Do you know that email marketing ROI is higher than any other marketing channel nowadays? Its ROI can reach an impressive $36 for every $1 spent, even when many new marketing technologies and tactics are available. Email lead generation is a required course for every business. In this context, email addresses are the cornerstone to make out of it and get new customers. In this post, we’ll share the best practices to grab email addresses with web scraping for generating business leads.
Why Scraping Email Addresses for Lead Generation
There are about 4 billion daily email users worldwide, which is expected to reach 4.6 billion by 2025. Email is an effective way for businesses and customers to communicate because of its large user base. Web scraping is the technique that helps you extract email addresses from websites in bulk without clicking your mouse to copy and paste all day. When you have email addresses in a sufficient number, you can launch a direct marketing campaign via email to reach more customers.
Don’t forget that, email marketing is still the most effective strategy to reach potential customers in 2024. 87% of brands say that email marketing is critical to their business success, and 38% plan to increase their budgets for email marketing in 2023. Some statistics also show that people nowadays prefer to receive brand communications via email.
However, no one likes getting emails from strangers, especially receiving uninteresting and irrelevant content again and again. That’s why dynamic content is the top personalization tactic among email marketing teams. By scraping email addresses, you can prospect potential customers or organizations who might be interested in your products and services, then distribute targeted marketing campaigns directly to individuals to increase email engagement. As a result, email addresses might contribute to better sales performance and brand image.
Things Should Pay Attention to While Collecting Email Address
Seeking email addresses from websites can be a tempting approach for business leads, but there are three potential drawbacks you need to consider before launching your email scraper.
Privacy and consent
While using online platforms, people always expect a certain level of privacy. Almost all websites apply policies to protect users’ privacy. Thus, scraping email addresses without explicit permission might violate users’ privacy on many platforms. Improperly getting this data will also damage trust between your brand and customers, potentially leading to negative consequences for your business reputation.
Legal consideration
Besides ethical issues, scraping email addresses without proper consent may violate privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union or the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States. So, you need a clear image of relevant laws and regulations before you start your web scraping journey.
Quality and relevance
Although email marketing is effective, relying on inaccurate or irrelevant email addresses can be a waste of time and resources. While seeking email addresses online, data may not always be accurate or up-to-date or not be used for business purposes. Therefore, you need to pay more attention to distinguish proper addresses from countless lines of information.
Where to Get Email Addresses
When you need to build a highly targeted email list with email scrapers, the first thing is to find the proper source to pull data from. For example, job search platforms like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed are perfect for extracting email addresses for B2B leads. Here are some websites where you can extract email addresses for lead generation.
LinkedIn is the most famous networking platform in the world. It attracts more than 875 million users, and you can seek leads based on users’ backgrounds, skills, working history, etc., to identify ideal leads.
Indeed
Indeed is a job search engine with a vast and diverse user base of professionals from various industries and career levels. Also, many companies have company pages there to showcase their brand, culture, and job opportunities. Therefore, you can scrape data for organizations and individuals from Indeed.
Social Media
Billions of active users are using social media worldwide, making social media a valuable database for lead generation. Despite privacy concerns, some users, especially KOLs and professionals, still share email addresses for businesses or peers to reach out to. You can grab such emails on purpose to launch email campaigns.
Tips: for more websites that provide information for lead scraping, please check out our top list of websites for lead generation in 2024.
How to Build an Email Address Scraper
Octoparse is a one of the best email scraping tools for anyone, regardless of coding skills. While applying it to data extraction, you can easily build an email address scraper in only four steps. If this is your first time using Octoparse, you can download Octoparse for free and install it on your device first. Then, sign up for a new account or log in with your Google or Microsoft account. After that, you can unlock the powerful scraping features of Octoparse.
Method 1: 4 Steps to Build an Email Scraper with Octoparse
Step 1: Create a new task to scrape email addresses
Copy the URL of the page you want to scrape email addresses from and paste it into the search bar on Octoparse. Then, click “Start” to create a new email scraping task.
Step 2: Auto-detect email addresses on the page
The page will finish loading in Octoparse’s built-in browser in seconds. Next, click “Auto-detect webpage data” in the Tips panel, allowing Octoparse to scan the whole page and highlight extractable data on the page for you.
Auto-detection is one of the most-used features of Octoparse. It simplifies the process of selecting data on pages. That means you don’t need to select your wanted data by hand, but Octoparse will do it for you and “guess” what you’re looking for on the page. Also, all the detected data fields will be listed on the “Data Preview” panel at the bottom. You can check if the data is needed there.
Step 3: Create and modify the workflow
Once you’ve selected all the wanted data, click “Create workflow.” Then, a workflow will show up on your right-hand side. It’s an auto-generated flow chart that showcases every action of the scraper and how it works.
By clicking on each action on the workflow, you can check if the scraper runs as you expected. If any steps work improperly, you can edit or remove them from the chart. On the contrary, if you need more steps to meet your needs on scraping data, you can add new actions to it.
Step 4: Run the task and export scraped email addresses
After you’ve double-checked all the details, click on the Run button to launch the scraper. At this point, you’ll need to select to run the task on your device or Octoparse’s cloud-based platform.
- Running on a local device: running the task on your computer with your own IP is perfect for a quick run and troubleshooting.
- Running on cloud servers: because information on the Internet is fast-changing, cloud servers are preferable for web scraping. Running the task on Octoparse cloud servers can help you scrape data on 7/24 and make sure the scraped information is up-to-date.
When the scraping process is completed, you can export the data to a local file like Excel, CSV, JSON, etc., or a database like Google Sheets for further data cleansing and analysis.
Method 2: Grab Email Addresses with Preset Templates
Besides building a scraper yourself, there is a more effective way to scrape email addresses. Octoparse offers a list of preset templates for scraping data from most mainstream websites. While using these templates, you only need to enter several required parameters, then you can get the wanted data without any additional clicks. Thus, you can maximize your efficiency in collecting data with such templates, pay more time and effort analyzing data, and make the most of the scraped data.
There are 2 ways to find the template you need, you can check all the available templates in the Template Gallery section if you have downloaded Octoparse already. Or you can use the online scraping template of Email & Social Media Scraper without any download.
https://www.octoparse.com/template/email-social-media-scraper
Wrap Up
Email addresses are still valuable for marketing. This data allows you to reach out to potential customers and partners directly, that’s why email marketing enduring. It is also important to consider the quality and relevance of email addresses when analyzing marketing performance. Web scraping is a time-saving and effortless solution to scrape up-to-date email addresses for lead generation. So you can focus on modifying your marketing strategy. Try Octoparse now, and bring your business to a new level!
