B2B Data Enrichment: The One-Month Clock Nobody Mentions

Enrichment is the step between a list of company names and a list you can write to. You hand a provider a partial record — a domain, a name, a LinkedIn URL — and it returns the fields you were missing: a work address, a job title, a headcount, a technology stack, sometimes a mobile number.

Commercially it is priced in credits, and the units are covered in what a credit actually buys. Legally it is the single most consequential thing an outbound team does, because obtaining personal data from somewhere other than the person changes what you owe them — and starts a clock.

What the tools here actually offer

All five platforms on this site sell enrichment in some form, at very different depths.

Instantly publishes the most detailed breakdown of what enrichment consumes: a fully enriched profile costs 0.5 credits, job-posting, technology, news and funding enrichment 0.5 credits a row, an engagement score 1 credit, and work-email enrichment about 1.5 credits a row. Its lead search costs 1 credit for a verified email it found itself and 2 for one sourced from a data partner.

That last distinction is quietly the most interesting number on any of these pages, because it is a vendor admitting that some of its data is somebody else's — which is exactly the situation the transparency rule below is written for.

The one-month clock

Under UK rules, where you obtain personal data from a source other than the individual, you owe them privacy information. The ICO's business-to-business marketing guidance puts a deadline on it: the information must be provided "within a reasonable period of obtaining the data and no later than one month from the date of collection".

Three things follow from that, and each one surprises somebody.

1. The clock starts at collection, not at contact. Enrich ten thousand records in January and write to two thousand of them in June, and the other eight thousand went past their deadline in February. The obligation attaches to obtaining the data.
2. It applies to the fields you bought, not just the address. A job title, a headcount attached to a named person, a mobile number — all of it is personal data about an identifiable individual, which the ICO says applies "even if they are acting in their business capacity".
3. It does not apply to a record with no person in it. The ICO's own example: writing to [email protected] without knowing whose desk it lands on is not processing personal data, and the UK GDPR does not apply. Enrichment is precisely the act of turning the second kind of record into the first.

There is a practical shape to meeting this: enrich in the batch you are about to contact rather than stockpiling, keep the source and date against every record, and put the privacy information where a first message can point at it. None of that is expensive. All of it is impossible to retrofit onto a list whose origin nobody wrote down.

The rest of the UK and US picture — including the corporate-versus-individual subscriber distinction that decides whether you may send at all — is in the rules, from the regulators.

LinkedIn, and what its own terms say

A large amount of B2B enrichment data has LinkedIn somewhere in its history, and several tools in this category advertise browser extensions that work while you are logged in. What LinkedIn permits is a question for LinkedIn's user agreement, and its section 8.2 is not ambiguous.

Clause 8.2.2 prohibits members from "Develop[ing], support[ing] or us[ing] software, devices, scripts, robots or any other means or processes (such as crawlers, browser plugins and add-ons or any other technology) to scrape or copy the Services, including profiles and other data from the Services".

Clause 8.2.13 prohibits members from "Us[ing] bots or other unauthorized automated methods to access the Services, add or download contacts, send or redirect messages". Clause 8.2.4 covers distributing information obtained from the platform "whether directly or through third parties (such as search tools or data aggregators or brokers), without the consent of the content owner". And 8.2.1 prohibits creating a false identity or misrepresenting your own.

This site will not tell you how to work around any of that, and does not recommend a tool on the basis that it can. The terms bind the LinkedIn member whose account is being used, which in the case of a browser extension is the person running it — not the vendor who sold it. That is worth understanding before pointing one at a prospect list, and it is a separate question from whether the tool works.

Several tools compared here automate LinkedIn actions as an advertised feature, including lemlist's Multichannel plan and Snov.io. Their pricing and structure are in the lemlist review and the Snov.io review; what using those features means for your own LinkedIn account is between you and the user agreement.

Choosing an enrichment source

Three questions, in order of how much they matter.

• Where did the record come from, and can you record it? A provider that cannot tell you the origin of a field cannot help you meet a transparency obligation that requires naming the source.
• What does one record cost in the field you actually need? Apollo charges eight credits for a phone number against one for an address; lemlist charges twenty against five. If numbers are the point, the cheap-looking allowance is not cheap.
• Does the allowance survive the month? Apollo's expires every cycle; Snov.io's and lemlist's roll over. Enrichment work is lumpy, and an allowance that evaporates is a discount you did not get.

The commercial comparison sits alongside the sending platforms in the platform comparison, because for four of the five vendors here the enrichment and the sending are the same subscription.