This library calculates a 'lead score', a simple score which gives you some indication that an email address is either associated with an influential individual, or a high profile company.

This score is especially useful for sales and marketing. For example, you could calculate scores for all your inbound sales inquires and also for existing customers, providing a good signal for valuable leads.

Behind the scenes, this library uses Clearbit, a data API which returns information on email addresses and company domain names. That information is then used to calculate a (fairly rudimentary) score taking into account such things as how many Twitter followers the person has, or if how much the company has raised, how many employees it has, etc.

Scores are out of 1.0, where 1.0 is the highest and 0.0 the lowest (we didn't find any information).

Firstly you'll need an Clearbit API key - register there and save your key. Clearbit provides 50 free lookups a month.

Then install the gem, clearbit-leadscore. A CLI is provided for simple email lookups.

gem install clearbit-leadscore

$ clearbit-leadscore
  Usage: clearbit-leadscore [options] email
      -k, --api-key                    Set API Key
      -h, --help                       Display this screen


clearbit-leadscore --api-key CLEARBIT_KEY [email protected]

There's also a Ruby API.

Clearbit::LeadScore.key = ENV['CLEARBIT_KEY']

result = Clearbit::LeadScore.lookup(email)

if result
  puts "Name: #{result.person.try(:name)}"
  puts "Company name: #{result.company.try(:name)}"

  if result.score > 0.5
    puts "Baller"
  end
else
  puts "Person or company not found"
end

As well as just passing an email, there are a number of additional options you can send to Clearbit::LeadScore.lookup, such as the weights that are used internally. You could also just use the information returned to calculate your own score.

The default options are:

{
  twitter_followers_weight:   0.05,
  angellist_followers_weight: 0.05,
  klout_score_weight:         0.05,
  company_twitter_followers_weight: 0.05,
  company_alexa_rank_weight:  0.000005,
  company_google_rank_weight: 0.05,
  company_employees_weight:   0.5,
  company_raised_weight:      0.0000005,
  company_score:              10,
  total_score:                1415
}