Enrichment waterfall order changes your costs significantly
Most Clay builds run providers in the wrong order. The cheapest, highest-coverage sources should always go first.
A waterfall enrichment run in Clay tries each provider in sequence and stops when it finds a match. The order determines your cost. If you put your most expensive provider first, you’re paying premium rates for data you could have gotten cheaper.
The principle: sort providers by cost per successful match, lowest first. Only reach expensive providers when cheaper ones have failed.
The order I use as a starting point for email finding:
- HubSpot / Salesforce native data. Free, check your own CRM first. Catches existing contacts you already have data on.
- Apollo. High coverage, low cost per match. Good first external source for most B2B contact data.
- Hunter.io. Strong for company email pattern inference. Good secondary option when Apollo returns nothing.
- Clearbit. Higher quality, higher cost. Worth it for the records cheaper providers miss.
- LinkedIn. Slowest and most throttled, but often the only source for senior executives. Use it last.
For firmographic data the order shifts: Clearbit tends to be more accurate for company data even if it’s more expensive, so it may be worth moving earlier for company-level fields while keeping it later for contact-level fields.
The other optimisation: add a validity check before the waterfall, not after. If the record already has a verified email from a previous enrichment run, skip the waterfall entirely. Re-running enrichment on already-enriched records wastes credits every time the workflow fires.
Clay’s conditional logic makes this straightforward: check if the email field is already populated and marked as verified. If yes, skip to the next step. Only trigger the waterfall on genuinely new or blank records.
At scale (10,000+ records per month) waterfall order and pre-checks reduce enrichment costs by 30–50%. Worth the hour it takes to audit.