As the name suggests, data enrichment is all about gaining extra information. But how does it work, and who does it best? The answer depends on your business needs. This is why we’ve looked at as many use cases as possible to help you find the right solution. 

List of Best Data Enrichment Tools:

1. SEON – Best for Fraud Prevention
2. Experian – Best to Complete Customer Records
3. Clearbit – Best for Targeted Marketing
4. Crunchbase Enterprise – Best for Prospecting
5. MaxMind – Best for IP Data Enrichment
6. ZoomInfo – Best for Human-Checked B2B Databases
7. BuiltWith – Best for Market Share and Technology Lookup

The Top 7 Data Enrichment Tools of 2021

Disclaimer: Everything written about the companies mentioned in this article was gleaned from online research, including user reviews. We did not have time to manually test all the tools. However, we ensured the information was correct as of October 2021. Feel free to contact us to request an update/correction.

SEON – Best for Fraud Prevention

SEON offers four data enrichment modules, which you can enable based on your needs. There is an IP address data enrichment tool, a reverse phone lookup tool, and a reverse email lookup tool, plus a way to learn more about credit cards based on a BIN number. 

All the information is delivered via API calls in real-time, but you can also perform a manual query or use a Google Chrome plugin. 

Here are some of the questions you will be able to answer using these data enrichment tools:

• IP analysis: Is the user connecting using a VPN, Tor, or a suspicious proxy? Is the IP geolocation near the shipping or residential address?
• Email analysis: Does the email address exist? Is it linked to any social media profiles? How easy was it to create it?
• Phone analysis: Is the phone number real? Does it point to suspicious geolocation? Is it from an eSIM or virtual SIM card?
• BIN lookup: Does the issuing bank match the customer’s address? Is the type of card suspicious?

All the results come in clear, human-readable terms, and they’re taken into account when calculating a risk score. This gives you complete control over your decision to allow or block a certain user action. 

Best of all, SEON is one of the few fraud prevention solutions that come with a free 30-day trial and transparent pricing, so you can get a clear idea of your ROI before you deploy it.

SEON pros:

• Reverse social media lookup: SEON can check more than 35 social networks to let you create a complete user profile including an avatar, bio, and post history.
• Transparent pricing: Few data enrichment and fraud prevention tools let you know exactly how much it’ll cost to get results.
• Modular and flexible: Enrich the data you need and integrate via APIs, manual query or even Google Chrome extension.

SEON cons: 

• Fraud prevention specific: While you could use SEON to filter out junk marketing leads, it’s first and foremost designed to reduce fraud rates. 

SEON pricing:

• Starts at 99€ per month

Honorable mentions for fraud prevention data enrichment: 

• Emailage
• ArkOwl

Experian – Best to Complete Customer Records

Experian is one of the most renowned credit scoring companies in the UK, but it also offers worldwide data enrichment services, with a focus on completing customer records. This can be useful if you need to meet KYC Verification and AML (anti-money laundering) requirements. 

The data enrichment services start by validating contact data from names, email addresses, residential addresses, or phone numbers. The data is then cleaned and enriched to gain a deeper understanding of the customer with up to 900 additional data elements.

Experian’s data enrichment is available as a free trial, but it can be confusing to know exactly which product to choose. There is a data quality platform and integration with Salesforce, Magento, Microsoft, and Oracle, among others, but there is no clear answer as to how it fits into other products such as business credit reports, targeted marketing, or debt collection – all other services that Experian offers. 

Experian pros: 

• Trusted brand: Experian is a household name in the credit scoring world, so you can trust their data intelligence.
• Suitable for KYC and AML: You can meet legal requirements by running your customer data through Experian’s tools.

Experian cons: 

• Confusing products: Experian offers numerous services and tools, and it’s tricky to understand exactly which one you need for your data enrichment requirements.
• Opaque pricing: Experian is notoriously pricey for KYC checks, but you won’t be able to know how much their data enrichment costs until you contact the sales team.

Experian pricing: 

• Unavailable online

Honorable mentions for customer records data enrichment: 

• Pipl, Spokeo, PeopleLooker

Clearbit – Best for Targeted Marketing

Clearbit is the marketing data platform used by Intercom, Asana, and Hubspot, among others. Its use case runs the gamut from targeting B2B audiences to streamlining operations and to personalizing customer journeys.

Clearbit’s unique take? All the data enrichment is performed in-house and not outsourced to other data providers. Clearbit scans more than 250 sources including websites, public records, legal filings, and social media networks. Each data source is scored, and the ones with the higher trust level are given more weight. 

Last but not least, the data is kept fresh by rescanning every 30 days, so you can be certain that stale databases don’t skew your results. 

Clearbit pros: 

• Numerous marketing uses: Use Clearbit for prospecting, targeted marketing, or personalized buyer journeys. 
• Regularly refreshed data: It’s cleared and rescanned every 30 days.
• No data enrichment outsourcing: Clearbit manages all the enrichment in-house.

Clearbit cons: 

• Pricey: While the pricing is unavailable online, user reviews report that it’s at the higher end of the spectrum.

Clearbit pricing: 

• Not available online, but each product is available via monthly or annual subscriptions. You can try one batch of database enrichment for free with Clearbit Batch.

Honorable mentions for marketing data enrichment: 

• LeadGenius, FullContact, InsideView

Crunchbase Enterprise – Best for Prospecting

Another familiar name that offers data enrichment: Crunchbase. The world’s most popular database for startups, funding rounds, and investors also doubles as prospecting software to help you find and close the right deals. 

Crunchbase Enterprise lets you access all the business data of a company right in your CRM via a simple API connection or bulk CSV export. 

You can then use it to your advantage, whether it’s to personalize communications, discover recommended prospects based on your needs, or perform market research.

Crunchbase Enterprise pros: 

• Trustworthy brand: Crunchbase has made a name for itself as the number one source for startup and VC lists. 
• Affordable: The tiered subscriptions appear reasonably priced, and you can even try Crunchbase Enterprise for free.
  

Crunchbase Enterprise cons: 

• No real technology lookup: You can see which platform the companies used to build their websites, but it’s not an insight into their tech stack. 
• Occasionally outdated information: Startup profiles are crowdsourced, so mistakes will occur.

Crunchbase Enterprise pricing: 

• There is a free plan with limited access to companies’ information; the Starter plan ($29 per month per user), which allows tracking and monitoring; and the Pro plan ($49 per user per month), which unlocks all the prospecting and sales intelligence tools. 

MaxMind – Best for IP Data Enrichment

Over 5,000 companies rely on MaxMind’s GeoIP data to enrich data about their website visitors. As aforementioned, it can be useful for fraud prevention but also to show relevant content and ads, to get more precise analytics, and to enforce digital rights (copyright issues). 

Businesses can learn about their users’ connection speeds, ISPs, and there is also a dedicated fraud prevention solution for ecommerce, called minFraud. 

This is in addition to the other five services MaxMind offers, which include commercial licensing, precision web services, and anonymous IP databases. 

MaxMind pros: 

• Free option: You can use the GeoLite2 Free Geolocation service free of charge.
• Affordable: Other licenses are also decently priced if all you need is manual IP data enrichment.
• Granular information: You can purchase a license to track IPs at the country or city level.
  

MaxMind cons: 

• No dashboard: All the information you get is raw data via API or spreadsheets.
• Need to manually review: It’s useful for additional IP information, but you’ll have to know what to do with it.

MaxMind pricing: 

• Aside from the free GeoLite2 service, you can get a commercial license for country information ($24 a month), or get granular to the city level for $100 a month.

ZoomInfo – Best for Human-Checked B2B Databases

Similar to Crunchbase, ZoomInfo is a B2B intelligence and contact data enrichment tool spawned from a directory. The key USP here is that ZoomInfo (formerly DiscoveryOrg, which it acquired in 2019) works for sales, marketing, and even recruiting. 

The company is currently used by some of the biggest corporate names such as Google, Amazon, and, yes, Zoom video, which has otherwise nothing else to do with ZoomInfo. 

How it fares for smaller businesses is less clear, but you can use ZoomInfo to verify company and profile data, all accessible in a few clicks or via Salesforce integration. 

If you want to see if ZoomInfo makes sense for you, there is a Community Edition package, which uses NLP (natural language processing) to identify business contact info and match it to existing records. 

ZoomInfo pros: 

• Trusted database: ZoomInfo has access to some of the largest B2B databases around the world, and it’s manually checked by its agents.
• Free trial: You can give the Community Edition package a try to see if Zoominfo can help your sales, marketing, or HR teams.

ZoomInfo cons: 

• Overwhelming segmentation: ZoomInfo offers a lot, so it can be daunting to choose between, say, Orchestration workflows, Data as a Service, and Buyer Intent tools.
• Delayed updates: Because the databases are so massive and sometimes checked manually, some online users report a delay in how often they are updated. 

ZoomInfo pricing: 

• Available upon request. However, there is a free option called the Community Edition package. You still need to contact ZoomInfo to get started with it.

BuiltWith – Best for Market Share and Technology Lookup

Sometimes you want to learn about people and businesses but with BuiltWith, it’s all about learning more about the technology. As the name suggests, this database and online service allow you to see what more than 637 million websites were built with. 

That includes CMS, CDN, software, and competitor comparison. You also get contact names, emails, and titles (within GDPR restrictions), usage alerts, and predictive leads. 

BuiltWith is also a go-to solution for market research and technology statistics. All the data is available via a plug-in extension, API calls, and a whole host of third-party integrations. It’s not cheap, though, starting at $295 per month for the Basic plan.

BuiltWith pros: 

• The go-to technology lookup tool: When it comes to technologies data enrichment, few companies can match BuiltWith’s databases.
• Multiple integrations: You can link BuiltWith to Zoho CRM, Pardot, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Dynamics 365, among others. 

BuiltWith cons: 

• UX: There is a lot of good data available with BuiltWith. But how it’s presented seems to raise eyebrows, whether it’s via API or the Chrome extension. 
• Pricey: There is a free version with limited functionality, but for anything more advanced you’ll need to allocate a serious budget.

BuiltWith pricing: 

• There is a free version for the Chrome extension. The Basic plan, which includes 2 technologies, 2 keywords, and 2 retail reports, starts at $295 per month. It’s $495 per month for the Pro plan, with unlimited features for 1 seat. The Team plan offers unlimited seats for $995 per month.

What Are Data Enrichment Tools?

Data enrichment tools are applications designed to merge data from an existing database with third-party data. This allows companies to gain deeper insights into their records, for a variety of use cases such as targeted marketing, lead scoring, data compliance, or fraud prevention. 

How Do Data Enrichment Tools Work?

These tools work by automatically merging data from multiple sources, using a first-party database as a starting point. 

The tool gathers raw data and connects it to external databases before then relaying the findings to the original database owner.

A good example is a reverse email lookup tool. A data enrichment tool will search for other online places where that email address appears. It can be on social media websites platforms or online websites. 

Type in an email address into a search bar below to see ours in action!

The goal is to make the initial raw data more useful. With an email address, for instance, you can get more information about the owner, to help you make better business decisions.

According to Experian, 26% of organizations plan to invest in data enrichment projects to target customers, prioritize leads, and improve their marketing efficiency and ROI. 

Data enrichment pros:

• Complete a picture: Data enrichment allows you to learn as much information as possible starting with as few data points as possible. 
• Make better decisions: The goal is of course to take action based on better intelligence, whether it’s about knowing which leads to contact or which users to block from your website.
• Real-time: Most data enrichment tools work via API calls, which can be performed in real-time for near-instant results. 

Data enrichment cons:

• Must use high-quality databases: The quality of the enrichment is heavily dependent on the quality of the database. If the information you enrich is incorrect, it can flaw your results.
• Adds an expense: Whether you use external data enrichment tools or build your own in-house, it’s an extra resource to spend on.
• Must integrate into your system: Data enrichment tends to be lightweight, but you still need to work out how to integrate it seamlessly into your business processes.

How Data Enrichment Prevents Fraud

When it comes to fraud prevention, data enrichment is very important since it helps complete the picture you may glean of your online users. More to the point, it lets you spot red flags that could point to criminal activities, such as:

• Chargeback and transaction fraud: By learning more about a user, you can make an educated guess about whether their payment method is theirs or if it has been stolen.
• User verification: Data enrichment lets you confirm someone’s identity based on alternative data, such as social media presence. Thus, you can spot ID theft and flag fraudsters as soon as possible.
• Credit scoring: The same tools that let you know how risky a user is can also help when calculating confidence that someone will repay a loan, for instance.

The goal is to allow you to learn as much as possible about who is on your site, without slowing down their experience. Because data enrichment happens behind the scenes, you can use the information to calculate how risky a user’s actions are in real-time. You can then use that risk score to accept or block a user action such as a login, signup, or payment.

Data Enrichment Tools – How to Choose the Right One?

Data enrichment is a powerful tool with dozens of use cases – which is to say, the right solution depends largely on what you want to do with it. 

Hopefully, this guide offers a good primer on the topic, whether you need to learn more about your marketing leads, hire better candidates, or ensure you only allow the right users on your website to reduce fraud rates today. 

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Experian: 26% of organizations plan to invest in data enrichment