Clearbit

Overview

Clearbit offers a platform for B2B intelligence, specializing in data enrichment and visitor identification. The platform is designed to provide businesses with detailed firmographic and technographic data on companies and individuals. This data can be utilized across various business functions, including sales, marketing, and customer success, to enhance personalization and operational efficiency.

One of Clearbit's primary applications is identifying anonymous website visitors. Through its Reveal product, Clearbit attempts to resolve IP addresses to specific company names and associated data points, enabling businesses to understand who is visiting their site even before a form submission. This capability supports targeted outreach and tailored content delivery, aligning with strategies described in visitor identification discussions from industry publications like Search Engine Land's guide to B2B analytics.

For lead enrichment, Clearbit's Enrich product takes partial information, such as an email address or domain, and augments it with over 100 data points. These data points can include company size, industry, technology stack, employee roles, and social profiles. This process aims to provide a comprehensive view of a lead, reducing the need for manual research and improving the quality of data fed into CRM systems and marketing automation platforms. The enrichment process is typically executed via API calls, integrating into existing workflows.

Sales prospecting is another core use case, facilitated by the Prospector product. This tool enables users to find contacts within specific companies or industries based on criteria like job title, seniority, and department. By providing access to a database of B2B contacts, Clearbit aims to streamline the lead generation process for sales teams, allowing them to build targeted outreach lists more efficiently. Moreover, Clearbit Forms is designed to reduce friction in online forms by pre-filling fields based on an email address or IP detection, thereby improving conversion rates by simplifying the user experience during sign-ups or content downloads.

Clearbit's platform is built with an emphasis on developer experience, offering a well-documented API and SDKs for common web environments, including JavaScript. This approach allows for programmatic access to their data and integration into custom applications. The company, founded in 2014, maintains compliance with data privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, and holds SOC 2 Type II certification, addressing concerns related to data security and privacy practices.

Key features

• Reveal: Identifies anonymous companies visiting a website by resolving IP addresses to company firmographics. This enables insights into direct traffic and intent signals.
• Enrich: Transforms partial lead data (e.g., email or domain) into comprehensive profiles with over 100 data points, including company size, industry, technology used, and employee roles.
• Prospector: Provides a search engine for B2B contacts, allowing users to find decision-makers within target companies based on specific criteria like job title, department, and seniority.
• Forms: Integrates with web forms to pre-fill fields automatically, reducing user friction and potentially increasing conversion rates by simplifying the data entry process for website visitors.
• Discovery: Helps identify potential target accounts based on predefined criteria, expanding prospecting efforts beyond known visitors.
• API Access: Offers a programmatic interface for integrating Clearbit's data services into custom applications and workflows, supporting various programming languages.
• Compliance and Security: Adheres to data privacy standards including GDPR and CCPA, and maintains SOC 2 Type II certification for data security.

Pricing

Clearbit offers custom enterprise pricing for its platform. While a free plan with limited access is available, comprehensive features typically require a paid subscription. The starting paid tier is referred to as the "Growth plan." Detailed pricing is generally provided upon direct consultation with their sales team due to the customized nature of their offerings, which are often based on usage volume and specific feature requirements.

For specific pricing inquiries and to understand the various tiers, organizations are encouraged to visit the official Clearbit pricing page or contact their sales department directly.

Common integrations

Clearbit is designed to integrate with a range of sales, marketing, and CRM platforms. Its API-first approach facilitates custom integrations, while pre-built connectors streamline common workflows. Examples include:

• Salesforce: For enriching lead and contact records within the CRM and automating data updates.
• HubSpot: For marketing automation, lead scoring, and personalizing website experiences based on enriched data.
• Segment: To send enriched data to various downstream tools and aggregate customer data.
• Marketo: For enhancing lead nurturing campaigns and improving segmentation based on firmographic data.
• Zendesk: To provide customer support agents with context about the requesting company and individual.
• Custom Applications: Via its comprehensive API reference, allowing developers to integrate Clearbit's data into proprietary systems.

Alternatives

Organizations evaluating Clearbit may also consider other B2B data providers and enrichment platforms:

• ZoomInfo: Offers a comprehensive B2B contact and company database for sales and marketing intelligence.
• Apollo.io: Provides a sales intelligence and engagement platform, including lead enrichment and outreach tools.
• Lusha: Focuses on B2B contact and company data, primarily for sales prospecting and lead enrichment.

Getting started

To begin using Clearbit's API for data enrichment, you typically need an API key. The following example demonstrates a basic API call using cURL to enrich an email address. This will provide company and person data associated with the given email.

curl 'https://person.clearbit.com/v2/combined/[email protected]' \
-u YOUR_SECRET_API_KEY:

This cURL command utilizes the combined endpoint, which aims to return both person and company data in a single request. Replace YOUR_SECRET_API_KEY with your actual Clearbit API key, which can be obtained from your Clearbit account dashboard. For more advanced usage, including different endpoints for company-only data (Reveal), person-only data (Enrich), or prospecting, refer to the Clearbit API documentation, which provides examples in Python, Ruby, and Node.js.