Contact Enrichment & Validation
October 24, 2024
by a searcher from Harvard University - Harvard Business School in Piedmont, CA, USA
I'm wondering people's approach for contact enrichment & validation. I.e., you have a list of companies (from Grata or other databases), and you then need to 1) identify names of owner(s), 2), get email / linkedin / phone / address for the owners, 3) do validation for the emails / phone numbers.
My VA and I have worked out a decent process for this, but it involves stringing together a lot of random services, and it's quite time intensive. Our process is below, but curious to hear how others are approaching this.
Identify names of owners
- Search LinkedIn (through the company page) and Secretary of State queries in the state the business was incorporated in
Find their:
- Email & Phone - we use Wiza (cheaper than Seamless and ZoomInfo and just as good)
- LinkedIn - search LinkedIn
- Address - generally skip this step. I have not written a lot of letters
Validation:
- Email: run through Emailable, BounceBan and NeverBounce (gotta keep those bounce rates below 1%)
- Phone: phonevalidator.com - not great but free
in Omaha, NE, USA
First, we standardize the input file, correcting address level data, which has a big impact to the match rates, Then, we take the newly updated input file and use a waterfall effect going from a tight match such as company name, address, phone, contact, down to a much looser match of company name and zip, or company name only. Many companies have very dirty data, so we help to clean it up, then append relevant attributes, identify duplicates, and identify corporately linked entities. We can typically add missing contacts and email addresses too. For email validation, we have our own tools but they work very similar to the companies mentioned in your post, which identifies if the email is valid, deliverable, not deliverable, bots, complainers, spam traps, etc.
For LinkedIn and other social platforms, we match/append only the company profiles, not the contact profiles, but we can append all contacts/titles/emails for each company.
We can process millions of records in as little as 48 hours and only charge for data that is returned to you. The analysis is free.
Hope this helps. Happy to chat more if you're interested.
from University of Mysore in Seattle, WA, USA