Person Enrichment API: Turn an Email into a Full Profile

A person enrichment API takes one identifier, usually a work email address or a LinkedIn URL, and returns what the provider knows about the person: name, title, employer and profile link. It is the cleanup step for leads that arrive with only an email and nothing else.

The problem it solves

Forms collect little. A sign-up gives you an email and perhaps a first name. A sales rep sees [email protected] and has no idea whether that is an intern or a VP. Enrichment fills the gap so that routing, scoring and personalisation can use real fields instead of guesses.

It is the reverse of the email finder, which goes from a name to an address, and it differs from people search, which begins at a company. If your input is an address and you want the person, you want enrichment. The companion guide on reverse email lookup looks at that workflow from the lead-capture side.

BusinessMCP’s endpoint in detail

The service documented on the People Data API page exposes enrichment as a POST to /api/hub/v1/people/enrich, with the MCP tool name person_enrich. It costs $0.10 per call, charged only when a result is found. It is the most expensive of the three people endpoints, which makes sense because it may resolve a whole profile from one input.

Input	Required	Limit stated
email	Optional, email format	320 characters
linkedin_url	Optional	300 characters

Both are optional on paper, which means you supply at least one. The page describes the function as name, title, employer and LinkedIn from a work email, “or the reverse”, so an input of a profile URL can return the work email. Response field names and sample outputs live in the developer documentation linked from the page, not on it, so we do not list keys here.

Key takeaway: enrichment returns the provider’s best match for an identifier. Always keep the original input beside the output, so a wrong match can be detected and reversed.

Where enrichment helps

• Lead routing. Send enterprise-sized prospects to account executives and small teams to a self-serve flow, based on title and employer.
• Form shortening. Ask only for an email and enrich the rest, which can lift completion rates on signup forms. Test this on your own funnel before assuming a gain.
• CRM hygiene. Fill missing titles and employers in old records, then flag contacts whose employer changed.
• Agent workflows. An AI sales agent that has only an inbound email can enrich it and decide on a reply.

For account-level fields such as industry and size, a company lookup is cheaper. BusinessMCP lists its company data API at $0.02 per call when a company is found, which is often enough when the question is “what kind of business is this?” rather than “who is this person?”.

What it will not do

The rules attached to the product are as important as the fields. Per the provider’s page, it never returns people located in the EU, EEA, UK or Switzerland, nor people placed in California, Texas, Vermont or Oregon, nor US people who cannot be placed in a state. When a person’s own state is unknown the employer’s state is used. An enrichment call for someone in an excluded location is therefore expected to come back empty, not to fail.

That behaviour reflects how personal data law works. The GDPR defines personal data broadly, as any information relating to an identified or identifiable person, and a work email with a title and employer plainly qualifies. A provider that declines to serve those regions reduces its exposure; it does not remove yours if you collect the same person’s data from other sources. Our article on people data and GDPR goes deeper.

The page also says that opted-out people are removed within about a day and that every people call is logged against the account with a declared purpose. Use for credit, employment, insurance or housing decisions is prohibited. If you are tempted to enrich candidates for hiring screens, stop: that is outside the permitted use.

Evaluating match quality yourself

No accuracy figure is published for this endpoint, and it is wise to be sceptical of any provider that quotes one without describing its test. Build your own.

1. Export 100 leads whose true title and employer you already know.
2. Enrich them all and tally found, not found and wrong.
3. Separate wrong from stale. A title that was right last year counts differently from a different person entirely.
4. Compute cost per correct record: total spend divided by correct matches, not by calls.
5. Repeat on a second segment, because performance often varies by company size and region.

You may find that coverage is thin where a provider’s store is small. BusinessMCP’s own comparison with larger databases acknowledges that its people tools cover fewer regions and that its store is smaller than the biggest vendors’, and it lists no phone data. That candour is useful when you decide whether to run enrichment as your only source or as one step in a chain.

Enrichment compared with the other two endpoints

Question	Best endpoint	Billing unit at BusinessMCP
Who are the senior people at this company?	Search	$0.08 per item
What is this named person’s work email?	Email finder	$0.04 per call
Who is behind this email or profile?	Enrichment	$0.10 per call

Choosing correctly saves money. Running enrichment on a name you already hold wastes the more expensive call, and running search when you hold a specific email returns many people you did not ask about. Read the full endpoint list on the Data API overview before you wire up anything, because the same key also covers company and IP lookups, which can answer account-level questions more cheaply.

A note on inputs you should not enrich

Be careful with personal webmail addresses. The endpoint is described as a business-contact service and returns work details, so a Gmail address is unlikely to resolve and may not be appropriate to submit. Filter obvious consumer domains out of the batch before you call, which also saves the unneeded spend. For leads whose work email you do have, deduplicate by lowercase address first so a repeat submission is not billed twice. Finally, log each call with a purpose note; the provider logs people calls against your account with the declared purpose, and your own log should agree with it.

Handling the output safely

Store the date of enrichment and the source. Re-check records before a big campaign instead of trusting a year-old export. Do not overwrite a field your own team entered by hand without a rule for which source wins. And never display enriched facts back to the person in a way that reveals how much you know about them; it erodes trust faster than any bounce. The provider checklist lists the questions to settle before this goes into production.