Another Great Way to Save Clay Credits: The Polaris API

While Clay is one of our favorite tools for prospecting, enrichment and personalization, if you’re anything like me, you blow through these credits quickly – and it definitely adds up!

While Clay is a premium product, it comes at a premium price. That was until I discovered the Polaris API rather recently.

They’ve built a tool that can be used on-top of Clay that’s cheaper and works similar to if not better than Clay itself. We got an exclusive demo of the API, and TLDR: we’re really excited about it.

Using Polaris with Clay HTTP Requests

While Clay has a bunch of built-in enrichments from different data providers, if you’re on the Explorer plan or above, you have access to their HTTP API. This allows you to connect Clay to different data providers (through APIs).

This essentially means that we’re not limited to the pre-built enrichments that Clay has on their platform; we can use any data provider that has an API to add data to Clay.

If you’re not technical, that’s ok. I'll still go over how to setup the PolarisAPI in Clay to save you some money on credits. 

To get started with HTTP Requests in Clay we’re going to add an enrichment and search for “HTTP API”

Select the POST method, and enter the endpoint at:

https://api.polarisprospects.com/{endpoint}

There are four endpoints we’ll talk about below but replace “/{endpoint}” with the respective endpoint:

• /enrich
• /write_salesgpt
• /email_finder
• /email_verify

Additionally, we’re going to want to set up our API key.

API keys live in the headers of the request.

Go to “Headers”, click “Add New Key & Value Pair”, and enter the following:

In the Key we’re going to enter API-Key (this is case sensitive), and in the value you’re going to enter the API Key you were able to get from PolarisAPI's site.

Now that we’ve got this setup, let’s discuss the different endpoints you can use and how to get those set up.

Four Different Features

There are four different endpoints that Polaris currently offers:

Enrichment

The enrichment endpoint lives at api.polarisprospects.com/enrich and lets you enrich your Clay prospects with a treasure-trove of data; This is like using 7 Clay credits in one! When you enrich prospects with the PolarisAPI, you’ll get the following data:

• Prospect’s LinkedIn Profile (Profile data pulled into Clay)
• The Company’s LinkedIn Profile (Data pulled into Clay)
• Prospect Email Verification (Similar to ZeroBounce)
• Full scraped company website
• Summarized scraped company website
• The Company’s Business Model
• The Company Industry and Subindustry

In order to get all of this data, you’re going to need the Prospect’s Name, Prospect Email (which we’ll verify), the Prospect’s Linkedin URL, and the Company’s Linkedin URL.

In the Body section, add the following:

Replace everything that starts with a “/” with the dynamic data from Clay.

If done correctly, it should look like this:

{"prospect_name":"/prospect_name",

"prospect_email":"/prospect_email",

"prospect_linkedin_url":"/prospect_linkedin_url",

"company_linkedin_url":"/company_linkedin_url"}

Once you’ve done this, you’ll get a full enriched prospect in under 10 seconds.

If you see in the cell 200 that is good, that means your enrichment succeeded. 200 is computer language for success.

If you click into the cell, you’ll see all of the enrichments which you’re able to add as new columns in Clay.

/write (SalesGPT)

The Write SalesGPT endpoint is one of the most powerful AI-assisted email writers on the planet. They trained their own models of hundreds-of-thousands of successful outbound-emails.

This endpoint far outpaces even the most advanced (yet still generic) models like GPT-4, and writes emails that are human-sounding, and have incredibly strong copy.

How does it work? While this endpoint is still in closed beta, you can get early access by emailing sam@polarisprospects.com. The team expects to launch this writing tool in Early November, 2023 so stay tuned. 

Once you have access, to start, you’re going to want to make a POST request to the endpoint: https://api.polarisprospects.com/write and create a body message that looks like:

{“system_prompt”:”/system prompt”,”user_prompt”,”/user prompt”} (replace all of the “/variables” with the columns from Clay). Weather you want the result to be a line, or a full-fledged email, you’ll get copy that looks like this: 

/email_finder

The endpoint in the PolarisAPI is the /email_finder endpoint. The email finder endpoint allows you to take a prospect’s name, and the domain name of the company, and find the best valid email address.

Often you can guess the syntax of email addresses, but if you guess it wrong, and the email address bounces, that can hurt your future email deliverability, so finding the correct email address is very important.

Here's how to get the correct email address nearly 100% of the time:

Make a POST request to the Endpoint: https://api.polarisprospects.com/email_finder

The Body should look like this: 

{"first_name":"/First_name",

"last_name":"/Last_name",

"domain":"/domain"} 

(replace all of the “/variables” with the columns from Clay). The end result should look like this:

/email_verify

The Email Verify endpoint allows you to verify that the email address you’re trying to reach is active. This ensures that your email lands in the primary inbox as frequently as possible.

One problem people usually face when they’re just getting started with cold outreach, is that they send emails that haven’t been verified. If an email provider sees that you’re sending emails that keep bouncing, they’re more likely to end up in the spam folder.

The best part about Polaris’ Email Verify endpoint, is that it comes with free unlimited credits on any paid plan. This is incredibly powerful, as now you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on tools like BulkEmailChecker. Here’s how it works.

What you’re going to want to do is make a POST request to the Endpoint: https://api.polarisprospects.com/email_verify.

The Body should look like this: 

{"email":"/email"} 

(replace all of the “/variables” with the columns from Clay). If done successfully, you’ll get a 200 result that shows Valid, Invalid, or Unconfirmed:

Getting Setup with Polaris

The first thing you need to do is request an API Key from Polaris’s Website. You can request an API Key on their site.

An API-Key allows them to authenticate that you’re making the request to their servers.

When signing up, if you enter the code “Penguin” you’ll get 50 free enrichment credits.

Once you have your API key, it’s off to the races.

Polaris is one of the first companies we’ve seen that’s building tools to be used on-top of Clay.

I think this is a really unique way to add tools to existing workflows for companies. Let's see where things will go in the coming months!