When LinkedIn acquired the popular Rapportive email add-in, and after its best features were subsequently removed, a large number of angry users decided to go for an alternative.
And speaking of alternatives, Clearbit Connect may be one of the best options available on the market.
Clearbit may not sound like much to you, but the company currently serves as the data backbone to a large number of technology companies, including Asana, Braintree, Slack, Stripes, Zendesk, Zen Payroll, AdRoll, Intercom, Bugsnag, Mention, Segment. and many more.
Until today, the company did not offer any products aimed at the consumer. However, they realized that after the closure of Rapportive there was a void that nobody had covered. So they decided to launch an add-in for Gmail called Connect, which adds a sidebar similar to the one offered by Rapportive.
This widget provides details not only of the person you are emailing, but also information about their company, when available.
This information includes the person’s name, photo, title, location, URL and social accounts, as well as company name, address and other details such as number of employees, type (public or private) , financing, labels, social accounts, among other things.
With that alone, Connect would be better than Rapportive, which focuses more on the person you are contacting, and not on the details of their company.
However, Connect goes one step further. It can actually provide you with someone’s email address when you don’t have that information in your address book. On the “Compose” screen in Gmail, you will see that to the right of the “Send” button there is a small icon with the Connect logo and that clicking on it opens a new window.
First you type the domain of the company and then you enter the name or title of a person. In the list of results that appears, just click on the name of the person you want to send the email to and boom! your email address will appear.
And if you have doubts about the email that you found using Clearbit, you can check it on our Email verification tool in just seconds!