What is Clay.com? It could just be the most important marketing tool to hit the scene in a decade.
As marketing and sales professionals we believe that our competitiveness will be determined by our ability to be ultra-targeted in our outbound campaigns and ultra-specific in our messaging. We need smaller campaigns that can get the right message in-front of the right prospect at the right time and Clay is a significant addition to our marketing technology stack that helps us do just that.
Clay is a tool that gives go-to-market teams unprecedented abilities to build comprehensive target audience lists and automate highly personalized outreach. It does 3 things really well:
You can connect your existing data enrichment tools to Clay, which we highly recommend or you can tap into Clay’s marketplace with over 75 data enrichment tools. This marketplace includes everything from contact information to company firmographics. Clay customers report having tripled their data coverage compared to providers like Zoominfo while significantly reducing costs. Clay offers some powerful and simple ways to clean and organize data, from basic deduping to standardizing how names and other information are displayed.
With Clay, you can leverage AI to conduct unstructured research that previously required manual work by marketing or SDR teams. This includes reading and analyzing webpages, PDFs, and Google searches for specific information. For example, you could ask Clay to analyze the websites of your target audience and identify which companies offer free trials.
Clay has a powerful “Claygent” feature which is great at real-time web research, looking for news articles and announcements for example.
Once you’ve enriched your data, you can use AI to create relevant, compelling messaging tailored to that data. The GhatGPT integration drives this, giving the ability to create a custom message for each person in the target audience. Everything seamlessly syncs back to your CRM, enabling your team to swiftly transition from campaign ideation to execution.
It sounds complex but it really isn’t. Think of it as a really clever spreadsheet that has many connected apps, APIs and integrations that help you build the best campaigns of your career.
Think of Clay as a tool that helps you get more out of the tools you already have, it certainly does not replace a CRM or an email sending tool. It could replace some of your prospecting tools, data enrichment services or AI message drafting tools. But we recommend keeping the subscriptions you have with data enrichment services and integrating them into Clay – that way you will minimize the costs of using Clay. Remember that Clay itself is not a native data provider but it is remarkably powerful at accessing data providers and allowing you to build waterfall type enrichment, for example, first looking for the data in Provider X, then taking any blanks and pinging another data service for enrichment – you can do this multiple times with multiple providers and to give you the best chance of complete enrichment of your target audience.
Typically a tech savvy marketer is the power user, the same type of people who set up campaigns in Marketo or Hubspot. It’s a simple tool to use and we find that the most successful users are those who have a natural curiosity in exploring Clay and pushing themselves to build more targeted and personalized campaigns. SDRs and Sales teams do not typically use Clay but they do benefit from enriched data and personalized plays that are exported from Clay into the CRM tools they are familiar with.
You can get started with Clay for free on their $0 monthly plan. Paid plans start at $134 a month and rise to $720 a month, with the number of “credits”, volume of searches and depth of integration tools increasing as the price increases. They offer a free trial for 14 days that gives access to the top tier functionality which is a great way to try the platform.
Clay “credits” are something that you should understand. Clay credits are essentially the way that you pay for data enrichment or actions in Clay. Many actions in Clay are free but things like finding an email address could cost between 2 to 5 credits depending on the data provider. Data that is more difficult to find, such as personal mobile numbers, cost more credits. Of course, if you use your own data subscriptions and API keys, you will not be burning credits.
Clay is a powerful tool that can help go-to-market teams build comprehensive target audience lists and automate highly personalized outreach. It offers a range of features, including basic data enrichment and cleaning, AI data enrichment, and automated outreach. Clay is easy to use and integrates with a variety of other tools and data enrichment services. It is an affordable option for businesses of all sizes, and when used effectively it can have a significant impact on your business.
There are alternatives but If you’re looking for a tool to help you improve your go-to-market strategy, Clay is definitely worth considering. It can help you save time and money while improving the quality of your outreach efforts.