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 verified email address, the director's name, LinkedIn and social profiles, and a quality score. 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 register is the starting point, not the finished product. This post explains what enrichment adds, why a verified email and a score 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 record from the Companies House register 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 register never holds. Done well, it turns "Acme Joinery Ltd, company 12345678, registered in Leeds" into "Acme Joinery, acmejoinery.co.uk, hello@acmejoinery.co.uk (verified), director Jane Smith, LinkedIn and Instagram attached, score 78".

If you want the underlying register 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 equals one delivered, enriched company record. Here is what gets attached:

• A website URL. The company is matched to its live site, which becomes the source of truth for everything else.
• A verified business email. Extracted from the site and then MX-checked, so the receiving mail server actually exists. Verified addresses carry a tick in the app.
• The director's name. Pulled from the officer data and reconciled with the site so you know who you are writing to.
• Company and director LinkedIn. Both profiles where they can be found, so you can research before you reach out.
• Facebook and Instagram. Useful signals for trades, retail, hospitality and other socially active sectors.
• A transparent 0-100 lead score. A single number summarising how complete and contactable the record is.

You get the same enrichment whether a lead came from a broad SIC-and-postcode search or from a Signals watch that flagged a brand-new incorporation. 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 verified email and the score matter most

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

The verified 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 extracted address rather than just scraping a string that looks like an email. The verified tick means the domain's mail servers resolve and accept mail for that domain, so the address is deliverable at the infrastructure level.

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 0-100 score

The score is a triage tool. It tells you, before you spend any time, how complete and contactable a record is. A lead scoring 80-plus usually has a verified email, a clear website and a named director, so it is ready to work. A low-scoring lead might be a dormant company, a business with no real web presence, or one where we found a site but no trustworthy email. The score is transparent, not a black box, so you can sort and prioritise instead of treating every row as equal. In practice that means your reps spend their hours on the leads most likely to convert.

How enrichment works, step by step

1. Start from the register. You search the ~5 million company UK Companies House register by SIC code, location or postcode, incorporation date, status, or the "no website yet" 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. Verify the email. The extracted address is MX-checked so you know the mail server exists; deliverable addresses get the verified tick. 5. Score the record. Completeness and contactability are rolled into a single 0-100 number. 6. Deliver. The finished lead lands in your account, ready to add to a campaign or push out via webhook or Slack.

On the Growth plan and up, an enriched lead flows straight into the outreach engine: connect a Microsoft 365 or Google mailbox, and the AI can even read the company's site to draft a brand-voice sequence and a one-click lead brief.

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.

Roughly a 50% email hit rate. Not every UK company publishes a usable, verifiable email on its website. Some have no site, some hide behind a contact form, some list an address that fails the MX check. Realistically, around half of enriched records come back with a verified email. That is normal for honest enrichment: the alternative is padding your list with guessed addresses that bounce and burn your domain. We would rather deliver you a smaller set you can actually send to.

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. Enrichment is a core feature on every plan, including the free trial of 10 leads. Every delivered lead is enriched from the company's website regardless of tier. The automated outreach engine, templates and analytics are what start on the Growth plan.

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 verified email, which pairs with a documented legitimate-interest basis for cold B2B contact.

What does the verified tick actually mean?

It means the email was extracted from the company's own website and then MX-checked, confirming the domain's mail servers exist and accept mail. It is an infrastructure-level check on deliverability, which keeps your bounce rate and sender reputation healthy.

Why do only about half of leads have an email?

Not every UK business publishes a verifiable email address. Rather than guess and risk bounces, we only attach an email when it passes verification, so the roughly 50% you receive are genuinely contactable. See pricing to match a plan to the volume you need.