The global e-mail marketing market is anticipated to increase by $17.9 billion by 2027.1 Email lists are an invaluable asset for businesses for several reasons such as direct communication, performance tracking and targeted messaging. Building an email sales list from scratch is challenging.
Organizations leverage email scraping for various purposes, including building email sales lists, email marketing campaigns, or market research. However, the ability to scrape large amounts of email IDs and analyze the scraped data is challenging. Email scraping tools allow users to extract email addresses in bulk from websites and social media platforms.
In this article, we will explain how an email scraper works, the ethical and legal considerations while using email scraping tools. We will also evaluate some of the best email scraping tools on the market, helping users choose the one that best fits to their specific needs.
What is an email scraper?
Email scraper, also known as email extractor, is a no-code tool that automatically detects and collects email addresses from web sources such as web pages and social media platforms. The collected email addresses can be utilized for a variety of purposes, including sales and marketing campaigns.
Is it legal to scrape emails?
Email scraping can be illegal and unethical in some jurisdictions. For instance, most of the websites have terms of service or privacy policies that include restrictions on data collection. However, even if a website explicitly states what is prohibited on their site, like web scraping, there are many privacy laws and regulations, such as GDPR. It is important to collect only publicly available data and use the collected data for legitimate business applications. You can consult with a legal professional to ensure your email scraping practices comply with relevant laws and regulations.
How to scrape emails from a website
There are three methods for scraping emails:
- Automated tool such as no-code web scrapers or web scraping APIs
- Manual navigation
- Hybrid web scraping.
Each strategy has its own set of advantages depending on your specific requirements. For example, if you need to scrape email addresses in bulk, no-code email scraping tools may be appropriate for large-scale data collection tasks. Here’s a simplified process of how a email scraper works:
- Enter the URL of the target web page you want to scrape.
- The email scraping tool starts to crawl the specified web page.
- The scraper parses the content of the web page to locate patterns that match email addresses. You can set a maximum number of emails to extract.
- Once an email address is found, the scraper collects and saves it in a file.
If the website you intend to extract email addresses segments web content into separate pages (known as pagination), you will need to navigate through all these web pages. Some email scraping tools handle pagination automatically.
Top 6 email scrapers for marketing and sales teams
This section reviews different email scraping tools highlighting their unique features and pricing plans.
1. Bright Data
Bright Data is a data collection platform that provides web scraping services and proxies for a wide range of use cases, including email scraping. Bright Data’s business web scraper allows users to extract email addresses from web pages and social media platforms like LinkedIn and Crunchbase.
Features:
- Provides built-in unblocking technologies such as proxies, CAPTCHA solving, and headless browsers.
- Offers auto-retry mechanism, allowing users to resend a connection request if the first attempt fails.
- Enables you to build your email scraper in a cloud environment.
- Provides built-in debug tools. You can understand what happened during a past crawl and what needs fixing.
Pricing:
2. Smartproxy
Smartproxy is a web data gathering platform that offers web scraping APIs and no-code scraper for different use cases. The web scraping tool scrape publicly available conduct details from any website, including business emails, names and phone numbers.
Features:
- Offers pre-made scraping templates.
- Delivers the extracted data in CSV and JSON format.
- You can store the collected data in the cloud.
- Supports proxy and CAPTCHA solutions to improve email scraping process.
Pricing:
3. Finder.io
Finder.io is a lead generation tool that provides various automation tools for different purposes such as collecting email addresses and email verification. They offer email extractor to collect email addresses in bulk and import the extracted data in a CSV file.
Features:
- Verify the domain of an business email address to ensure that it is active and valid
- Offers Chrome extension that streamlines the process of collecting email IDS.
- Allows users to conduct bulk email search.
Pricing:
- Starting price: $14 .99 /mo
- 14-day free trial
4. GrowMeOrganic
GrowMeOrganic is an all-in-one B2B prospecting and cold email platform that provides sales and marketing teams with various outreach tools, including an email finder and scraper. The email scraping tool allows individuals and organizations to extract emails, phone numbers, and social media URLs.
Features:
- Collects business email addresses from the home page and contact page of the target website.
- Exports data collected from target websites in CSV or XLS format.,
- The email extractor works on LinkedIn and allows users to bulk search on Sales Navigator.
Pricing:
- Starting price: $49/mo
- 14-day free trial
5. FindThatLead
FindThatLead is a B2B sales prospecting platform that helps businesses find email addresses through social media profiles. The email scraper extracts any relevant data from LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, including work experience and education.
Features:
- Provides bulk email search tool, enabling users to find business email addresses in bulk from LinkedIn pages.
- Provides verified email addresses from social media profiles.
- Offer Chrome extension, helping find and verify email IDs easily.
Pricing:
- Starting price: $49/mo
- Free trial is available
6. UpLead
UpLead is a B2B prospecting platform that provides automation tools including email scraper, finder and prospector. The email scraper scans web sources for email IDs.
Features:
- You can search leads by company name or URL and extract email addresses in bulk.
- Export collected data to Excel or CRM.
- Offers real-time email verification. You can ensure that you are contacting qualified leads.
Pricing:
- Starting price: $99/mo
- 7-day free trial
Transparency statement
AIMultiple serves numerous tech companies including Bright Data and Smartproxy.
Further reading
Feel free to Download our whitepaper for a more in-depth understanding of web scraping:
For guidance to choose the right tool, check out data-driven list of web scrapers, and reach out to us:
- Dencheva, V. (May 19, 2023). “E-mail marketing revenue worldwide 2020-2027“. Statista. Retrieved on June 20, 2023.
Gülbahar is an AIMultiple industry analyst focused on web data collections and applications of web data.
