4.09 credits per sendable lead, against a typical 6 to 20

The problem

The agency had no per lead cost baseline for its enrichment builds. It couldn't tell whether a campaign's credit use was normal. When the monthly allocation ran out, there was no number to point at.

What we built

Four segmented tables in Clay. Each one runs company discovery, then contact discovery, then an 11 provider email waterfall.

Then we priced every step against its own yield and against published benchmarks.

What it produced

• 9,694 credits produced 3,054 contacts and 2,369 confirmed emails. That's a 77.6 percent hit rate and 4.09 credits per confirmed lead.
• Cost per lead by segment ran from 3.49 to 4.39. The cheapest segment had the best hit rate, 87.6 percent. Cost followed hit rate.
• Contact discovery was 38.9 percent of total spend.
• 22.4 percent of contacts got no email through the whole waterfall, against a published range of 25 to 35 percent.
• The first provider took 82.8 percent of email spend and returned nearly every confirmed lead, at about 2 credits per cell.
• The tenth provider cost 6 credits per cell, three times the first. It only fired on contacts nine providers had already rejected.

A long waterfall isn't wrong. The tail just costs more per find than the head, and you should know by how much.

One more decision is in the numbers. Zero credits went to AI enrichment. Running it across 3,054 contacts was priced at 15,000 to 45,000 more credits, and the report said so.

Your scenario

If you can't tell whether your Clay spend is normal, send us your usage screen. We'll price it step by step.

Related tools: Clay, Prospeo, Findymail, FullEnrich, Work Email Waterfall Finder, Clay Waterfall Designer

Some of the links on this page are affiliate links.

Client names are always kept confidential at MMG, so they have been removed from this case study.

Published March 31, 2026

Last updated April 20, 2026