LeadOcean + Clay: draft an outbound email for 5 personas per company

You get a Clay table of companies. Each row holds five contacts, one per buyer persona, and five drafted emails. LeadOcean supplies the people, the email and its status. Clay's AI column writes the copy. Clay's own template for this job starts from a company list and enriches summaries and emails inside Clay (Clay template, September 2026). This recipe swaps in LeadOcean for the people.

It fits teams that sell to a buying group, not one title. If you only need one contact per account, see the Clay integration.

How it works

1. Create a LeadOcean key. Sign up at app.leadocean.io/register. The free plan gives 1,000 records, once, with no card.
2. Add a Domain column. One company per row, with the website domain such as acme.com.
3. Add five search columns. Each is an HTTP API column that calls POST /v1/people/search with the domain and one persona's titles, limit 1. Name them for the persona, for example Sales lead.
4. Add five enrich columns. Each takes the person_id from its search row and calls POST /v1/people/enrich with reveal_email true. Set "Only run if" so it skips rows where the search came back empty.
5. Add one AI column per persona. Give it the persona, the company and the person's job title, and ask for a four-sentence email in a different voice per persona. Clay's template does this with writer styles.
6. Run five rows first. Check that every persona resolves and that empty personas leave the draft blank.

Configuration

Clay's HTTP API column takes a method, URL, headers, a JSON body and field paths (Clay docs, September 2026). The search column for the sales persona looks like this. /Domain is Clay's column reference.

Method:   POST
URL:      https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search
Headers:  x-api-key: <your LeadOcean key>
          content-type: application/json
Body:     {
            "domain": ["/Domain"],
            "jobLevel": ["VP", "Director"],
            "jobFunction": ["Sales & Business Development"],
            "limit": 1
          }
Field paths to return:
          data

Test the same request in a terminal first. The enrich step then runs per person_id.

curl -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"domain":["acme.com"],"jobLevel":["VP","Director"],"jobFunction":["Sales & Business Development"],"limit":1}'

curl -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/enrich" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"person_id":"<person_id from the search>","reveal_email":true}'

Change jobLevel and jobFunction, or swap in a title array, for the other four personas. Each search row carries its id at meta.source_ids.person_id (LeadOcean OpenAPI, October 2026). Return data and pull that value from the first row with a Clay formula column. Like the other filters, domain takes an array of strings.

Field mapping

Repeat for personas 2 to 5.

Cost at 10,000 rows

At 10,000 companies the recipe makes 100,000 HTTP calls: 50,000 searches and up to 50,000 enrichments. A search returns 1 record per person and a miss is a 404 that costs nothing (LeadOcean docs, September 2026).

LeadOcean. Free covers 1,000 records once, about 100 companies. Solo at $97 a month allows 50k enrichments a week and 500k search records a week, so the run fits in one week on 50 requests a second. Agency at $497 a month raises both.

Clay. The HTTP API column needs Growth or Enterprise. Each call uses one Action, so 100,000 calls need 100,000 Actions (Clay pricing, September 2026). Each AI run is one more Action, plus Data Credits unless you connect your own AI key (Clay docs, October 2026). The 50,000 drafts bring the total to 150,000 Actions. On Growth's monthly grid that is the 200,000 Action tier at $850 plus $290 for 6,000 Data Credits, or $1,140 a month billed monthly.

Cheaper path: run 2,000 companies. That is 20,000 calls and 10,000 drafts, 30,000 Actions, inside the 40,000 Action Growth entry tier at $495 a month.

Troubleshooting

FAQ