What Is Clearbit And What Can You Do With It For Marketing Intelligence?

Marketing intelligence is the data you need to stay on top of your game. You use this information in numerous ways, whether it’s analysing competitor behaviour and products or understanding consumer trends, to make informed decisions and maximise your marketing efforts.

In a world where so much data and technology are available, it makes sense that marketers would want to take advantage of all they can get their hands on when making decisions about what might work best for them versus other businesses in the same space. But sometimes, those who bark the loudest have nothing else going on except opinion-based guesswork… Enter Clearbit and its fantastically accurate B2B data!

What Is Clearbit? 🤷‍♀️

Clearbit is a marketing intelligence tool that you can use to effectively get quality B2B data for understanding customers, identifying prospects, and creating personalised marketing and sales exchanges. In more technical terms, it’s what you call a “data activation platform” – a SaaS data enrichment product that provides more insightful information about prospects through the use of verified contact and company details.

You only get so far with business instinct. For sustainability, it needs to be right every single time, which is highly unlikely. A lot goes down in your head without you even knowing it — the newsfeeds you read daily are an example. You want more knowledge about what’s happening around you, but sometimes subtle changes go unnoticed because they happen so gradually over time or through insignificant interactions with other individuals who also don’t see things as clearly. This means that any decision made based on assumptions may end up being wrong when something important finally surfaces months later than expected.

With Clearbit, you can get real-time context on various data types, such as precise led scoring and custom sales alerts, to help marketers and sales teams make informed, data-driven decisions instead of relying on hunches or assumptions. Since it’s a single data engine for all your customer interactions, the platform integrates seamlessly with many tools, such as HubSpot, G Suite, Zapier, Outlook, and more.

The Revolutionary Part 🤯

Clearbit’s data coverage is superb. It has access to millions of data points — more than 250 public and private data sources, plus a contacts list of 395 million from 20 million companies in 165 nations worldwide. But that’s not all. The revolutionary part is that it uses all that to provide scarily accurate data!

Clearbit only presents you with data that are standardised and usable, having been filtered and sifted through four stages of extensive verification:

1. Data refreshed within the last 30 days.
2. Records with unanimous agreement.
3. Confirmation of any presence of deviations with reasonable justification.
4. Final accuracy appraisal by a team of specialist researchers.

It’s this authentication process that brings you highly accurate data with which to improve your business by leaps and bounds.

From a marketing perspective, you can use the product for data enrichment for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or any system you want from a digital customer experience perspective. This can mean anything from shortening forms (all you’ll need is the email address!) to tailoring content and user experience to adapt to the attributes of that person or the company they work for.

Now let’s consider this from a sales perspective. It’s crucial to be well-prepared when prospecting for customers – you need to have all the data you may need right at hand, especially in a sales call. Clearbit gathers tons of accurate data from numerous sources and puts them all into the place of your choice, automatically keeping them up-to-date at all times.

Here’s a video showcasing how you can use the tool with Salesforce to save time and effort and help with accurate business intelligence for securing more, higher-quality leads.

Test It Out Right Away 👀

Here’s an easy way to test things out for yourself for free immediately using Clearbit Connect – Supercharge Gmail. By installing this Chrome extension and connecting your email account, you can find relevant business email addresses directly by pressing the Clearbit button on your inbox, clicking on “Find emails”, and inputting the company domain of your choice. Then just select the right business from the list of results to find the top personnel there.

Image Courtesy of Clearbit Connect

In just a few clicks, you get access to several email addresses and relevant data on their recipient, including their industry and role, location and company size, and also financials – all accurate using Clearbit’s 150 million business contacts! You’re limited to 100 searches per month, but that’s still pretty impressive for an absolutely free option.

If you’re up for a more thorough test, try integrating it with Salesforce using the Clearbit for Salesforce – Lite extension and see if you like the data there.

What Else You Can Do 🎯

Aside from supercharging your Gmail and Salesforce as described above, there are other ways you can use Clearbit for marketing intelligence and to enable revenue-driven marketing. Many things are possible but for now, let’s look at three major methods.

🔍 Detailed Website Visitor Tracking

Clearbit allows you to track your website visitors even if they don’t fill in any forms or identify themselves. With visitor tracking, you can de-anonymise this traffic, identifying those visitors who are interested in your product but haven’t yet committed. This enables a more personal level of engagement with these potential customers by letting you proactively reach out or advertise to them directly. This way, you can more easily turn prospects into customers.

You can try their free website visitor tracking tool to see this in action. You will receive a comprehensive weekly report summarising the most engaged companies and the channel through which they landed on your site. This includes company details like estimated annual revenue, technology used, and employee range.

It’s particularly helpful because of the diverse options you receive, such as:

• Filtering by channel, intent, or any field or data point you have
• Checking traffic quality through a channel-by-channel breakdown
• Hiding companies that aren’t relevant
• Adding the best ones to a prospects list
• Taking action directly, like emailing sales or prospecting on LinkedIn
• Seeing how others are actioning the report

The tool works after you install their script on your website, after which a pixel, i.e. a GIF file, is injected into each page on your domain. The tool will record the IP address on every load and match it to an organisation. Don’t worry; it won’t affect website performance, although you’ll be limited to identifying 25,000 visitors per week with reports only available on your business email address.

💰 Better Data With Enrichment API

Clearbit’s Enrichment API is a powerful tool you can use to extract real-time information from any given source. For example, if you were looking up the name and location of someone in your inbox or on a company’s website, this would provide relevant data on them and allow for more personalisation by providing insights into what they do at their job.

The API lets you collect and sort millions of third-party data points from hundreds of public or private sources before adding these rich details to your company’s records. Moreover, it keeps this automatically updated, so you don’t have incomplete records or stale details but rich firmographic data.

Note: Pictured from a demo environment

With Clearbit Enrichment, you can get over 85 accurate data points, such as location and LinkedIn profile, from a single email address or domain name. This can be fed instantly into other tools like Segment through seamless integration. It’s easy to install, and the expansive amount of data you receive is instrumental in helping you personalise customer journeys in more detail than ever before through better-optimised calls to action and so on!

Furthermore, you can send all this data directly into your data analysis and warehousing, empowering your analytics teams with dynamic information and better marketing intelligence.

💡 Accurate Insights With Reveal, Discovery & Prospector APIs

Another way you can leverage Clearbit’s capabilities for stellar marketing intelligence is by using their de-anonymising technology to soundly discern who’s actually visiting your website, which of your campaigns are working to bring in the right kind of traffic, and what content is attracting your ideal buyer personas.

The Reveal API will offer you plenty of attributes for Google Analytics, including:

• Traffic Type
• Company Name
• Company Domain
• Industry
• Sub-industry
• Employee Range
• Estimated Revenue Range
• Global Alexa rank, and more

These can be used in your reporting as custom dimensions to help identify what portion of your reveal traffic can be attributed to company visitors.

The Discovery API will help you find companies that meet your unique criteria. Say, you might want to search for every established business using some new technology, or that has similar existing customers as yours. Clearbit’s Discovery API will promptly give you this data.

And finally, the Prospector API can help you pull prospects out of thin air by granting the ability to search for companies and pinpoint the highest-potential prospects from their vast network using multiple, thorough filters. Swiftly fetch all required contact information and emails associated with a company, employment role, seniority, job title, and location at once!

It should be noted that Reveal, Discovery, and Prospector are only available under their Enterprise plans. You can check out the technical details in Clearbit’s API documentation section.

Current Deterrents 🛑

At the moment, we’ve found three deterrents that can stop you from using the complete, paid services of Clearbit:

1. No multi-user capability for teams
2. Unavailability of B2C data
3. Expensive pricing

Among these, pricing seems to be the most aggressively discouraging.

Clearbit’s Enrichment Segment and Enrichment API monthly plans both cost you $99 USD and $199 USD for 275 and 550 API requests per month, respectively. This does not include premium upgrades for Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot and Salesforce integrations. Upgrade options and Enterprise plans are available by contacting sales.

The Reveal Standard, Enrichment Salesforce, Enrichment Marketo, and Prospector Salesforce plans will all cost you $999 USD a month or $12,000 USD annually. If you go for the Reveal Premium plan, ready your wallet to pay $24,000 USD annually.

Final Words 📋

Clearbit is an amazing platform you couldn’t even imagine years ago. It’s definitely revolutionary in some aspects, particularly in presenting eerily accurate B2B data directly to where you need it.

With Clearbit’s full backing, you’ll be able to turn website visitors into leads and successful conversions by targeting them using multiple platforms and fully utilising bountiful data of very high quality. They can also help you save time and effort in data collection and management, letting you focus completely on finding and securing leads. The cost is definitely quite high, but if you can afford it, we fully recommend Clearbit because the data you get is definitely worth it!

The platform may not be a good fit for small business owners and single operators because it may take a while for ROI to kick in. However, it can be powerful for sales agents and marketers in larger companies, particularly BPOs and marketing agencies, due to their best chance to fully utilise Clearbit’s power and realise ROI more quickly.

If you’re unsure of them, we encourage you to have a go for yourself and test their capabilities with a free account. Their free tools will surely add at least some level of value to your business because the data is sound, even though it may be a bit limited.

If you’re not interested or put off by the cost, here are some alternatives:

• Swordfish AI
• UpLead
• Voila Norbert
• LeadLeaper
• Hunter

Clearbit is clearly great, but who knows, one of the above options may be just as, if not more, appealing in your specific case!

We are customer experience transformation specialists committed to helping you meet your business goals by holistically using strategy, data, commerce, and technology to level you up one step at a time.

Schedule a discovery chat today for a comprehensive consultation and business review! We’d be happy to identify problems and provide personalised solutions, including recommendations on the best marketing intelligence tools for you.