Lead enrichment: turning Companies House rows into contactable leads

Lead enrichment is the process of taking a bare business record, in the UK usually a Companies House row of a company name, number and registered address, and adding the details you actually need to contact and qualify that business: a website, a working email address, the director's name, and LinkedIn and social profiles. Leadistry enriches every delivered lead automatically from the company's own website, so what lands in your account is a contactable lead rather than a database row you still have to research.

The public record is the starting point, not the finished product. This post explains what enrichment adds, why a checked email and a dated reason to write matter more than a long list of fields, and the two honest limits you should know before you rely on it.

What is lead enrichment?

Lead enrichment is the step between raw company data and a usable sales lead. A Companies House record is authoritative but thin. For a typical UK limited company you get the name, the company number, the incorporation date, the SIC codes, the registered office address, the status (active, dissolved, in liquidation) and the officer names. None of that lets you send an email or open a conversation.

Enrichment fills the gap. It matches the company to its real-world web presence and pulls back the operational contact details that the public record never holds. Done well, it turns "Example Joinery Ltd, company 12345678, registered in Leeds" into "Example Joinery, examplejoinery.example, hello@examplejoinery.example (the domain accepts mail), director Jane Smith, LinkedIn and Instagram attached".

If you want the underlying Companies House mechanics first, the complete guide to SIC codes and our note on finding recently incorporated companies cover how the raw rows are structured before enrichment touches them.

What does Leadistry add to each Companies House row?

Every lead Leadistry delivers is enriched from the company's own website, on all plans including the free trial. One lead is one lead, and every lead carries these as standard:

• The Companies House record. Name, number, status, age, SIC codes and officers, refreshed from the public record.
• A checked website. The company is matched to its live site, which becomes the source of truth for everything else.
• A business email that belongs to the company. Taken from the site and then MX-checked, so the domain accepts mail.
• The director's name, when the public record has it. Pulled from the officer data and reconciled with the site, so you know who you are writing to.

On top of those, the extras come free when we can confirm they are the company's own: director LinkedIn, company LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. All of it sits on one Leads screen, and what a B2B lead should include sets out the checklist to hold any supplier to.

You get the same enrichment whether a lead came from a search you ran yourself or from an agent that spotted a dated reason, such as a company registered in the last 12 months. If you spend a lot of time on live company websites, the Chrome extension runs the same identification in one click on any UK business site you visit.

Why the email and the dated reason matter most

You could enrich a record with a dozen fields and still have a lead you cannot use. Two things carry most of the weight.

The checked email

An email you cannot trust is worse than no email. Sending to addresses that bounce damages your sender reputation, and once your reputation drops, even your good emails start landing in spam. That is why Leadistry MX-checks every address it finds rather than just scraping a string that looks like an email. Checked here means the domain's mail servers resolve and accept mail, and the address belongs to the company. No check can prove a mailbox exists without sending to it, which is why a lead whose first email bounces is credited back.

This matters most if you are running cold outreach at any volume. Bounce rate is one of the first things mailbox providers watch. Keeping it low is the difference between a campaign that reaches inboxes and one that quietly dies in filters. You can sanity-check any single address yourself with the free email verifier, and if you are sending, the SPF/DKIM/DMARC checker tells you whether your own domain is set up to be trusted.

The dated reason

The dated reason is the triage tool. Every delivered lead already has a checked email and website, so the reason tells you why to write this week and not some other week: a company registered in the last 12 months, an accounts or confirmation-statement deadline, a change of name, a website graded poor. It comes from the public record with its date attached, not from a black box, and the first line of the email is drafted from it. In practice that means your hours go on companies where something has just happened, instead of treating every row as equal.

How enrichment works, step by step

1. Start from the public record. Your agent, or a search you run yourself, works through the ~5 million companies on the UK public record by SIC code, location or postcode, and the reason you care about: a new incorporation, a filing deadline, or the poor-website filter.
2. Match to the web. Each qualifying company is matched to its live website, the anchor for everything that follows.
3. Extract the details. The website URL, business email, director name and social profiles are pulled from the company's own site and officer data.
4. Check the email. The address is MX-checked so you know the domain accepts mail, and it has to belong to the company; whatever fails is dropped.
5. Draft the first line. The opening line of the email is written from the dated reason on the public record.
6. Deliver. The finished lead lands in the Feed, ready to approve, or goes out through a webhook, Slack or your leads link.

On any plan, including the free trial, an enriched lead arrives in the Feed with the first email already written: connect a Google or Microsoft mailbox, then approve, change or skip it. Nothing sends until you approve it or switch on Autopilot. The trial includes 25 free emails from your own mailbox, and sending past that is included on every paid plan.

The honest limits

Enrichment is powerful but it is not magic, and pretending otherwise would set you up to fail.

No phone numbers. This is deliberate, not a gap. UK PECR rules forbid unsolicited marketing calls to numbers on the TPS and CTPS registers, and cold-calling businesses you have no relationship with is a compliance minefield. We do not provide phone numbers because we do not want to hand you a route to breaking the rules. Email, backed by a documented legitimate-interest basis, is the safer channel for cold UK B2B outreach. Our UK B2B data and GDPR guide walks through the legal basis in full.

Not every company qualifies. Some UK companies have no site. Some hide behind a contact form. Some list an address that fails the MX check. We do not deliver those companies, and we do not charge for them. That is the honest trade: a smaller set you can actually send to, instead of a padded list of guessed addresses that bounce and burn your domain.

Knowing these limits up front is what lets you plan a campaign that works, rather than one that stalls on bad data.

Frequently asked questions

Does lead enrichment work on the free trial?

Yes. Every delivered lead is enriched from the company's website on every plan, including the free trial of 25 free leads, and the trial can email those leads: 25 free emails go from your own mailbox. More leads every month, sending past those first 25, and downloading your leads as a file are what the paid plans add.

Why is there no phone number in the data?

Because UK PECR restricts unsolicited marketing calls, and providing phone numbers would invite compliance breaches. We focus on email, which pairs with a documented legitimate-interest basis for cold B2B contact.

What does a checked email actually mean?

It means the email was published by the company or belongs to it, and the domain was MX-checked, confirming its mail servers exist and accept mail. It is an infrastructure-level check, not proof that one mailbox exists, which is why a lead whose first email bounces is credited back.

Does every lead have an email?

Yes. A checked website and a business email that belongs to the company are part of the definition of a lead here. A company we cannot complete is held back and never charged. For where the public record stops and enrichment starts, see Companies House data for lead generation. See pricing to match a plan to the volume you need.