What is B2B data enrichment?

B2B data enrichment adds missing fields, such as email, phone, owner name, website or industry, to records you already hold about companies or contacts.

Also called: lead enrichment, data append.

A typical enrichment job starts with a thin record (a company name and city, or a domain) and returns it with more columns filled in. The quality question is always where each new field came from and when it was last checked: a field matched from a vendor database, read from the company's own website, or guessed from a pattern are three very different things.

Enrichment sources fall into a few groups: public business listings and company websites; registries and government data; contributed or co-op databases; and inference, such as email permutation. Each has a typical failure: listings go stale, websites change, databases decay, and inference produces addresses no one ever published.

Two habits make enrichment trustworthy. Keep the source and date beside each field, so a reviewer can see why a value is there. And re-check perishable fields, emails above all, close to the time of use; see data decay and SMTP verification.

The company website finder is a free single-field enrichment: type a business name and it checks the domains that name would most likely use.