Part III · The data · Chapter 8
Enrichment that doesn't waste money
Waterfalls, gating expensive steps, de-duplicating, and the one cost metric worth tracking.
13 min read
Enrichment turns a name and a company into something you can act on: a verified email, a phone number, company size, tools used, recent news. It is also where money disappears fastest. Most enrichment tools charge per lookup, often whether or not they find anything, so design decisions translate directly into cost.
What you'll take away
- 01What to enrich, and why every field should earn its place.
- 02How waterfalls raise coverage without raising cost much.
- 03How to gate expensive steps so they only run on rows worth it.
- 04Why de-duplication saves more money than any discount.
- 05One cost number that summarises how well the whole data pipeline is built.
What enrichment is for
Enrich only what a later step uses. If no message, score or route will ever use a company's founding year, don't pay to look it up. A useful habit is to write next to each enrichment field what it is for: filtering, scoring, personalising, routing or contacting. Fields with no purpose get removed.
| Field type | Typical use |
|---|---|
| Contact (email, phone) | Reaching the person at all |
| Firmographic (size, industry, location) | Filtering against the ICP; scoring |
| Technographic (tools used) | Filtering; personalising; spotting switches |
| Situational (news, hiring, funding) | Timing and the opening line |
| Person (title, start date, past roles) | Routing; personalising; finding champions who moved |
Waterfalls
No single data provider finds everyone. A waterfall tries providers in order and stops as soon as one finds a valid result. The next provider only runs on the rows still missing. Ordered well, a waterfall finds far more than any one provider, at a cost close to the cheapest.
- 1
Test providers on a sample you know
Run 100 contacts with known-correct emails through each provider. Record the hit rate, accuracy and cost per hit. - 2
Order by cost per correct result
Not by price per lookup, and not by brand. Results vary a lot by country and industry. - 3
Always verify at the end
Run found emails through a verification service. Treat 'catch-all' domains, which accept everything, as uncertain. - 4
Re-test every few months
Provider quality changes. Your order should too.
Only pay for rows that deserve it
The cheapest lookup is the one you don't run. Put cheap checks first and run expensive steps only on rows that pass them. Most enrichment tools have a setting that makes a column skip rows failing a condition you choose.
- Check ICP fit from cheap company data before looking up contacts.
- Score accounts before running deep research on them.
- Skip contact lookups for companies that are customers, competitors or recently contacted.
- Don't run a second provider if the first already found a verified result.
Order your columns from cheapest to most expensive, and let each one decide whether the next runs.
Duplicates and lookups
Duplicates waste money twice: you pay to enrich the same person again, and you risk emailing them twice, which looks careless. De-duplicate on a stable key before enriching: company website domain for accounts, email or professional profile address for people. When data lives in several tables, look rows up by that key instead of copying them, so a fix in one place applies everywhere.
The one metric to track
Track cost per verified contact: total enrichment spend divided by the number of contacts that ended up with a verified, usable email or phone number. It captures provider choice, waterfall order, gating and duplicates in one number. Compare it across campaigns and over time; when it jumps, one of those four has changed.
Try it
Work out the cost
You have 2,000 accounts. A cheap company-data check costs 1 cent per row and 35% pass the ICP. For passing accounts you need two contacts each. Email provider A costs 5 cents per attempt and finds 50%; provider B costs 12 cents per attempt and finds 40% of what A misses. Verification costs 1 cent per found email, and 90% pass.
Calculate total cost and cost per verified contact, with and without the ICP check first.
Write your answer down first, then reveal the worked answerWorked answer
With the ICP check first: check 2,000 × $0.01 = $20. Passing accounts 700, so 1,400 contacts. Provider A: 1,400 × $0.05 = $70, finds 700. Provider B on the 700 missed: 700 × $0.12 = $84, finds 280. Found: 980; verification $9.80; verified: 882. Total ≈ $183.80, or about 21 cents per verified contact.
Without the ICP check: 4,000 contacts. A: $200, finds 2,000. B on 2,000: $240, finds 800. Verification on 2,800: $28. Total $468, and only the 882 verified contacts at ICP accounts are useful, so about 53 cents per useful verified contact.
The same useful output costs about two and a half times more without the check. A strong answer counts only contacts at ICP accounts as useful.