Why Enrichment Accuracy Drops When You Leave the US

Most enrichment tools publish a single accuracy number. "93% email find rate." "85% coverage." What they don't tell you is where those numbers come from. Almost always, they're based on US contacts at mid-to-large companies with standard email conventions. The moment you step outside that sample, the numbers fall apart.

If your sales team prospects across multiple countries, or even across the US and Canada, you've probably noticed this without having language for it. Some profiles come back with full contact info. Others come back empty. The split isn't random. It's geographic.

Where enrichment data actually comes from

Enrichment databases are built from a mix of sources: public web scraping, data partnership agreements, user-contributed data, government filings, and social media profiles. The volume and quality of these sources vary enormously by country.

In the US, there's a dense ecosystem of business data. SEC filings are public. Company websites follow standard patterns. LinkedIn penetration is extremely high. Business directories like Crunchbase, ZoomInfo, and D&B have deep coverage. The result is that US contact data is relatively abundant and relatively accurate.

Outside the US, the picture changes fast. European contacts are harder to find because GDPR has restricted how data is collected, shared, and stored. Asian markets have different professional networks (WeChat for China, LINE for Japan) that Western scraping tools don't reach. African and South American markets have even thinner coverage because the data providers serving enrichment tools simply don't invest in those regions.

The numbers nobody publishes

When an enrichment vendor says "90% accuracy," ask them on what sample. If the test set is 80% US contacts at companies with 500+ employees, that number tells you very little about your pipeline if you're selling into the UK, Germany, or Australia.

When I tested three enrichment tools on mixed-geography profiles earlier this year, US-based contacts at known companies returned data 70-85% of the time depending on the tool. European contacts dropped to 40-60% across those same three tools. APAC and Latin American contacts would likely drop further, though my sample was too small to say definitively.

One example: none of the three tools I tested could find an email address for a UK-based contact in the sample. A senior in-house counsel at a mid-size company. That said, the UK is one of the better-covered international markets. Tools like Cognism that specialize in EMEA data would likely have found it. The point isn't that UK contacts are unreachable. It's that the US-centric tools most teams default to have uneven coverage outside North America, and the gaps get worse the further you move from English-speaking markets.

Why the gap exists

Three factors drive the disparity.

Data collection economics. Building and maintaining contact databases is expensive. Providers concentrate their investment where the largest customer base is: US-based sales teams selling to US-based companies. International data is a secondary priority because fewer customers ask for it, and the collection methods that work in the US (web scraping, public filings, LinkedIn data) are less effective or legally restricted elsewhere.

Email format unpredictability. US companies overwhelmingly use firstname.lastname@company.com or some close variation. This makes pattern-based email guessing (which many tools rely on before running SMTP verification) fairly reliable. Other markets use more varied formats: initials, numbers, nicknames, non-Latin characters transliterated inconsistently. A pattern-matching model trained on US conventions produces garbage when applied to a company in Seoul or Sao Paulo.

LinkedIn coverage gaps. Enrichment tools lean heavily on LinkedIn for professional data. LinkedIn's market share varies by country. It's dominant in the US, strong in the UK, Canada, and Australia, weaker in continental Europe, and much weaker in Asia. If your prospect isn't on LinkedIn or has a minimal profile, the enrichment tool has less to work with.

What this means for your outbound workflow

If you're prospecting internationally and treating enrichment output as uniformly reliable, you're going to have problems.

Your bounce rates will be uneven. The same enrichment tool that gives you a 2% bounce rate on US emails might give you 8-10% on European emails. If you're sending from the same domain and the same sequences, the international bounces drag down your sender reputation across all your campaigns.

Your coverage gaps will be invisible until you measure them. Most teams track aggregate enrichment rates. "We found emails for 75% of our list." If your list is 60% US and 40% international, that 75% is hiding the fact that you found emails for 85% of US contacts and 55% of international ones. You won't see this unless you segment your metrics by geography.

Your AI tools can help with the analysis but not the underlying data. You can throw your enrichment results into Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to segment accuracy by country or region. That will show you where the gaps are. But no amount of analysis fixes the fact that the data doesn't exist in the provider's database. AI can identify the problem. It can't manufacture verified contact data that no source has.

How to work around geographic accuracy gaps

Accept that no single tool covers everything. This is the core argument for waterfall enrichment. A tool that's strong on US data might be weak on European data, and vice versa. Running contacts through multiple sources sequentially gives you better total coverage than any single provider. Waterfall enrichment tools (like ShareCo SalesSync) query multiple databases automatically. If you're using a single-source tool like Apollo or Lusha, you'd need to manually check contacts across platforms to get comparable coverage.

Segment your lists by geography before enriching. If you know which contacts are US-based and which are international, you can set different expectations and different follow-up workflows. US contacts with missing data might be worth one more lookup attempt. International contacts with missing data might need a completely different sourcing approach: manual research, referral requests, or inbound capture instead of outbound.

Track your enrichment rates and bounce rates by country. This takes five minutes to set up in a spreadsheet or BI tool, and it'll show you exactly where your data quality drops off. Most teams that start tracking this are surprised by how wide the gap is.

Use region-specific providers for your toughest markets. If you sell into Germany, a DACH-focused data provider will outperform a US-centric tool on German contacts. Same for tools focused on the UK, France, or APAC markets. The major enrichment platforms are generalists. Specialists exist for most major markets, and combining a generalist with a specialist for your key regions produces better results than either alone.

The vendor conversation you should have

If your enrichment tool claims 90%+ accuracy, ask for the breakdown by region. Most vendors won't have this readily available, which tells you something. The ones that do will usually confirm what you'd expect: strong US coverage, weaker elsewhere.

Ask whether the tool's waterfall includes region-specific data sources. Some waterfall enrichment providers route lookups through different provider sequences based on the contact's geography. A US contact might hit providers A, B, and C. A European contact might hit providers D, E, and A. This kind of geographic routing produces better results than running every contact through the same US-optimized sequence.

Ask about GDPR compliance for European contacts. Some providers serve EU email data that was collected before GDPR enforcement tightened, or from sources that don't comply with consent requirements. Using non-compliant data exposes you to regulatory risk and means the data might disappear from the provider's database when they're eventually forced to clean it.

The realistic expectation

If you're selling exclusively to US-based companies, US-based enrichment tools will generally deliver close to their advertised numbers. Not exactly, but close enough to build outbound campaigns on.

If you're selling internationally, plan for a 20-40% drop in enrichment accuracy outside the US with those same tools. Budget more time for manual research on high-value international prospects or have multiple enrichment tools for different geographic markets. Track your metrics by region so you can see where the gaps are instead of letting them hide in aggregate numbers.

No tool has solved this fully. The ones that claim to usually just haven't been tested on a genuinely international sample.