Email Crawling: The Secret to Business Growth

Email marketing remains a vibrant and powerful way to connect with your audience, build long-lasting relationships with them and subsequently, generate more sales-qualified leads for your business. From reduced marketing costs to highly targeted and immediate reach, the benefits of email marketing are innumerable. However, just as any other form of marketing, it also has its specific challenges.

In order to achieve a measurable ROI with your email campaign, you need to have a large list of contacts who are interested in your services and products. But building a valid email list from scratch and keeping it up-to-date is not a piece of cake. It requires a lot of time, patience, and extra effort. That’s why many newbie and seasoned marketers prefer to go for a faster and more convenient way – Email Harvesting.

What is Email Harvesting and How it Helps You Build and Execute a Successful Marketing Campaign?

Email harvesting is the practice of extracting mass email IDs both from online and offline sources with the aim to use the collected addresses for bulk messaging. There are a number of methods of email crawling,  from using harvesting software or involving professional data scraping services to purchasing email address books or hacking into websites. Although some of these methods, like buying email IDs or hacking into sites can lead to legal implications, others are legal and can bring a number of benefits to your business.

While data scraping is a tried and tested method of enhancing the effectiveness of any marketing campaign, the potential value of email crawling might still seem questionable, given the anti-spam laws and concerns over brand reputation issues. However, if you implement this method the right way without abusing others’ personal data for spamming, it can prove to be a powerful tool for improving the productivity of your overall marketing efforts.

It enables you to build a massive email list and expand your reach within the shortest timeframe and at the lowest cost. Rather than building dozens of landing pages and filling your website with pop-ups asking your visitors for their emails, you can use harvested emails to send bulk newsletters or promotions, and engage your prospects with valuable content.

Having a robust email database, you can establish and strengthen brand recognition with new and potential customers and if you manage to consistently break through the inbox clutter with quality content and nurture your email leads, you’ll eventually build up trust and long-lasting relationships with your audience. In this way, you will dramatically increase your website and in-store traffic which in its turn will help you organically grow your email database for future marketing campaigns.

You can use your email list not only for marketing purposes but also to streamline other areas of your business. If you’re an HR manager and recruitment emails are your bread and butter, you can scrape email addresses to build a solid contact base of professionals and reach out to them anytime you need to hire new talent.

How to Harvest Emails?

The safest and most common ways of data scraping and email harvesting are purchasing crawling bots to collect email IDs or having data scraping services extract, analyze and parse email addresses for you.

Email harvesting bots scrape the Internet, detecting different formats of email addresses. Since [@] and [.] are required for an email address, it’s easy for programmers to create tools that scan every phrase in the scraped websites and pick up the phrases which have a specific email format, like email@domain.com.

Email crawling services also scrape forums and chat groups, detecting email IDs that are not visible to ordinary visitors but are specified in the headers. However, scraping bots appear to have certain disadvantages. Many websites detect and block email crawlers or have captcha restrictions to protect personal data, which makes it impossible for crawling bots to collect email addresses. In addition, some crawlers may mistake phrases that contain “at” and “dot” for email addresses, and having a large number of wrong emails on your list may lead to increased bounce rates.

While the idea of having a large list of email IDs in the wink of an eye seems pretty attractive, you should also take into account that the addresses extracted with a harvesting bot will need to be segmented and structured, in order to make sure that you’re not sending irrelevant messages to people who are not likely to be interested in your services and putting yourself at the risk of getting blacklisted, that is getting into a list of IP addresses that have been reported many times for sending spam.

How Can Data Scraping Services Work for Your Business?

Email harvesting services, on the other hand, will not only extract email IDs but also segment and parse them based on your needs and requirements, weeding out the abandoned or irrelevant emails and leaving only the valid ones. They will provide you with structured data, saving you the time and headache of analyzing the extracted emails on your own. If you want to create targeted campaigns by sending tailored content to your contacts, data scraping services will segment the email list not only based on demographic features but also considering the industry, job function and previous purchasing habits of your recipients.

Doing the legwork for you, they will also help you ensure that you don’t deliver unsolicited, junk emails to wrong recipients, damaging your brand reputation and getting into legal troubles. While crawling bots are often oblivious of the legal restrictions on email crawling, data scraping experts will ensure that everything is done in compliance with the law.

Final Thoughts

Email harvesting is a powerful tool to craft a massive list of valuable contacts without a hitch and make your email marketing campaigns more effective. It allows you to hit far and wide, connecting with an audience that you could hardly reach with traditional methods of email list-growing. In order to ensure that your campaign doesn’t violate the anti-spam laws and harm your company’s image, you should choose safe and legal methods of email crawling, avoiding sources that have data scraping restriction policies. You should also keep in mind the best practices of email marketing, segmenting your list and sending relevant content to your prospects.

Images’ source: Freepik