Inbound lead enrichment

The job in one paragraph

Inbound lead enrichment means filling in what a form did not ask for. A visitor gives you an email. You need to know who they are, what they do and how big their company is, so you can route or score the lead in seconds. LeadOcean returns that record over REST and over a hosted MCP server. It does not capture forms, score leads or route them. You call the API from your form handler, a Zapier, Make or n8n flow, or an agent, and act on the result yourself.

The workflow

1. Check the account. GET /v1/account (MCP: leadocean_get_account). Free. It shows the records you have left.
2. Receive the form fill. Your handler or automation catches the submission and passes the email on.
3. Enrich the person. POST /v1/people/enrich (MCP: leadocean_get_lead) with email only. 1 record per hit. A 404 costs nothing, and an MCP get_lead that finds nobody costs nothing either.
4. Enrich the company. POST /v1/companies/enrich (MCP: leadocean_get_company) with the domain from the email. 1 record per company. Skip free-mail domains, and cache the answer so a second lead from the same company needs no second lookup.
5. Score and route. Read the title, seniority and employee range in the response. Your own rules decide the owner, the queue or the nurture track.
6. Handle the miss. On a 404, keep the lead and route it on the form fields alone. Retry on a schedule, because the dataset is refreshed monthly.
7. Find a phone for the hot ones. GET /v2/people/phone (MCP: leadocean_find_phone). 1 record per call. On the v2 endpoint a call that finds nothing still costs 1 record, so run it only on leads that pass your score.

curl -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/enrich" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"email":"jane.doe@acme.com"}'

There is no lookup by name plus company name. If the form gives a name and a company site but no email, search by domain first, then enrich by person_id.

A worked example

Take a site with 2,000 form fills a month, each with a work email. Suppose 1,500 of them match (the hit rate is your assumption here, not a result). That is 1,500 records. The 500 misses cost nothing.

Add phones for the 200 leads that pass your score. That is 200 more records, found or not. The month totals 1,700 records.

On Free, the first 1,000 records are yours once, with no card. On Pro the month is $499, flat, with no per-record price, inside fair use. See pricing.

To see what your best inbound looks like against the market, we ran leadocean_count_leads on 1 October 2026. Filters: jobLevel VP or C-Team, jobFunction Sales & Business Development, country US, employeeRange 51-200, emailType work. It returned 27,820 people with a mailable work email. The count cost 0 records.

Tools that fit

• Enrich Company: the account lookup by domain, with every field listed.
• Enrich Person skill: Claude looks up one lead from a LinkedIn URL or email.
• Zapier, Make and n8n: fire an enrichment call on every new form submission.
• The Exports page in the app at app.leadocean.io: filter builder, column picker and the record price before you start. Use it to backfill old leads as a CSV. It has no form capture or routing.

For the method behind the steps, read what is data enrichment and what is waterfall enrichment. For the term itself, see enrichment.

Pitfalls

• Stale data. The dataset is refreshed monthly, and each record carries its own fetched_at date. A lead who changed jobs last week may still show the old title. Check that date before you route on seniority.
• Catch-all emails. catch_all and catch_all_valid addresses accept any mail, so a reply can still bounce. There is no refund for bounces. Read email_status before you add the lead to a sequence.
• Rate limits. The limit is 100 requests per second per key, on every plan. A 429 is never metered. A launch day spike can hit it, so queue the calls and retry with backoff.
• Enum strings. Filter values are exact strings: jobLevel is C-Team, VP or Director, and seniority is lowercase, such as c_suite. Check leadocean_list_enum_values before you write a routing rule.

FAQ