What is waterfall enrichment?
Asking several data sources for the same field in order, and stopping at the first good answer.
No single data provider knows everything. For any given person, one source may have a work email and another may not, and which one wins changes by country, company size and industry. A waterfall accepts that: it asks the first source, and if the answer is missing or fails a quality check, it asks the next.
The gain is coverage. A single source might find emails for half a list; two sources in order will usually find more than either alone, because their gaps are not in the same places. The cost is that a row can be charged more than once, which is why the order matters: cheapest or most likely first, and expensive sources last.
The part people get wrong is the quality check between steps. A waterfall that accepts any answer will stop at the first source that returns something, including a guess. A waterfall that checks before accepting will skip a risky answer and keep going, which is slower and more expensive, and produces a list you can actually send to.
Read next
- Order by cost and likelihood, not by preference: the first source should be the one most likely to answer cheaply.
- Check each answer before accepting it, or the waterfall stops at the first plausible guess.
- Count what a full pass costs per row, not what one source costs, because a miss at step one still pays for step two.
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