How I Use Apollo.io to Quickly Automate Lead Enrichment & Prospecting
Video Transcript
(00:01) if you’re using apollo.io chances are you might be missing out on a profit feature you know nothing about and that’s Apollo’s enrichment API this API is going to allow you to enrich your prospect’s data so you can make sure you have the right emails and the right phone numbers but what if you wanted to automate this process well that’s the whole point of this video we’re going to Showcase how we use apollo.
(00:20) iOS en richment API to automate our prospecting efforts and we’ll also demonstrate a bit of validation so you can make sure the emails that you are getting from Apollo or the phone numbers are legit so without further Ado let’s get into it in an effort to create a visual explainer of this automation to enrich um data via Apollo I want to start off here um and pretty much this is where you’ll anyone will start off if you’re trying to enate any sort of data you’re going to probably be working with a Excel sheet like a CSV with all th
(00:57) different leads or contacts that you kind of have this could be from uh leads from an webinar your CRM data email list so on and so forth maybe sales Prospect list you start off here you most likely go through the process of cleaning it up um you’ll be removing duplicates standardizing formats normalizing the data removing anything that’s unnecessary to make that uh import into something like error table makes sense now as I mentioned this is the platform we’ll be using to house our data it’s a flexible database that allows us to kind
(01:29) of just pull whatever we needed put put in there in an easy and retrievable way as it has access to apis which is going to be needed for when we’re actually going to retrieving that data that we put in the air table the next phase of this plan is to pass our data into Apollo’s API to enrich it um if you watched our videos in the past you know that with Apollo um to enrich people and use their API you you can only pass 10 records at a time and each time you go through that enrichment there is an export credit so something to think
(01:59) about as we’re as I go as I show you what the solution that I created and how I went about getting through that situation next phase of this is actually verifying the email itself we’re using Ron I’ll talk about some other solutions that you can use but this is where we’ll go ahead and and verify we’ll go ahead and and find any temporary unsafe email addresses you’ll get like a status or score and this will be good for when we talk about even creating dashboards with air table to visualize our leads list and see the health of our emails from
(02:33) there we’ll go ahead and take all that information once it’s been enriched and verified put it into a table and we’ll we’ll it’ll look something kind of like here but we’ll put in a table with all the necessary fields and things that we created and at the end what it at the end it’s really up to you what you do with that information you can pass in the hub spot you can use something like smart lead for um scale prospecting you can pass into sales force or use mail gun um there’s a lot of different things you
(03:06) can do with it but at the end of this video you should have an idea of how to actually enrich your data verify it and then do what you need to do based on our overview enriching leades and Apollo boils down to three strategies either we’re enriching manually which is the process I described earlier where we’re building a list downlo the CSV and porting in the air table all that jazz or we’re going to be doing a partial automation which is all that but with the with the enriching and verifying leads piece being automated or we’re
(03:37) doing a full automation which is the entire the entire process is automated as we’re going to be tapping into Apollo’s people API we’re going to be enriching um with Apollo API and verifying the leads all that’s going to be done programmatically through automations and workflows so those are going to be the primary strategies that you want to go down for this video we’ll be looking at the full and partial automation as the video is all about Apollo’s enrichment API now this is where all the automation magic is going
(04:07) to happen we’re using a tool called n8n n is going to be a great tool to build workflows automations has a great community and just at the price for what you can do you can you can do a lot of different cool automations with this with AI and such that’s enough for the end we’re right now we’re looking at this canvas from the big scale it’s a lot going on here so let’s break down the workflow in general I guess first place to start is in is to zoom in into this air table uh node that’s what they call an nnn essentially imagine this
(04:40) being an API wrapper or a way to connect to your application through this little square box and that’s what we’re doing with air table if you remember earlier air tables where we contain all of our contact information that we’re trying to enrich we imported that into um from a CSV in aor table and now we’re going to search and grab all this information and we’re going to enrich it next in our flow is this code node which essentially is just a node specifically made to add code to our flow we need this because as
(05:15) I mentioned earlier in order to enrich contacts in Apollo you’re going to need to pass in 10 records at a time or else Apollo really won’t accept your request 10 rich so that’s essentially what we did here if you look inside here not to go too deep into the code but essentially we created this we created this code so that way that way the flow can actually take our data break it into pieces and pass it into Apollo’s enrichment API now let’s proceed to the next piece of the flow which is our HTTP request node this is pretty much a node
(05:49) that is multifaceted it can connect to anything on the web as long as you have the base URL needed to make that connection and the API that we’re passing is apollo. enrichment URL this is going to be a bulk people API endpoint and not to get too technical that essentially is going to allow us to do a bulk match search we’re going to have to strap in our API key and we’re going to have to pass some stuff into our body um in order to in order for our actual information from the previous node to actually get accepted and pass through and get that
(06:28) data enriched you can see some of that data down here um from from some stuff we’re passing through you see first name contact information things of that nature and uh once that once that kind of gets passed through we go to the next phase of our enrichment after it’s pretty much been enriched as it gets passed through and we’re going to split out and go into different sections and we’ll talk about that now that our data has been enriched we’re going to then split all that data into its individual records so they can
(06:59) be loaded up into air table and so we can do other things with it to do further verification and things of that nature so as you can see here I have this split out node this is native to NN but it’s going to take the data that we got split it out and now we’re going to be able to get those individual pieces and pass it into a table into a separate table where pretty much all that enriched data that we have can sit but the issue that we’re going to have is we want to verify so we’re going to use we’re going to use
(07:32) the um information that we split out and pass through another API and then some and some more code to further arrange the data in the way we want so we can verify it to make sure all the emails that we have are good to send and do what we what we need to do with it as we proceed to the email verification phase of this flow I did want to take a step back just to recognize the tool that we’re using Ron is actually a really good tool for emao verification but there are are some other options you may want to use things like zero bounds boun
(08:03) ay um there’s male verifier um and there’s a tons of different ones on the market we actually found this cool get repo that went through this whole massive test to figure out which one’s good and have all these cool little ratings and reviews for different ver email verifiers and a bunch of other tools the real reason why we’re using um Ron is mostly because it has access to an API so it’s going to work well for us when we’re trying to pass through things programmatically um also has some like nice little simple features like a nice
(08:33) dashboard um a few other few other components that makes it helpful but a lot of these things can be replicated as you’ll see later on this video um especially that dashboard piece where we’re going to take some of the data that Ron provides and we’re going to make our own interface on air table so this verification section you might be wondering what’s going on essentially what we’re doing is we we got we developed this code here to arrange our data in such a way in such a way that we can pass it through and submit our emails for
(09:06) verification to Ron and if you look at their documentation they kind of explain it themselves here where we would submit the emails we would create the task we would pass in all the emails um in in the way they’re asking um with the API key that they provide um and we’re passing this through their bu email validation endpoint which you’ll see this is what that URL looks like um and then after that we’re going to be waiting you know we set up a wait to wait for the results of that verification um and they’re going to
(09:41) return back with the results that we’re looking for so you’ll get things like is this a catch all is this deliverable um is this disposable is it safe to send all these different things are going to be real important as we’re going to be using this to filter and figure out which is like a good email bad email how should we continue proceeding this is why the verification piece is so important as we go through the enrichment process so all that is happening in this section here so I pretty much summarize all the stuff
(10:09) that’s basically happening here and why we’re doing what we’re doing with the weight and all that stuff and once we’re done with all that we’re going to then take the results split it out and we’re going to update update what we entered here and update that same table and air table and that pretty much walks us through the entire flow that we did here that’s how you would do an email verification or email enrichment verification process of course you’re going to have to go through apollo.
(10:37) I’s enrichment API documentation to kind of sort through and figure out what you want to pull and all the other stuff but this explains the the whole flow of how you would do it so before I start in the whole automation piece I want to go ahead and just kind of show you what the beginning stages of what that da is going to look like um just for privacy reasons the information has been like blacked out but you’ll you can see like first name last name title just simple stuff that you would probably start off with if you’re going to be working with
(11:06) any sort of like lead list or email list that you may have the end state of everything once everything’s gone through the automation has been enriched and verified is you’ll be able to see things like the the email the or more more verified email last name some more information about the company uh email RIS status all these things are going to end up in the end State when the automation has fully been ran through you’ll end up having this in this table which is like a separate table from what was unenriched so this is what that
(11:36) process is going to look like I just want to show you that before we kind of go into the whole process um and how it’s going to end up looking like this at the at the end so now with our automation being done and everything sitting in our air table I wanted to show you this real cool leadless Health dashboard that we built which pretty much takes all the information that we house in our air Table after the verification and the validation has been done and we’re we’re actually able to have like a kind of like a health
(12:04) dashboard to see uh how our campaigns for prospecting is going right so we can actually see the total amount of contacts we have we can see the contacts with emails that we we currently house in our in our error table we can see the the amount of clean emails emails that actually they’re saying hey these are good to send like these are verified and then it’s been enriched and we can also see like how many contacts is actually in our CRM we have this whole process that we built out for doing it it’s pretty much fully automated so we don’t
(12:34) really have that loading piece we have to import into a table and that’s because we develop a process of going through air table and building a whole list it’s pretty complicated but the whole point is this is kind of like an end state with how you would want to build something similar um you do need air table premium to do something like this but this is a cool interface that you can kind of build once you kind of have all that data being housed in air table and that’s it we successfully enriched our lead data with the help of
(13:05) apollo.io having NN being the Workhorse to automate the whole process using Ron as a piece to verify our emails to make sure they’re legit and we house all that enich data in air table so now we can send this to pretty much anywhere we want with the help of apis we might want to sell into smart lead mail gun or even something like a serum like HubSpot and you don’t got to stop here you can make this as complex as you want for example that was something that we did we were able to build on top of this flow allowing us to make campaigns with the
(13:36) help of apollo.io list making the entire process fully automated so we don’t even have to do the whole import piece I hope you found this video tutorial helpful if you have any questions don’t forget to leave comments down below don’t forget to like subscribe and ring the notification Bell to let YouTube know hey like yo we like this content we want more of it and without further Ado I bid you I do and uh I catch you on the next one peace [Music]
Summary
This video explains how to leverage Apollo’s enrichment API and automate lead enrichment and validation for prospecting, using tools like Airtable, n8n, and email verifiers. Starting with a basic spreadsheet of contacts, users can automate the process by importing data into Airtable, where it is cleaned and normalized. From there, n8n workflows push batches of leads through Apollo’s API for data enrichment, fetching details like verified emails and phone numbers. The video emphasizes validating email addresses with verification tools like “Ron” to ensure leads are active and safe to contact. Finally, enriched and verified data is presented in Airtable, where users can analyze lead health and send contacts to CRMs like HubSpot or email tools like Mailgun.
Key Takeaways
Apollo’s enrichment API, combined with Airtable and n8n, makes it easy to gather accurate contact information for leads. By creating a workflow to clean, enrich, and verify leads, users can focus on high-quality outreach rather than data entry. Key steps include importing contacts into Airtable, using n8n to run automated API calls with Apollo’s enrichment, and filtering out low-quality contacts through email validation. The setup also includes a lead health dashboard in Airtable that shows metrics like the percentage of clean, verified emails, helping teams quickly assess their data quality.
Conclusion
This setup provides a seamless way to handle lead enrichment, validation, and outreach. Automating prospecting through Apollo’s API with n8n and Airtable saves time and ensures accuracy, making it ideal for teams aiming to boost lead quality in their sales funnel. With this method, users can create a steady pipeline of qualified leads, fully enriched and validated, ready for personalized engagement.