The Scraping Robot Guide to Email Scraping

Digital marketers rely on email campaigns to notify subscribers and customers about available products and services. Most businesses start with minimal lists of contacts. To expand their lists, they resort to “cold email marketing,” sending emails to individuals not currently on a business subscriber list.

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However, marketers use email addresses as a starting point for cold email marketing. Locating that information manually is a time-consuming process that isn’t always reliable. That’s why many businesses turn to email scraping to streamline the collection of contact information.

What is Email Web Scraping?

Email scraping is a way for marketers to gather consistent contact information on potential leads. A program examines web pages, extracts email addresses and other information, then uploads the data to a storage format like a database or Excel file. Businesses can also use email scrapers to collect data from social networks.

Instead of having an employee go out and collect email addresses one by one, email scrapers automate the process. As a result, they can collect more information in minutes than one person can in hours. Good email scraping tools can collect, process, and render data scraped from a web page in graphical form. Here’s a general breakdown of what a typical email scraper does.

• Users load the email scrapers with parameters to use to narrow down prospective websites, including information like keywords and date of publication.
• The web scraper uses those parameters to locate websites to target and focuses on lines containing the “@” symbol or the word “email.”
• The program collects the email address information and saves it to a database.

What Should I Consider When Using an Email Scraper?

Some challenges come with using email addresses scraped from websites to create cold email marketing lists. First, you need to think about the sites you’re targeting with your email scraping software. Have you loaded the correct parameters into the application? Is the site it’s pulling information from legitimate?

The best way to ensure that the websites targeted by an email scraper pass the smell test is to research beforehand. Ensure that the information provided to the web scraper is relevant to your company’s industry and its products and services.

Think about the email addresses themselves. Have the users given their consent to make that information public? You don’t want to make the mistake of contacting someone with an email address published without their knowledge.

You should also consider the quality of the email addresses. Are they current addresses or ones that will produce a high bounce-back rate? You don’t want to set up email campaigns using lists consisting of outdated contact information.

Finally, what kind of emails do you plan to send to your contacts? Be careful about sending out blasts to tons of email addresses hoping that a few will bite. Those recipients might mark them as spam, which could hurt your business reputation. That might also put you in conflict with local spamming laws.

Using email addresses to establish legitimate connections with potential subscribers is better. If you have valid addresses on your contact list, they can become the basis for creating more targeted campaigns using ad services from Google or Facebook.

What are the Benefits of an Email Scraper?

Most public and private entities rely on the internet for a large chunk of their business. Charities and other non-profit organizations can cut down on the time it takes to find people to reach out to with fundraising emails. Other benefits of using email scrapers for collecting email addresses include:

Less expensive

Email scraping services are more cost-effective than paying someone to perform the same task manually. You can set it up to run automatically, providing a consistent flow of updated information. The efficiency of an email scraper makes it more budget-friendly for smaller companies.

Fast implementation

After deploying the program, email scrapers collect everything from a webpage domain. Making a small upfront investment pays off by providing a way to continuously extract a lot of web data.

Low maintenance

A high-quality email scraping program typically requires very little maintenance. Once developers set up the correct parameters, the tool runs as directed until the company decides to make changes.

More accurate

Making a mistake in data collection can lead to major errors in your digital marketing. A robust email scraper tool gives you the accuracy necessary when collecting email addresses and other data relevant to your company.

How Does Email Scraping Benefit Digital Marketing?

Businesses can leverage email scraping programs for other purposes in addition to extracting email addresses from web pages. Below are examples of how you can use an email scraper to shape other digital marketing decisions, including information from:

• Blog posts — Use your email scraper to collect data from relevant blog posts, including meta tags and URLs. Once you have what you need, utilize the information to construct posts on your site and attract more visitors.
• Social media outlets — People use social media to express their opinion about what they think of different companies. Companies can leverage web scraping tools to pick up and store customer feedback. Brands can look at the emotional responses and figure out what customers do and don’t like to help improve their marketing strategies.
• Competitor sites — Deploy email scrapers to collect data from a competitor’s blogs and social media sites, including the keywords they use and how they label different products. Use the info to set up counter-marketing efforts that attract the attention of their customers.

Why Do Some See Email Scraping as a Negative?

While there are many advantages to using web scraping tools, past behavior has led to skepticism and negative opinions on their use. Below are examples of how people have misused web scraping tools.

• Individuals ignore copyrights and use email scraping tools even if a website prohibits them.
• Users overload sites by sending multiple requests per second, much faster than an average person.
• Web scrapers are used to bypass security measures designed to keep people from automatically downloading web page information.

Is Email Scraping Legal?

There have been legal issues around the use of email scraping tools. Web scraping, in general, is permitted if the deployed program complies with set policies. The issues that arise tend to be about how a company will use the data collected by the application. There’s no problem if you use an email scraper to pick up information from your own site.

Email scraping for digital marketing typically falls under legal web scraping. For example, there’s no problem if you’re collecting reviews posted about a brand or negative feedback left by customers. Likewise, it’s generally ok to analyze financial information posted by rivals, like the prices set for competing products.

Essentially, you should be alright if you limit your collection to publicly available data. That would include email addresses posted to be accessible to everyone on the internet. However, it’s always good to check out a website’s Terms of Use to see if they explicitly state that they don’t want email scrapers or other data automation tools used on their site. In addition, you should be usually avoid scraping:

• Copyrighted data
• Private info that requires a user id and passcode to access
• Selling personal information collected by web scrapers to a third party

Does Email Scraping Conflict With Data Privacy Laws?

Two significant pieces of legislation put in place to protect online privacy for users are the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Other states also have legislation designed to keep information about consumers private. You must understand how those laws impact your use of email scraping programs.

Any person can ask your company about the information you collect and save that refers to them. Ensure you immediately answer any questions they pose to stay compliant with any applicable laws.

These laws also outline your responsibilities regarding securely storing and protecting personal information, including encrypting the data. You’re also not allowed to sell information about a person to a third party unless they grant you explicit permission.

Email Scraping Made Easy

Scraping Robot lets companies set up projects targeted at websites containing relevant data. Use the pre-built modules to quickly set up and deploy email scraping robots for digital marketing and other business purposes. In addition, we can build you a custom module that fits your business needs if necessary.

Get information from the web quickly and seamlessly. Let us know what information you need and how often, and we can craft a custom solution for your organization. Use Scraping Robot’s email scraping process to pick up everything from social media information to pricing information from competitors.

Check out the pricing for our email scraper and see if it fits your budget. Or sign up for 5,000 free scrapes here before purchasing more credits. Feel free to contact Scraping Robot with any other questions.

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