The 6 Best Data Enrichment Tools in 2021

It’s 2021, so most of us already have fairly full tech stacks that are bursting with a long list of SaaS tools designed to make our work easier or more efficient in some way.

You’ve likely already got communication tools, project management tools, and analytics tools… but do you have data enrichment tools? 

Data enrichment tools can help you take the existing data you’ve gained from the tools you’re already using to the next level, giving you more detailed and actionable insights that can help you take your business—and your revenue—to the next level.

Here at Breadcrumbs, we know that lead scoring is only as good as the data that you get. Using data enrichment tools allows us to help you fill in the blanks about your customers, ranging from a lead’s job title to what steps they need to take to convert based on site analytic data.

In this post, we’re going to look at the six best data enrichment tools in 2021 that you should consider testing for your business. 

What Are Data Enrichment Tools? 

Data enrichment tools take data from multiple sources (including third-party sources), merge it into a single stream, and then offer detailed analysis that you wouldn’t have gotten from the primary sources alone. It often merges first-party data obtained directly from the contacts themselves or your own analytics platforms with third-party data from other platforms. 

This data revolves around your audience and contacts, including both prospects and existing customers. 

Simply put, you’re using tools to fill in the blanks about a contact. You can learn more about their company, their job title, their contact information, and more. 

Data enrichment tools are crucial, because as we all know, most of our audience data is typically spread out amongst a wide array of different tools and platforms, and it’s difficult (if not impossible) to really sync it all up correctly.

You might be able to track a user who sees an ad on Facebook and converts by downloading a lead magnet, for example, because there is an explicit identifying action.

But what about when customers click on an ad, view your site four times, open three emails but only click on one, and watch a webinar without converting? All of that data likely comes from different platforms, making it challenging to track without data enrichment tools. 

Data enrichment tools, therefore, can give you a much more accurate look at what’s happening with your total customer acquisition pipeline and how all those puzzle pieces are fitting together. It also gives you much more detailed and accurate information that your team can act on right away. 

1. Clearbit 

Clearbit harvests data from over 250 private and public companies and updates over 500 million records every month (after two stages of verification) to keep their information up to date. You can even opt-in to get notifications if a contact’s information changes, like they switch positions or a company is acquired by another. 

In a recent post, we actually tested Clearbit to see how effective it was at sourcing company data and personal data from a contact’s email. The experiment used the Breadcrumbs founders’ email addresses, which were about six months old. 

The experiment was interesting, showing that Clearbit was able to pull up accurate and detailed data about the company itself, but it didn’t pull up much information at all for the individual contact. When they looked up older email addresses, however, they were able to get more information about the individual contacts (including links to social profiles). 

Clearbit was exceptionally thorough, though it may work best for email addresses that are older than six months if you want personal contacts in addition to company info.

2. InsideView 

InsideView is one of the OG data enrichment tools that ever hit the market, and that may be part of the reason they integrate with all the major CRMs on the market. 

What it means is that they can get you updated records that are all relevant as you’re inputting them into your system. They boast a 91% data currency rate for most information and a 92% accuracy rate for contact information from Fortune 1000 companies but only 84% for smaller businesses.

InsideView has its own CRM platform that can give you fairly detailed profiles of your audience, but the data enrichment tool is an additional subscription.

3. ZoomInfo 

ZoomInfo is a B2B database that’s been around for decades, and their data enrichment tool has always been a popular choice amongst some of their competitors. This is partially because the tool has been around for so long and partially because it collects data from many sources.

According to ZoomInfo’s site, their data is updated through automated machine learning that views public information across over 28 million site domains daily, including press releases, corporate sites, job postings, and more. This helps them collect an abundance of information about any given business, including where it’s located, how much revenue it’s making, whether it’s looking to expand, and more. 

That’s a lot of potential data, and while it does have great reviews, it was part of the experiment we recently ran to assess which data enrichment tools were best. 

It was able to find one out of three contacts from our business, and it was able to supply basic information like contact info, residential address, and social links. While the quality of the contact data was great, some of the company data for contacts was outdated by over two years. It’s a decent tool to consider as an option, however.

4. Pipl 

Pipl’s data enrichment tool is undeniably a powerful one, with a database containing over 3+ billion unique contacts from across 150+ countries. 

Pipl’s database focuses heavily on contact information, doing their best to consistently provide the following data points for each individual contact:

• Name
• Age
• Gender
• Mobile and landline phone numbers
• Social profile links and usernames
• Work experience (including current and past jobs)
• Email address 
• Language
• Location

When Pipl is able to get all of this data on a contact, it’s exceptional; even collecting a lead’s past work history can help you get a feeling of how to connect with them when your sales team reaches out.

Pipl also has developer-friendly libraries of code that keep their API accessible and ideal for easy integration. And it has plenty of solid reviews online, so it’s not a bad place to start. 

5. People Data Labs 

People Data Labs (PDL for short) is a data enrichment service that has three different core offerings:

• Traditional data enrichment
• Data licensing to provide data without having any contact info
• And a Search API for prospecting that’s currently in beta 

This tool is API-only, making it a better solution for back-end integration more than anything else, but the data it provides is solid. When we tested PDL, it had some of the strongest showings in contact information in terms of detail, which is a huge asset; the more you know about your leads, the better. 

All in all, if you’re okay with an API-only data enrichment tool, this is a great one to consider. 

6. LeadGenius 

LeadGenius is a pretty impressive data enrichment tool. It’s a Cloud-based tool that actually factors custom points in with buyer personas and verified leads to help you better understand who you’re working with (or who you want to be working with).

LeadGenius will help you fill in any blanks that you have about potential prospects while also tracking potential buying signals, events, and triggers for the entire company you’re watching. They’ll monitor social behavior, job postings, and press releases to help your business determine when it may be time to make a move. If someone is looking at scaling up, for example, that may be a good time to sweep in with an Enterprise-grade solution! 

Their data is continually verified by their human team members, making it much more accurate than tools that rely exclusively on machine tracking. 

Final Thoughts 

There are plenty of data enrichment tools on the market, but based on a combination of extensive research, pouring through reviews, and a few of our own experiments, these are the six that may be the most effective at getting the job done right.

Data hygiene is essential, and the more information you have about a lead or customer, the better. These six data enrichment tools are all excellent candidates when it comes to quickly granting you a contact’s data (or their company’s data) so that you can create stronger, more relevant pitches, marketing messages, and offers. 

When you’re offering direct customer service or going after account-based marketing strategies, this is essential.

And keep in mind that knowing how to manage the data you’re given is just as crucial. That’s where lead scoring comes in. You can use data enrichment tools to fill in the blanks, and then we can help you make sense of all the data that you now have at your fingertips to identify hot leads and find ways to improve the digital sales funnel.

Want to leverage all your data into action that leads to results? See how Breadcrumbs can help with lead scoring. Book your demo here.