What is Lead Enrichment?
Free Tools to Enrich Your Leads

Declan Gray
December 11, 2023

Lead enrichment is the powerful process of turning raw data into insights. It is an elaborate process that helps businesses transform their lead generation strategies and create more predictive approaches to sales and marketing, resulting in efficient targeting, personalization, resource allocation and improved overall conversions.

What is Lead Enrichment?

As the name suggests, the process of enriching your leads with comprehensive first and third-party information is called lead enrichment. When you collect leads from various sources, whether it’s a form on your website or an email or even a direct message on social media, you would typically know their username, name or maybe an email.

These are great leads because they are sending out some type of intent signal—asking questions about your product or downloading a free template are positive intent signals. Intent signals give you valuable information about who your potential customers are, where they live, where they work, and what they’re looking for.

To act on these signals, you need to create hyper-targeted campaigns for each segment that you have identified. To do so, you need more than just a name and email. This is where lead enrichment comes in.

Why is Lead Enrichment Important?

Enhanced Targeting and Personalization

When you’re talking to everyone, you’re not really talking to anyone at all. This applies to your prospecting where a single strategy or single message is as good as none. To make any meaningful conversation, you need to understand who your prospects are on the ground. What are their demographics, what is their work, and what problems do they face in their roles.

Leads enriched with deeper insights about the industry, company, prospect and their behavior let you pin-point a strategic entryway into their lives through which you can position your product or service against the status quo.

Relevant information about your leads lets you personalize your content and nurture your leads into loyal customers. While better targeting helps you send the right message to the right people, personalization allows a deeper connection with your brand.

Improved Lead Scoring

If you do not have an elaborate lead management system, you should. This work is not in vain. When the work is done, lead scoring helps you identify and allocate resources to the most promising leads. Lead scoring is the process of prioritizing your leads for sales and marketing efforts. Lead enrichment informs this process by offering you the parameters by which to measure your leads’ readiness to buy.

This includes factors like their industries, job titles, company size and revenue, tech stack, intent signals, and more. Lead scoring helps your sales team focus on high-intent leads for effective conversions.

Efficient Resource Allocation

Lead prioritizing is not just great for guaranteed conversions, it also lets you convert leads more cost-effectively. A comprehensive understanding of your leads can shape the way your sales and marketing teams work. Lead enrichment allows you to take an informed approach, by which you can allocate the time and resources to spend on a particular type of lead.

One example of this is dividing your team up by the types of leads and assigning your sales leaders to high scoring, well-qualified leads. By classifying your leads and scoring them, you can optimize your budget and your team’s efforts to do more with less.

Reduced Cold Outreach

If you’re in sales, you’re probably used to the coldness associated with cold outreaching. You’ve probably wondered if there isn’t any way to relieve yourself of cold calls and emails completely, what with the prevalence of sales intelligence tools nowadays. Well, you would be right. There are no true cold leads anymore, not like when Avon came calling anyway.

Lead enrichment helps you classify your leads into various temperatures of luke-warm, warm and hot so that when you start your outreach, you are taking no one by surprise with an irrelevant and annoying pitch. With so many outstanding sales intelligence tools at your disposal, you can now map your prospects’ intent signals and strengths to a T.

Lead enrichment takes away all uncertainty and replaces it with meaningful insights into your prospects’ interests and buying-readiness. The bonus is that this boosts your email open and response rates like never before.

Types of Lead Enrichment

What information do you need to enrich your leads? Let’s look at some of the main ones.

Information about the technologies and software your leads are using. If your leads are customers, this could look something like what operating system they use (e.g. iOS vs. Android or Windows), what programs or applications they use (e.g. CRM or project management software) and the types of devices they prefer.

If your leads are people within companies, you’d need to know the company’s tech stack which includes everything from their hardware and IT infrastructure to the CRM software they use. Technographic data also includes information about your prospects’ technology usage and adoption behavior.

Today, this information is indispensable in helping you determine the right market for your product and how your product compares with existing competitors.

Firmographic attributes help you identify your ideal buyer profiles. Information about the companies your prospects work at also informs the quality of fit with your ideal criteria.

This includes industry name, industry code, industry size by revenue, company size by employee and revenue, ownership structure, and more, all of which is crucial in determining how to position and price your product.

Location data is geographic insight into your prospects and their companies’ location. This includes country, state, city, ZIP codes, regional divisions of companies, information for regional targeting and understanding your global demand.

Contact data is the most useful insight you can have about a lead. Information like emails, direct dials, fax, and social media profiles can offer ample opportunities for multi-channel engagement and conversions. It is also the most important aspect of lead enrichment.

Every year, up to 25% of emails become invalid. The recommended time to update contact information is no longer than 90 days to ensure the health of your contact database.

Step-by-Step Guide to Lead Enrichment

Now that you know what lead enrichment can do for you, let’s break down this process and see what lead enrichment entails.

Data Collection

The first step in lead enrichment, data collection is the process of gathering information about your leads.

This can be an active process, such as looking up contact information on Google or LinkedIn or a passive process, where data is collected whenever a visitor on your website or social media page fills out a form, signs up for a newsletter, or clicks on a product link.

The goal is to collect data from all touchpoints between you and your potential customers.

Data Validation

Data validation is the process of verifying and validating the data collected in the previous step. This process includes email verification, phone number and address verification, verification of social media profiles and firmographic details, data appends (filling out missing data), removal of outdated data, and more.

Data validation can be done through artificial intelligence tools along with human verifications for added strength. Through this process, you arrive at clean, verified and up-to-date databases containing actionable insights.

Data Enhancement

At the heart of lead enrichment is data enhancement. This is where an actionable database is turned into a high-quality database. The process of enhancement involves enriching your databases with deeper, more valuable insights which goes beyond basic contact details.

Sources of data enhancement include public records, online sources, third-party data providers and social media. Added insights like company information, social media profile links, technology adoption and usage behavior, and other intent signals enable you to create strategically segmented buyer audiences and tailor your campaigns to them.

Enrich Your Leads for Free with LinkedIn and ReachStream

Lead enrichment is a multi-step process that can benefit from a range of additional intelligence and data processing to create stronger databases. There are several tools, platforms and data providers online that can help your lead enrichment process at different stages.

Examples include third-party data providers, real time email verification tools, list providers, lead scoring services, and more. While there’s no dearth of paid data providers, there are powerful platforms that you can use to find and enrich your leads for free.

LinkedIn’s professional networking platform is one of the most popular ways to find information about your leads for free. Its powerful search features and numerous filters let you find high-quality connections that can become warm leads.

Let me show you how.

Step 1 :

Go to the LinkedIn search bar and enter any keyword (e.g. healthcare) as specific or general as you like. Select People or Companies to find prospects associated with that keyword.

Step 2 :

Once you’ve selected for instance, people, now select All filters.

Step 3 :

Use the right filter to select your criteria. LinkedIn consist of diverse filters like location, current company, past company, industry, service categories, keywords, and more.

The All filters option lets you find high-quality leads using deeper insights from your ideal buyer profiles.

Step 4 :

Visit any profile and under their name, select Contact info. This opens a box containing your lead’s LinkedIn profile link, website link, email and phone number. You can use the rest of the profile to add information like company, past company, industry, education, job title, and so on.

But if this is not enough, you can get a free 30 days trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, a premium prospecting feature on LinkedIn. Cancel your subscription before your trial ends to avoid being charged.

ReachStream

Another popular free platform for lead enrichment is ReachStream. In particular, ReachStream Freemium. This is ReachStream’s free monthly plan with an unlimited trial period and doesn’t require you to provide any card details to subscribe.

ReachStream is a B2B contact and company data platform with 22M+ leads profiles, each with 20+ data attributes for you to enrich your data with. In addition to comprehensive filters, you can use its custom list building feature to download enriched and updated new datasets every month.

Here’s how you can use ReachStream to enrich your leads in seconds.

Step 1 :

Create a free ReachStream account in seconds. Enter your details, select Create Account and activate your account by clicking on the verification link sent to your email.

Step 2 :

Step 3 :

View your leads’ profiles by selecting the View Details icon.

Step 4 :

Each profile contains the 23 contact and company data attributes listed below. Use this information to enrich your leads with missing or new information.

First Name
Middle Name
Last Name
Job Title
Job Level
Job Department
Job Function
NPI

Email Address
Phone Number
Country
Company Name
Industry
Technologies
Address
City

Step 5 :

You can also build a list of new leads. Select the profiles you like and go to View Selected Contacts to review or edit your list.

Step 6 :

Click on Download Selected to export your list in an XLS file. Import this file to your existing database.

Step 7 :

Once you’ve downloaded your leads, you can go back to ReachStream in the future and download any updated data attribute for free.

This is an unlimited feature meaning you never have to pay again for any updates to a contact you’ve downloaded in the past, allowing you to maintain updated databases with superior data accuracy and reliability.

With ReachStream Freemium, you can view 100 leads and download 25 leads every month. In addition to available features, you can easily request additional credits (views and downloads) along with a custom data requirement.

The best part? Limited views and downloads aside, you get all premium features on the Freemium plan. This includes 20+ insights for lead enrichment and an advanced API access for seamless integration.

Freemium $0 / month

Do’s and Don’ts of Lead Enrichment

Do

Build ideal buyer profiles

Clearly define who your target audience is and what your ideal buyer’s characteristics are for effective lead enrichment.

Use multiple data sources

Collect and enhance data using multiple sources for comprehensive, cross-verified data attributes.

Comply with privacy regulations

Trust goes a long way. Follow privacy laws like GDPR and CAN-SPAM when collecting and qualifying leads data.

Segment your leads

For better targeting, segment leads along relevant attributes to identify distinct target audiences.

Consistently update data

Outdated data is not only lost opportunities, but it also damages your online reputation. Put systems in place to update your data within 90 days.

Don’t

Spam your leads

Once you have an enriched, high-quality leads database, be strategic in your outreach. Don’t waste your opportunity to convert great leads by sending them excessive and irrelevant messages.

Focus on quantity over quality

When it comes to successful marketing, quantity means nothing without quality. Highly qualified leads bring guaranteed results while a large quantity of weak leads is missed opportunities and wasted resources.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is lead enrichment important for business?

Lead enrichment improves lead quality, enables better targeting and personalization, increases email open and response rates, boosts conversation rates, campaign metrics and overall ROI.

What is the difference between lead enrichment and lead generation?

Lead generation is the process of identifying or capturing potential leads and qualifying them into sales or marketing qualified leads (SLQs and MLQs). Lead enrichment is the process of enhancing existing leads with additional data containing valuable sales and marketing insights.

What kind of lead information can be enriched?

You can enrich information about your leads’ company, industry, job specifications, work history, contact information, technology information, location information, and more.

What are some sources for lead enrichment?

Common sources for lead enrichment include third-party data providers, public databases, online business directories, annual reports, websites, social media sites, forms, web scraping, etc.

What are some good lead enrichment tools?

Popular lead enrichment tools include LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, UpLead, Apollo.io, ReachStream, and Clearbit.

A highly driven Growth Hacker at ReachStream, Declan has spent the last 8 years as a branding and digital marketing specialist committed to leveraging data and technology for growth marketing.