API, which returns enriched company data for contacts.
These APIs are fun to play around with but don’t offer much in the way of useful, actionable data.
Pros
- Lots of different APIs that return interesting data about websites and domains
- The company data API is reasonably accurate.
- May be more useful for developers building apps (i.e. for website reviews) than for enriching data
Cons
- Pricey
- Few people seem to have used it
Customer Reviews
"The website categorization and logo API helped me a lot with my new app for reviews that I am currently developing. They also have a social media links scraper where you can extract the social media links from a URL."
Pricing and Usage Limits
Klazify offers a free 7-day trial. Plans start at $39.99/month for 500 API requests, and range up to $3950/month for over a million API calls.
Best for: app developers
7. BeenVerified - Best for Hobbyists
BeenVerified has a refreshingly simple UI that is readily available front-and-center on their homepage. You can use their person lookup, email lookup, phone number lookup, address lookup and vehicle search for free right from their website for one-off real-time enrichment.
BeenVerified searches billions of publicly available records, so you know that the data is reliably and ethically sourced. You can download gathered information as a PDF. Unfortunately, the site does not offer an API, so may not be useful for enterprise or companies who need to run lots of queries.
Pros
- Easy and free to look up anyone’s email or personal data
- Relies on publicly available records so no risk of privacy invasion
Cons
- No API
- Slow
Customer Reviews
There are no customer reviews of this platform
Pricing and Usage Limits
BeenVerified is a free service. You only need to provide an email address once you have your results so they can mail the results to you.
How to Choose the Right B2B Data Enrichment Tool
Now that we’ve seen some of the B2B enrichment offerings, how do we decide which tool is right for us?
Factors to Consider
Ultimately, the choice will come down to an evaluation of your needs. We can’t tell you what those are - but we can guide you in making this decision by highlighting some things to consider when comparing enrichment platforms.
- how accurate is the data?
- are they GDPR, CCPA, and ISO 27701 compliant?
- how large is their dataset and from where do they source their data?
- do you need company data like business email addresses, social media profiles, names and physical addresses, phone numbers?
- do you need additional features like marketing and sales automation?
- how generous is their free tier?
- how responsive is their customer support?
- what is your budget?
Note that we consider budget last of all. We believe that if a particular platform has the features you need, it is worth adjusting your budget to get those features, if need be.
Common Questions About Data Enrichment
Why is data enrichment important?
Data enrichment allows businesses to build a more complete picture of their clients and prospective leads by adding information about those customers to existing information in their datasets.
This allows companies to better target advertising, prevent email bounces and spam complaints, dramatically improve their cold outreach, and build deeper, longer-lasting relationships with their clients.
How do data enrichment tools work?
Data enrichment tools typically have access to a large database (or multiple databases) of contact information, either that they have built up themselves, or that they have bought from other sources. These tools allow you to run queries against their datasets and use the information in them to augment and supplement your own data.
What are the benefits of using an API for data enrichment?
Using an API allows you to automate the process of data enrichment so that you don’t have to run each query manually or spend hours trawling LinkedIn or other websites for someone’s job title or business email.
An API allows you to programmatically look up data about prospective leads, then insert that data into your own database.
How can B2B companies benefit from data enrichment?
Data enrichment improves conversion, increases ROI on marketing campaigns, and ensures accuracy and consistency in their mailing lists.
Conclusion
Data enrichment will likely improve in the coming years as more Artificially Intelligent data enrichment solutions are brought to market. However, human QA and support will still be necessary to ensure accuracy
We encourage you to explore the data enrichment solutions on this list and use the provided questions to evaluate your business needs when choosing one.
