Email Address Scraping: Dream Big, Scrape Smart

WebScrapingAPI
5 min readMay 20, 2021

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Email marketing is a powerful strategy that uses email to advertise the company’s goods or services. It is a type of direct marketing in the same vein as paid ads.

Web scraping can quickly help with gathering email addresses. By incorporating it into your marketing automation campaigns, it will help keep your customers aware of your new products or deals.

How Does Web Scraping Merge with Email Marketing?

Email marketing will help you establish a connection with your audience while still pushing traffic to your blog, social media pages, or anywhere else you want people to go. You can also segment the emails and reach audiences based on their demographics to ensure that they only see the updates that they want to read.

Web scraping may also play a key role in the marketing campaign by generating leads, raising brand interest, establishing partnerships, and keeping customers engaged in the meanwhile.

Creating an entire mailing list from start to finish, on the other hand, is much more difficult. Why is it so difficult? Simply put, it takes a lot of patience, effort, and money to do it, and the temptation to speed up the process can be really appealing. This is likely why so many people choose the quicker and less expensive option of scraping email addresses from the websites they require.

So let’s look into what it is you should keep in mind when web scraping emails:

Stay Legal, Folks

In order to scrape and use email addresses safely and effectively, you’ll need to understand quality, ethical, and software issues. Without a doubt, email scraping is an effective technique, but when it comes to legal issues, it is also a work in progress. Since scraping takes pre-existing content from all over the internet, companies who choose to use scrapers on their own processes face a host of ethical and legal issues.

Here’s the main legal stuff to keep in mind:

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

In many aspects, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation safeguards the data and privacy of most European residents. When scraping emails from European users, you must accept GDPR regulations even though you are not located in the EU.

SPAM ACT

In addition, the United States has its own spam laws. CAN-SPAM is much more lenient on the subject and fails to address certain key issues around spam and consumer protection. However, it continues to focus on problems of email messaging, and the FTC expects your company to follow CAN-SPAM.

Bounce Rate Factors

Email marketing metrics function a bit differently when it comes to determining an appropriate rate. The number of email addresses in a mailing list that did not accept advertising messages because the recipients’ mail servers returned them is known as the email bounce rate.

When emails cannot be sent to email addresses, bounces occur. The sender’s credibility is harmed by high bounce rates. This occurs when advertisers use out-of-date mailing lists. Errors in importing or inserting addresses, on the other hand, result in higher bounce rates and emails classified as spam.

An email may be bounced for a variety of reasons. One of the most common explanations is that the recipient’s email address has been deleted because it is no longer available or has been inactive for a long time.

As a solution, you can use data collection to keep track of the deliverability and success of your emails. The more you ignore problems like high bounce rates and low subscriber participation, the more likely you are to develop a less than desirable rating, which would hurt your email deliverability. Here’s a guide on how to integrate web scraping into your campaigns.

Alternatively, emails will be bounced if the email server is down, as has been known to happen with company email addresses. If the receiver adds you to a “blocked” list, the email will still bounce.

Most email-deployment platforms will attempt to resend a soft bounced email a certain number of times before classifying it as a hard bounce and removing it from the email send list.

The norm for bounces is less than 2%. Anything more than a 2% bounce rate in your email campaign is worth paying attention to. If the bounce numbers are more than 10%, or even 5% or more, you have a serious concern that needs to be addressed. While these are the averages, it’s important to remember that each industry has its own bounce rate. This is due to the fact that each market caters to a specific population, and each demographic has its own set of behaviors.

If you get a hard bounce, delete the address from your email list immediately and do not submit to it again. Hard bounces are usually removed automatically by most email deployment platforms. However, it’s still a smart idea to double-check if the platform is permanently eliminating bounces since we’ve seen setups where this wasn’t the case. You can, however, attempt to resend it if it bounces softly.

Reputation Concerns

There are several other explanations why email scraping should be taken with a pinch of salt, one of which is your company’s reputation. This type of email harvesting and use of the addresses to send spam can be detrimental to any company if not used wisely.

Emails are an excellent way to encourage people to visit a website, buy a product or any kind of desirable action. Within the body of your email, you should have related links to your goal. A good idea is to also use email promotions to encourage consumers to interact with other valuable material on your website or blog.

If you send out many emails and receive a lot of spam reports, you’re likely to be added to a blacklist. A blacklist is a set of IP addresses (the online address of a web server) that have been identified as sending unsolicited emails.

Emails with a shady subject line or from an anonymous source may sound like spam. Customers sometimes unsubscribe from these emails because they simply don’t feel right.

For certain people, an emoji is enough to make them smile and press. Others will be prompted to look for the unsubscribe connection by the same subject line. You must adapt your content to meet the needs of your readers.

Knowing your readers’ desires and wishes ensures that your email lands in the mailbox rather than the spam archive. Customers will know which emails they’re signed up for and how frequently they’ll be sending emails from you if you have a permission-based email list with a checkbox for users to opt-in to your mailing list.

Scrape Smart

Now that you’ve worked out some of these factors, you can move on to the final phase of the process: selecting the suitable web scraper for your email scraping project.

Email scraping will give you plenty of extra options. Although email harvesting is unquestionably a powerful tool in the hands of a knowledgeable person, many factors need to be considered before your venture.

The methods you used to obtain an email address database, as well as the end goal, would decide their value. So our recommendation is to proceed with caution; weigh all of the risks, ask yourself the questions above, and if you’re satisfied with the outcome, scrape on!

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