A steady supply of leads is essential for maintaining a healthy sales pipeline. All you have to do is find those leads, qualify them, and start outreach campaigns.
So, how exactly can you find leads for your business? You can try buying leads—but you need to validate their contact information. Or, you can look at publicly available information.
Platforms like LinkedIn and other social media are a great place to start. But, manually finding emails this way takes a significant amount of time. That’s where an email scraper tool comes in.
Email scrapers automate email extraction from websites in bulk. There are several tools you can choose from. The question now is, which one fits your business best?
We’re here to help answer that question! In this guide, we’ll cover the following:
- What is an Email Scraper?
- How does an Email Scraper work?
- Is it legal to scrape emails?
- Free email scraping tools
- Paid email scraping tool
- Email scraping vs. other lead generation strategies
What is an Email Scraper
An email scraper is a tool for extracting emails from a website. We can use general scrapers for almost all sites and scrapers for specific platforms.
For example, *email scraper software* specializes in scraping LinkedIn emails, and *other scraper* is used for Crunchbase.
No matter the platform, most email scrapers do their job similarly. Here’s a quick look at how an email scraper works.
How Does an Email Scraper Work?
Email scrapers parse the HTML of a website. All forms of content shown or publicly available can be scraped. The only difference is that email scrapers look at emails specifically.
It then compiles all the emails inside a lead database for you to add to your email list. There are scraper tools that you need to download. Others are as simple as a browser extension.
But before going into the tools, let's look at the legality of an email scraper.
Email Scraping Vs. Other Lead Generation Strategies
Should you focus on email scraping or use other lead-generation strategies? Although email scraping can help you sustain your lead pipelines, you can’t solely rely on it.
It should be used to supplement other strategies like inbound sales. Also, remember that although email scraping is legal, sending unsolicited emails might not work in your favor.
Always provide value, personalize every email, and find ways to genuinely build relationships with the prospects you’ve extracted from your email scraping efforts.
When paired with other sales enablement strategies, email scraping becomes a powerful tool in any email marketer’s arsenal.
Free Email Scraping Tools
While the concept of anything “free” sounds enticing, the reality is that we have to spend money to make money. So, while free, these tools will have limiting features. But if you’re just looking to dip your feet into email scraping, try out these free tools:
Instantly.ai
Instantly is your one-stop shop for all your email marketing needs. Instantly’s B2B lead Finder allows you to find and validate prospects at scale.
You can even refine the email scraping process by qualifying leads on the spot by applying filters and relevant keywords. The best part is that Instantly also offers unlimited email warm-ups so you can ensure the highest deliverability rates in every outreach campaign.
Features:
- Auto lead verification
- Email warm-ups
- AI-powered writing assistant
- Intuitive analytics dashboard
Get started with Instantly today for free today and get 25 free leads!
Saleshandy Connect
If you want the email marketing trifecta—email tracking, prospecting, and scraping, Saleshandy is a free scraper tool you can try. It’s especially effective when scraping LinkedIn emails.
To get Saleshandy, you only need to add a Chrome extension. You can integrate Saleshandy with your Gmail sending accounts to track email opens and clicks.
For email scraping, log into your LinkedIn account and click the Saleshandy extension. When viewing a LinkedIn profile, Saleshandy automatically extracts the name and email address.
GetProspect
Much like Saleshandy, GetProspect is a Chrome extension where you can scrape LinkedIn emails. But, it's catered more toward salespeople, recruiters, and marketers.
Just visit your prospect’s profile, then GetProspect scrapes information such as their first and last name, position, location, company name, website URL, and LinkedIn URL.
You can use a free version, but there’s also a premium version with more powerful features like CRM integrations, priority support, analytics dashboards, and custom properties.
Skrapp.io
Email scraping can help you find leads. But you still need to qualify those leads before any outreach efforts. Skrapp.io helps with just that.
It offers real-time email verification and LinkedIn email scraping. Much like most of the tools in this list, it's also a free Chrome extension with premium features.
With its premium version, you can access tools like LinkedIn and Sales Navigator email finders, bulk email verification, duplicate cleaning, and priority support.
Prospectss
If you’re more into lead generation for Twitter, Facebook, and IG, Prospects might be the tool for you. With Prospectss, you can extract verified emails, company details, and a user’s bio.
Various tools are available when using Prospectss, such as an email finder, a B2B lead searcher, a Quora question finder, and a LinkedIn email scraper.
So, it’s not only an email tool but an overall marketing tool your team can use to streamline lead generation and engagement.
IG Email Extractor
As the name implies, IG Email Extractor parses the available public email addresses included in a user’s bio, posts, or provided contact information.
After parsing a prospect’s information, users can export the data into an xlsx or CSV file to import into their CRMs or other marketing tools.
It can also scrape a prospect’s followers and who they’re following, hashtag publishers, likers, and commenters.
Email Extractor
Email extractor scrapes emails from any web page, not just platforms like LinkedIn. It automatically scrapes emails ending with a website’s domain name. For example, if you’re trying to scrape XYZ.io, it’ll find addresses ending with xyz.io.
The unique thing about Email Extractor is its ability to fetch email IDs straight from a site’s source code. So, even if you find 3 email IDs on the website, Email Extractor can find hidden ones from the source code.
Hunter.io
Hunter.io is an all-in-one email scraper and verification tool. It can be used on any website and helps you find emails in bulk. The tool also has flexible pricing plans for new users, which include a free plan.
Pricing starts at $49 monthly and goes up to $399 monthly for enterprise users. But, if you’ve already tried it out and feel like it’s not a fit for your business, we’ve curated a list of great Hunter.io alternatives.
Best Paid Email Scraping Tools
Paid or premium email scraping tools have superior features that can help you scale campaigns and integrate with your CRM. If you want to get serious with your lead generation campaigns using email scrapers, here are the tools we recommend:
Scrap.io
If you’re an agency that wants to target local businesses, try using Scrap.io. It turns Google Maps into a lead generation machine.
The best part about Scrape is that it gets data from Google Maps in real-time. This helps ensure the data you’re extracting is up-to-date and valid. You can search by industry, city, and country.
Pricing starts at $49/month, billed monthly. Premium features include the following:
- Advanced search filters.
- Additional GMap fields during export.
- Website scraping.
SpyLead
SpyLead is a paid email scraper tool that helps you extract LinkedIn emails in bulk. There’s no need to open profiles to get the data manually. SpyLead automates this for you.
It can extract emails from Google Maps if you want to contact local businesses. You can also integrate SpyLeads into Zapier to streamline your sales process further.
Pricing starts at $39/month or $31/month if you play for the entire year. The features of their basic plan include:
- 1500 LinkedIn emails
- 15 GMap results.
- 15 results from SERPs.
- 1500 contacts from Email Finder.
- 6000 email verifications.
Octoparse
Octoparse offers a variety of pre-built templates for email scraping and lead scraping from directories like Yelp.
All you need to do is input keywords for parameters, click run, and wait for Octoparse to extract the data. One of the best features of Octoparse is its ability to overcome common parsing hurdles like Captchas and proxies.
Pricing starts at $75/month with the basic plan including the following features:
- IP rotations.
- 100+ presets for scraping.
- Captcha solving.
- Automatic exports.
- API access.
Apollo
For many marketers, Apollo is their number-one go-to for finding emails. You can integrate Apollo with HubSpot and Salesforce and connect it with email providers like Gmail and Outlook.
If you want to streamline your sales strategy, Apollo offers features just for this. You can use Apollo to scrape emails and verify and qualify these leads to ensure they fit your business.
Pricing starts at $39, billed annually, but you can also use a free version with limited features. For their basic plan, you get the following:
- AI-powered email writing.
- Email scraping.
- Web scraping.
- Advance features.
- Open and click tracking.
If you’ve already tried Apollo and find that it doesn’t quite fit with your business, here’s a list of alternatives you can try.
Lead Scrape
Try Lead Scrape if you want to fill up your B2B lead database. You can filter leads for any category and extract information like emails, social media URLs, structured data, and other website content. After extraction, you can download the data in CSV format to upload to your CRM or sales management software.
Pricing starts at $97 for their basic plan and goes up to $247 for a business plan. Both plans are for a yearly license. And, if you’re unhappy with their services, you can get a full refund within a 14-day days.
Is Email Scraping Legal?
Scraping emails from a website is legal since you’d extract publicly available information. You could even scrape the entire content from a website if you want to use the right tools.
Laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) protect copyrighted material in the United States. But public domains like LinkedIn and social media sites aren’t under DMCA.
However, some website owners might have terms prohibiting third parties from scraping their data without permission. To avoid issues, check the terms of service before scraping.
Another critical factor is the legality of sending bulk unsolicited emails to the addresses you’ve scraped according to 15 U.S. Code § 7704.
So, if you’re running email campaigns using scraped emails, personalize your emails and provide value to avoid being seen as spam.
Now that we’ve understood the basics of email scrapers, here are some free and paid email tools we recommend.
Key Takeaways
Email scraping is one of the best ways to support your sales funnels and lead generation efforts. As a refresher, here is some key information you might’ve missed:
- Email scrapers parse data from websites to extract email information.
- Most free LinkedIn email scrapers still require you to manually visit the profiles of your prospects to save their email information.
- Email scraping is legal. Using email scrapers to find leads and bombard them with spam emails is not.
- Some email scraper tools only parse email data. Others include supplementary features such as email validation, tracking, analytics, and CRM integrations.
The best email scraping tool all comes down to preference. But, when choosing one, ensure it has the following features:
- Extract contact information like email addresses and contact numbers in bulk.
- Integrate with CRMs for a more streamlined sales process.
- Complies with data privacy laws and standards.
- Validate emails to ensure high deliverability rates.
- Automate the email scraping process to scale.
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