Data enrichment: what it means
Data enrichment is adding missing details to a record you already have, such as turning a name and company into a job title, LinkedIn profile, verified work email and company size. It makes a bare lead usable for scoring, routing and outreach, and it is usually paid per lookup.
What can be enriched?
| Layer | Example fields | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Person | Job title, seniority, LinkedIn URL, location | Fit and routing |
| Contact | Work email, phone, mobile | Outreach |
| Company | Headcount, industry, revenue band, location | Firmographics and territory |
| Technology | Tools the company uses | Technographics |
| Context | Recent posts, hiring, reviews written | Timing and personalisation |
Contact data is usually the most expensive layer, and mobile numbers cost far more than emails.
A worked cost per usable lead
The sticker price per lookup is not what a lead costs. Say you enrich 300 names at 4 cents a profile lookup and 5 cents an email lookup (illustrative prices).
- 300 profile lookups. 270 come back with a title and company. If misses are free, you pay 270 x 4 = $10.80.
- Of those 270, 180 fit your profile well enough to contact.
- You look up emails for the 180. 140 come back verified. That is 140 x 5 = $7.00.
- Total: $17.80 for 140 contactable, qualified people, about 12.7 cents each.
If the supplier billed every attempt instead, you would pay for 300 profiles and 180 email attempts: $12.00 + $9.00 = $21.00 for the same 140 people. The order also matters: scoring before email lookups saved you from paying for 90 emails you would never use. Our piece on what a lead actually costs works through more of these.
Common mistakes
- Enriching everything. Look up contact details only for people who pass a fit check.
- Not checking the miss policy. A cheap supplier that bills misses can cost more than a dearer one that does not.
- Trusting stale fields. A job title from two years ago is a guess.
- Skipping verification. An enriched email that bounces is worse than no email, because it damages email deliverability.
Related terms
Waterfall enrichment is a way of enriching from several suppliers in turn. Email verification is the check every enriched email should pass before you send.
How Sluice handles enrichment
Sluice charges only for lookups that returned something usable: a profile lookup with no title, no company and no location is not billed, and only verified emails are billed. People are scored before their contact details are revealed, so you pay for contact data only on people worth contacting. Every pass shows its worst-case price before it runs, and a single pass is capped at 25 people enriched by default.
Questions people ask
- What is the difference between data enrichment and data cleansing?
- Enrichment adds fields that are missing. Cleansing fixes or removes fields that are wrong, such as duplicates, typos and out-of-date job titles. You usually need both.
- Do I pay for enrichment that finds nothing?
- It depends on the supplier. Apollo, Instantly, Lemlist and Clay do not bill a lookup that returns nothing; Seamless.AI bills the research; Lusha's API bills a request even with no match. Check before a large run.
- How fresh is enriched data?
- Only as fresh as the supplier's last update. People change jobs often, so re-enrich records you plan to contact if they are more than a few months old.
Sources
Try it on your own market
Sluice quotes the worst-case price before anything runs and charges only for lookups that found something, so finding out costs close to nothing.
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