How Clay Grows Faster by Integrating ZenRows As a Feature

“We power it all with ZenRows. It’s the most cost-effective and reliable data enrichment tool on the market.”

Eric Nowoslawski

Certified Expert at Clay

Struggling with Costly and Unreliable Data Enrichment

Clay, a data-powered no-code platform, enables companies to run highly personalized outbound sales campaigns at scale. However, they were struggling to enrich their data through web scraping, a crucial step for achieving personalization. Proxy networks were costly and unreliable, resulting in regular scraping failures and hindering their ability to deliver tailored outreach efficiently.

Weak Proxies and Failed Scrapes

Before discovering ZenRows, Clay faced several challenges in their web scraping and data enrichment processes:

1. Wasted hours setting up and maintaining unreliable proxy networks, leading to frequent errors and inefficiencies.
2. Couldn't access highly-protected websites like Crunchbase due to their in-house scrapers getting blocked, limiting data collection capabilities.
3. Spent from 3 to 6 hours per scraped list on data preparation, from formatting proxies to cleaning and integrating data.
4. Faced major bottlenecks with large scraping tasks, sometimes taking up to two weeks to complete due to concurrency limits.

Higher Scraping Success While Minimizing Costs

After discovering ZenRows, Clay quickly integrated the Scraper API into their workflow, leading to big improvements in their data enrichment process. The built-in proxy network was a game-changer, eliminating the need to purchase and manage separate proxies.

ZenRows proved to be a far more cost-effective solution compared to traditional data providers, allowing Clay to optimize their budget without compromising on data quality. They could now easily scrape a wide variety of data sources, including highly-protected sites like Crunchbase, SimilarWeb, and ZoomInfo, which were previously challenging or impossible to access reliably.

Saving Time and Boosting Efficiency with Auto-Parsing

Implementing ZenRows led to significant improvements for Clay:

1. Reduced data preparation time from 3 to 6 hours per list to mere seconds, with just a simple JSON field mapping.
2. Reduced large scraping tasks from two weeks to just a few days.
3. Made the entire data-gathering process smoother and more efficient.