BetterContact Review: GOOD Waterfall Email & Phone Finder?

What is my opinion on BetterContact

BetterContact is a data enrichment tool that allows you to find valid B2B email addresses and phone numbers for your leads 📧📞.

BetterContact pioneered the concept of Waterfall Data Enrichment, which consists of using multiple providers to find more data.

I’ve always been a big fan of Findymail personally, but I’ve also paid for BetterContact more than once for their phone number enrichment feature.

I believe that if you need both email and phone enrichment, BetterContact is arguably the best tool out there, and the best part is that you can get started at $15 per month 💰.

In this article, I’ll share my full review of BetterContact, but before that, let me walk you through the pros and cons of the tool 🔍.

Pros & Cons

Over the years, BetterContact became one of the best data enrichment providers on the market. It came with its pros and cons.

Pros of BetterContact

What I love about BetterContact is its simplicity. It’s pretty rare for a B2B data software to have such an elegant UI and UX, and it really shows from the landing page 🎨.

And obviously, the fact that you don’t need to think about which provider is best to find data, because BetterContact does the grunt work for you. Thanks to that, you can easily find more valid B2B email addresses than with most other softwares 🧠.

To summarize:

• Lovely UI and UX ✨

• Uses multiple providers to find more data

• Great CRM integrations

• Only charged when an email or phone number is found

Cons of BetterContact

The fact that BetterContact relies on multiple APIs to find data is both a blessing and a curse ⚖️.

Because of that, data enrichment can sometimes be slow. But the biggest downside, in my opinion, appears when you need to enrich large volumes of data. BetterContact does not scale very well because it does not have a proprietary algorithm to find data on its own ⏳.

To summarize:

• Slow data enrichment (minutes versus seconds for other tools)

• Phone enrichment is not included in the base plan 📞

• No built in scraper, so you need to rely on other softwares to find leads first

• Pricing scales poorly

Note: you can reduce the scalability cost issue of BetterContact by choosing the Enterprise plan at $799 per month, which allows you to use your own API keys from your preferred providers 💡.

Key Features of BetterContact

BetterContact doesn’t have many features but the few it has work like a charm.

Waterfall Email Enrichment

When you import a CSV file into BetterContact to enrich your leads with valid B2B email addresses, BetterContact does not use its own proprietary algorithm to find emails 📄.

What it does instead is stitch together multiple APIs and try each of them to find the correct email address.

This technique ensures that you find more valid B2B email addresses, as each provider has its own strengths and weaknesses. As a result, you benefit from the best of all of them 🧩.

With this approach, you can increase your email enrichment rate to an average of 60 to 70 percent, depending on the industry 📈.

The downside of waterfall email enrichment, however, is that not all tools are equal, and the best tools might not always be included in BetterContact.

What I mean by that is that BetterContact has an incentive to use the cheapest tools first in their waterfall. This can prevent some providers from partnering with them, since they would only be used as a last resort.

But in practice, this does not have a big impact, as most players still partner with BetterContact for brand recognition anyway 🤝.

Softwares used to perform Email Enrichment in BetterContact

I talked with the customer support of BetterContact and got the information that they use **20+ premium data sources **for their waterfall enrichment system!

Here are the main ones:

Named providers:

• RocketReach

• Apollo

• ContactOut

• Datagma

• People Data Labs

• Enrich.so

• Prospeo

• Hunter

• Anymail finder

• Bouncer

• Enrow

• Icypeas

• Kendo

• Nimbler

• SocieteInfo

• Tomba

Plus they have 5+ additional database sources that they can't name publicly for competitive reasons.

Waterfall Phone Enrichment

BetterContact can also find the phone numbers of your leads 📞.

I’d say where they really shine is with EU phone numbers. For US phone numbers, other tools are already quite good, but overall BetterContact is arguably one of the best solutions out there to find B2B phone numbers.

I achieved an 88 percent or higher enrichment rate with BetterContact on some lists, and my sales rep told me he had never seen such a high pick up rate during cold calls 📈. If your sales reps can have more conversations with real people, you win big with a higher ROI on your reps.

What makes their phone number enrichment special is the multi layer verification system. They use carrier connectivity checks, geo name matching to ensure numbers align with the lead’s actual location, and activity scoring to verify that numbers are actively used.

So if your contact is in Spain, you won’t get a random Taiwanese number. Their system cross references geographic data with LinkedIn profiles 🌍.

Softwares used to perform Phone Enrichment in BetterContact

The BetterContact support team told me that for phone numbers, they work with more than 10 premium data providers, including Apollo, RocketReach, People Data Labs, Datagma, and ContactOut 📞.

Apparently, they tested 20 data vendors over five months and partnered with the top 8 specifically for mobile numbers 🧪.

However, they cannot publicly name all their phone number providers for competitive reasons, just like with their email sources, where they also rely on 5 or more additional unnamed databases 🔒.

Bulk Enrichment with a CSV

Like any data enrichment tool, you can find the B2B information of your leads by uploading a CSV to BetterContact 📄.

When using the software, I realized that you get a much better enrichment rate if you use the LinkedIn URL of your leads to find phone numbers and their website URL to find email addresses 🔗📧.

API, Zapier & Make

BetterContact also has an API. In practice, you won’t use it unless you’re tech savvy. But the fact that they have an API means they also offer Zapier and Make integrations, which allows you to use BetterContact with more than 2,500 softwares 🔌.

The downside of their API and automation integrations is that you’ll need to build two different workflows: one to find the data and another one to retrieve it, since BetterContact does not enrich data very quickly ⏳. Once again, this can be a bit cumbersome because of their dependency on multiple APIs to find data.

You don’t have this problem with tools that have their own proprietary data finding system. That said, this is the trade off to find more data with BetterContact, and overall it’s still pretty reasonable ⚖️.

Integrations of BetterContact

At the time of this writing, BetterContact has integrations with more than 15 B2B sales softwares, pretty impressive!

CRM Integrations with Breakcold & others

BetterContact made a smart move by integrating natively with some CRMs for salespeople such as Breakcold or HubSpot Sales Hub 🔗.

Indeed, many salespeople want to enrich data directly from their CRM in one click or in bulk from their CRM lists.

Manually or automatically, you can enrich leads using BetterContact’s waterfall enrichment technology directly inside Breakcold. For example, when a lead moves from sales pipeline stage A to stage B, you can automatically enrich it with a valid B2B phone number 📞. Super powerful workflow ⚙️.

Lead Generation Tools Integrations

Beyond CRM integrations with Breakcold and HubSpot, BetterContact also integrates with lead gen tools such as:

• Lemlist and Reply to send multi channel prospecting campaigns 📣

• Smartlead and Instantly to send cold emails at scale 📬

• Make and Zapier to perform smart automation ⚙️

• Clay to personalize cold email campaigns ✍️

• RB2B to enrich data from anonymous visitors 👀

The set of integrations offered by BetterContact is top notch in the sense that it covers the most widely used lead gen softwares on the market, and all of them are native integrations, which is ideal for the end user.

Pricing

BetterContact’s first plans are super affordable 💸.

The first plan (Starter) starts at $15 per month for 200 credits. One credit can be used to find one verified B2B email address, and 10 credits are used to find one phone number 📧📞.

The second plan (Pro) is priced at $49 per month for 1,000 credits. From there, you can upgrade the number of credits all the way up to 50,000 credits for $1,999 per month 📈. This is clearly expensive compared to what you will get with dedicated email finders where it'll be more $400/mo for 50,000 credits.

The main difference between the two plans is that the Pro plan includes phone verification and catch all validation, which can lead to 10 to 30 percent more emails found.

Competitors of BetterContact

BetterContact vs FullEnrich

FullEnrich is arguably the BIGGEST competitor of BetterContact 🆚.

They arrived on the market at a very similar time, probably slightly after. FullEnrich bootstrapped until 1 million dollars in ARR, then raised money, and they are now at more than 5 million dollars in ARR 📈. They are gaining market share from BetterContact at a much faster pace because they focused on the US market straight away to become an alternative to ZoomInfo 🇺🇸.

In my opinion, both products are equally good. FullEnrich can be more expensive since their target users are more enterprise focused, so BetterContact is probably a better choice for most teams. But on this one, it really comes down to taste, as they both rely on the same APIs to run their software.

BetterContact vs Findymail

Findymail is, to my knowledge, one of the only well known B2B email softwares that removed itself from BetterContact because they were probably losing money, as Findymail has the best email enrichment rate on the entire market, even when waterfall email enrichment is used 🧠📧.

That is pretty crazy when you think about it.

Therefore, for email finding, Findymail is the clear winner 🏆, while BetterContact wins for B2B phone numbers, as it covers both the US and EU, whereas EU phone numbers are not covered by Findymail 📞🌍.