How the buyer database actually works

The five-stage pipeline

Every contact in your audience walks through this pipeline:

Our data sources (in detail)

Apollo.io — verified B2B contact database

• Coverage: ~275M person profiles, ~73M companies. Strong on US + Canada retail buyers; coverage tapers in EU smaller chains.
• Compliance: SOC 2 Type II certified. GDPR-compliant for EU contacts (with documented legitimate interest).
• How we query: domain-and-role match. e.g., company:rona.ca AND title:[buyer OR procurement OR category manager].
• What we extract: work email, job title, LinkedIn URL, company name, location.
• What we ignore: phone numbers, personal emails, predicted compensation, predicted seniority levels.

Google Places API — public business listings

• Coverage: any business with a public Google Maps listing — strong on indie retailers, restaurants, gift shops.
• How we query: geography + place-type tags. e.g., type:gift_store, location:[Whistler BC] radius:5km.
• What we extract: business name, address, phone (optional), website URL, opening hours, up to 10 photos, ratings.
• Where the email comes from: our crawler visits the published website's /contact, /about pages and surfaces public role-based addresses (info@, hello@, orders@).

Verification process

Three checkpoints, in order:

Apollo classifies each email into:

• Verified — SMTP handshake completed cleanly. ~92% of our reveals.
• Likely deliverable — catch-all domain (the inbox can't be directly probed but the domain accepts mail). ~6%.
• Unverified — could not confirm. ~2%. Excluded by default; you can override per-contact.

Update cadence

Critically: we do not maintain a "Pitch2Retail master database" of contacts. Each audience is a live query. This means you don't pay for stale contacts and we don't have a giant honeypot of personal data sitting at rest.

Quality controls

• Personal email domains (gmail.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, etc.) are stripped at filter stage
• Generic catch-all roles you don't want are filtered (noreply@, no-reply@, donotreply@)
• Companies with active hiring freezes / acquisitions are flagged (Apollo metadata)
• Same-domain frequency cap: max 5 contacts at one company per audience (avoids carpet-bombing)
• Same-recipient frequency cap: max 1 pitch / 14 days regardless of campaign
• Vision filter excludes mismatched storefronts (e.g., a store tagged "gift_store" but photos show only auto parts)
• Audience-level cap on unverified-share: if > 10% of the audience is unverified, the build pauses for your review

Live metrics we publish

These numbers update continuously based on the trailing 30 days of platform activity. We publish them so you can audit our claims against current performance, not marketing copy from launch:

Per-tenant numbers are visible in your dashboard. Reply rates vary widely by category, list size, and pitch quality — the 3.2% above is the platform median.

What we exclude on principle

Independent audit + how to verify our claims

You don't have to take our word for it:

1. Test on yourself first. Build an audience using your own LinkedIn URL or a colleague's known business email — you'll see exactly what data the system surfaces.
2. Free 14-day trial sends 15 verified pitches. Reveal contacts, send to them, and watch your reply rate vs. our published median (3.2%) — enough volume to gut-check the workflow before committing to a paid month.
3. Apollo subscription portability. Bring your own Apollo API key (Growth+ plans) — you control the source, we just orchestrate.
4. Bounce + suppression logs are exportable. Every send / bounce / suppression event is in your audit log with timestamps. Export to CSV any time.
5. SOC 2 reports. Apollo's SOC 2 Type II is available under NDA. Our own SOC 2 Type I is targeted Q4 2026.

Found something wrong with the methodology or the metrics? Email hello@pitch2retail.com — we publish corrections.