Playbook

Enrich Gmail signups with firmographic info

Automatically find the person and company behind the personal email.

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Teams:

Marketing, Sales

Sources:

Google Sheets import logoGoogle Sheets importCSV import logoCSV import

Overview

Product-led growth (PLG) business models come with a lot of pros.

To name a few:

✅ Users prefer to self-serve products rather than talking with sales reps.

✅ Lead acquisition becomes easier as the barrier to entry and commitment is lower.

✅ You get all sorts of intent data from users evaluating the product.

While the benefits often outweigh the drawbacks, there are some challenges that come from a product-led approach to growth.

One challenge is the influx of inbound users who sign up using a personal email.

Gmail often makes up the bulk of the volume here, but other free email providers like iCloud, Outlook, Yahoo, and even AOL show up.

And even though it’s sometimes possible to find the person behind the ISP email address, it’s a painstaking process (e.g., search the person's name if it’s in the email handle + LinkedIn and manually input details from any matches).

In this playbook, we'll show you how to bypass the painstaking Gmail enrichment process and automatically enrich leads with firmographic info using Common Room.

Let’s do this!

What you’ll need

Common Room: What we’ll use for email enrichment—sign-up for free to follow along.
Google Sheets or CSV: We’ll import a CSV of our latest Gmail leads.
CRM or Data Warehouse: For more advanced use, we can connect to the source-of-truth for user signups to automate enrichment.

Step 1: Import users via CSV or Google Sheet

The easiest way to test Gmail enrichment is to import a CSV or sheet into Common Room.

We suggest starting with anywhere from 100-1000 users who recently signed up for a free trial using a personal email address. Gmail typically makes up about 80-90% of these users.

You’ll need to create a Common Room account if you haven’t already. From there, you can click to jump into the Members view.

Members overview with connected sources
Members overview with connected sources
Note: The screenshot above shows what that looks like when many sources are connected (e.g., HubSpot, Snowflake, LinkedIn). If you’re starting from a blank slate, this will be empty. But we can quickly fix that with a quick CSV import.

Click on the + Add new members button in the top right. This will trigger a menu to import new members, allowing us to import users by email, Twitter handle, LinkedIn URL, or GitHub username individually or in bulk.

Add a new member individually or in bulk
Add a new member individually or in bulk

We want to import a relatively large spreadsheet of recent signups, so we’ll select the Bulk add or update members link.

This will bring us to a wizard that guides us to add import users to an existing segment and add activity. Let’s add these members to a new segment and name it something with context.

Add members to a new segment in bulk
Add members to a new segment in bulk
Note: When importing via CSV, you’ll need to format it using this members import template.

We can click Continue to import our CSV with our new segment created.

Import new members by uploading spreadsheet
Import new members by uploading spreadsheet

After uploading the file, you’ll be asked to confirm field mappings, review, and complete the import.

Confirm mappings and import your list of customers
Confirm mappings and import your list of customers
Note: While email is the only field required, the more detail you can fill in from the import template, the higher your match rate will be (i.e., we’ll find more matches that can be enriched with firmographic data).

Confirm field mapping, and your list will begin to import. This takes a few minutes, depending on the size of your list.

Onto the next step!


Step 2: Tag enriched users

After waiting a while, we can return to our list and identify enriched users.

To do that, we can go to the Members menu and locate the Search all members input box on the top right of the screen.

Filter users by Gmail email addresses
Filter users by Gmail email addresses

And we’ll input “gmail.com” in this box. Doing so will give us a filtered view of all gmail signups.

We’ll then click on the + Add filter button and locate the Has organization filter option.

Before selecting Yes, make note of the number of results showing. Then click Yes.

This will give us a filtered member view of enriched users.

Notice that as you hover over a user profile or when you click the Preview button, you’ll see firmographic info like current employment, role, past jobs, company size, and more.

Example of enriched Gmail user
Example of enriched Gmail user

Next, we can apply a custom tag to all enriched members.

To add a tag, we’ll click select the checkbox in the top left of the member overview pane to select all members. Then, we’ll add a custom tag (like “Enriched”) by selecting the More actions drop-down and the Tag option.

Apply a custom tag to enriched users
Apply a custom tag to enriched users

With that, our enriched users will be tagged, which we can use to operationalize workflows, apply a higher score, and build custom views.


Step 3: Export enriched users

For our last step, we can export our enriched users.

To do that, head to the Segments view and choose + New segment. And we’ll select the option to Create a new segment for members.

Create a new member segment
Create a new member segment

This will open up a modal to name our new segment. We can call it something memorable like “Enriched Gmail users.”

Create a new member segment
Create a new member segment

With our segment created, we can click to Set criteria and apply a Tag filter using the tag we created in the previous step. This will automatically add all the enriched Gmail users to our segment.

Auto add/remove members to a segment
Auto add/remove members to a segment

And finally, we can click the Export button and choose an option to export all fields or just basic user data.

Export enriched users to CSV
Export enriched users to CSV

(Bonus) Step 4: Connect your user data

Until now, this playbook has been mostly demonstrative of how Common Room can enrich personal emails.

But the real value comes when you connect to a data source of product activity and new signups. Common sources include Snowflake, Salesforce, HubSpot, Census, Hightouch, or API.

Connecting new sources is easy and can be done in just a few steps.

Connect to business data sources
Connect to business data sources
Note: Many business data sources require user permissions to connect.

Wrapping up

In this playbook, we showed a quick, yet manual method for enriching users who sign up with a personal email domain like Gmail or Yahoo.

When we connect an always-on data source, all of this enrichment happens automatically as new users are detected in Common Room. And the more sources you integrate, the better enrichment you’ll see.

rocket ship blasting off

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