How to automatically identify the industry of your subscribers based on their E-Mail Domain

funnel email domain industry

Working on the funnel to optimize conversion rates, I am looking for a service that helps me to extract the industry of my visitors, after they have signed up to our QR Code management service. Based on the industry I will then create auto responder e-mails that highlight specific features of our product that fit into line of business of the newly subscribed users.

funnel email domain industryMy assumption is that users who receive targeted educational content during their trial phase will convert better to paying loyal customers, than users who are all being treated equal.

Our company is based in Austria and we have customers all over the world. Therefore I would need a solution with a database containing businesses across the globe or a semantic approach that is able to automatically extract the industry based on the content of the visitor’s website.

Thanks to Alexander Franz, Maximilian Schirmer, Gerald Hrastic and Lukas Fittl I stumbled upon some 2 SaaS websites and 2 APIs that give detailed insights about your website visitors.

SaaS Solutions: Webprospector & Leadfeeder

The following solutions require a tracking cookie on your website. The tracking pixel sends information from the client’s browser (e.g. IP address) to their servers to show you aggregated information about your visitors.

WebProspector

webprospector visitor analyzerhttps://www.webprospector.de

WebProspector, a company based in Munich (Germany), recognizes companies that visit your website and extracts their company name, address, industry & contact persons based on the visitor’s IP address. The service also tracks which pages where viewed by the visitor to identify potential leads.

They claim that their database holds over 800.000 companies based in Germany and Austria. In the enterprise version they offer a API / SOAP-Interface but I did not find out if WebProspector supports webhooks, to push qualified leads directly to our website.

leadfeeder

Leadfeeder sales lead generation tool http://www.leadfeeder.com
The Finland based company leadfeeder claims to identify the companies that visit your website and to find out what they do there. To get started you need to connect your Google Analytics with leadfeeder. You will then get information like industry, company or organization name, but it’s not possible to get the name of the person who visited your website. They have a free plan with up to 100 leads per month. I did not find out how many companies they have in their database nor which countries they are operating in.

Clearbit API & ValidData API

My first approach in mind was to query an API with the E-Mail address or E-Mail domain from the signed up user, rather than using his IP address or a tracking cookie. There are two promising APIs I am evaluating now:

clearbit API

clearbit enrichment apihttps://clearbit.com/enrichment
With the clearbit enrichment API you can Look-up person and company data using emails and domains. The API responds in JSON and up to 50 requests per month are for free. Querying the API with the domain of the payment service provider stripe

curl 'https://company.clearbit.com/v1/companies/domain/stripe.com'

gives me the following results:

{
    "url": "http: //stripe.com",
    "site": {
        "url": "http: //stripe.com",
        "title": "Stripe",
        "h1": "Webandmobilepayments, builtfordevelopers",
        "metaDescription": "StripeisasuiteofAPIsthatpowerscommerceforbusinessesofallsizes."
    },
    "category": {
        "sector": "InformationTechnology",
        "industryGroup": "Software&Services",
        "industry": "Software",
        "subIndustry": "ApplicationSoftware"
    },
    "tags": [
        "Paymentprocessor"
    ]
}

I am very pleased too 🙂

ValidData API

validdata-email-domain-api
https://www.validdata.eu

Another promising API is from the Austrian company validdata e.U.
Their database is the Austrian (500k+ companies) and German business directory. Based on the E-Mail domain you can look up a company and you receive a XML or JSON notated response. The response includes a classifications tag describing the area of economic activity for this company based on:

Example:

{ 
 "id":"bar.com", 
 "orgName":"Bar.Com GmbH", 
 "addressStreet":"Barstrasse 11", 
 "addressCity":"Neumarkt", 
 "addressZipCode":"92318", 
 "countryCode": "de", 
 "addressLatitude": 11.000001, 
 "addressLongitude": 49.111110, 
 "classifications": [ 
  {"id":"34","text":"Herstellung von Kraftwagen und Kraftwagenteilen", "type": "wz2003", "lang": "de"} 
 ] 
}

If you have any other APIs to recommend please let me know. In the meantime I will continue to evaluate those APIs.
And I just setup a mailing list where I can keep you updated about my growth hacking activities:

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *