What are database contacts?

Most business email addresses can be obtained from public sources - such as company websites, search engines, social profiles, etc. These are always gathered fresh by LeadSwift. When you start a search, we scour the web for email addresses associated with the businesses. There's no outdated databases.

However, public sources are unlikely to contain email addresses of actual employees working at the organization. To capture individuals, we rely on a combination of third-party partners and our own proprietary technology. The process may include identifying patterns for employee email addresses, and then testing such combinations for a match. The email verification process for individuals is more cumbersome and necessitates maintaining a database.

Unless absolutely necessary, we always recommend ignoring database contacts. Unlike generic business email addresses, these are more likely to go stale as individuals frequently change their email addresses or move on to other companies. As well, since LeadSwift always lists the source of every email address, it is much easier to explain how you found their contact when it's through a public source (such as on their website or Google rather than a database).

For most small businesses, the generic business email address is likely monitored by the decision-maker anyway. A mom-and-pop restaurant or HVAC technicians wouldn't have a dedicated customer support channel to monitor inbound queries. In fact, most small businesses likely don't even provide email addresses to their employees, nor would they have professional profiles (i.e. LinkedIn) to connect them to the business. Restricting outreach to individuals would then entirely, and unnecessarily, exclude such businesses.

The goal of LeadSwift is to help you quickly find and reach as many local businesses as possible. These small businesses are the ones that are likely to purchase your product or service. Selling to larger organizations would require a more focused approach than a cold email outreach.