Enrich People (Email Waterfalls) 

In lesson four, you learned how to use Clay’s waterfall enrichment to enrich companies with firmographic and technographic data. Now we’re going to show you how to use waterfalls to enrich the people. 

And since contacts hold little value without basic contact information (at least LinkedIn profile and/or work email), in this lesson, we'll show you how to enrich people with validated work emails. 

Prerequisites

Before proceeding, ensure you have:

• A company list with domain names and LinkedIn profile URLs. If you haven’t imported companies yet, go back to the previous lesson: Finding Companies in Clay.
• An understanding of the Jigsaw framework, which helps you determine when your data is ready for enrichment.

Review: Waterfall Enrichment

If you remember from lesson four (Enrich Companies), a waterfall is a data enrichment method that pulls data from multiple providers in a specific order, eliminating the need for multiple manual uploads and lookups across different providers. 

Traditionally, revenue teams had to manage costly subscriptions to multiple data providers and manually filter results through spreadsheets. Waterfalls automate this process by sequentially querying providers—starting with the most cost-effective—until the required data is found, ensuring efficiency, accuracy, and cost savings. If one provider returns a valid data point, Clay stops further enrichments, saving you credits.

Email Validation: Ensuring Quality Data

Clay’s email waterfall not only finds emails, but validates them as well. 

By default, we use ZeroBounce, a best-in-class validation service, but you have the flexibility to choose a different provider if you prefer (e.g. if you know a different provider validates best or cheapest in your industry). 

💡Tip: By default, Clay considers catch-all emails valid. You can toggle on the “Only mark ‘Safe to Send’ emails as valid” to exclude catch-all emails.

How It Works: Watch The Guided Demo

Just like with companies, we'll use waterfalls to maximize coverage and minimize cost across 10+ data providers. This time, we’ll waterfall work emails—one of the most powerful waterfalls in Clay.

How it works:

1. Open the Enrichment Panel:

• Click on the “Add enrichment” button.
• Search for “Work Email” in the list of available enrichments.

2. Configure Your Waterfall:

• You’ll see a pre-arranged order of email providers optimized for coverage.
• Add or reorder email providers as desired to maximize data coverage, as Clay refunds credits if a provider doesn't return an email.

3. Select Input Columns:

• The primary input required is the Company Domain.
• Ideally, also include Personal Social Profile URLs.
• If unavailable, use fallback combinations like Full Name + Company Name or Full Name + Personal Email.

4. Choose Your Validation Provider:

• Clay defaults to ZeroBounce, known for high accuracy.
• You can select another validator if preferred.

5. Set Catch-All Email Handling:

• By default, catch-all emails are treated as valid.
• To avoid potential deliverability issues, toggle to treat catch-alls as invalid if you’re uncertain.

6. Run a Test on 10 Rows:

• Always start by testing 10 rows to review results before scaling.
• Click “Save & Run (10 Rows)” to initiate.

Once the enrichment process starts, Clay dynamically moves through the waterfall:

• If a provider finds a valid email, the process stops for that contact.
• If no email is found, credits are refunded and Clay moves to the next provider.
• The process continues until an email is found or all providers are exhausted.

💡Tip: Validation columns are hidden by default. Open the Columns Panel and unhide these columns to inspect detailed validation steps.

Enrich Beyond Emails

Emails are the cornerstone of successful outreach, but Clay's waterfalls can enrich your contact data far beyond just emails. Easily add phone numbers, social profiles, GitHub URLs, and other information to build a more complete picture of each prospect.

And for those of you who need specialized, hard-to-find information, Claygent, Clay’s AI research agent, and our direct integration with Google, can help capture custom enrichment across the web. 

Congrats!

That’s a wrap on finding validated work emails using Clay’s waterfall enrichment. 

Next up, we’ll explore prompt engineering best practices in Clay using the S.P.I.C.E. Framework. 

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