Scraping Contact Information from Websites
On our Lead Generation service page, we described the opportunities that web scraping opens for collecting information about your potential customers. Here I will describe issues related to extracting contacts from websites: what is available, what is legal, and what is ethical.
What is Available?
You can find almost every type of business contact information on the web: emails, phones, mailing addresses, social media profiles, and so on. The most important issue related to contact data is actually that business information gets stale very quickly.
There are companies specialized in selling contacts — data compilers. But custom web scraping technologies definitely can provide you with a ton of accurate information.
What is Legal? What is Ethical?
The legality of contacting your potential customers depends on your country’s laws and the laws of the countries where your potential customers live. Check out our article “Is Scraping Legal?” for more information.
From an ethical point of view, you can avoid sending spam messages or phone calls by targeting your audience as specifically as possible. When collecting contact data, you can achieve a tailored list of prospective customers with the help of data enrichment from different web sources that have additional information about your prospects. It helps you divide your target audience into segments and customize your offer for each category.
Project Example
One of our clients requested that we collect C-level business contacts for specific brands in the US. We chose to scrape Crunchbase and selected the required companies with the help of filters. Then our software extracted all of the top managers and scraped the available emails from their LinkedIn profiles. Then we enriched the information we found with Owler, a business information database. Our enriched data helped our client narrow his target audience. And as a result, our client was able to customize his offer to best fit the businesses he worked with. He closed three big deals with large companies!
If you’d like to web scrape emails, phone numbers, or other contact information for your business, schedule a short free consultation with our data expert!
