Why Parsing Alone Won't Help You Gather Email Contacts

Email marketing is an inevitable part of business growth and scaling. It's the easiest way to reach a large number of potential customers without spending too much, and email parsing from websites is one of the favorite tools of marketers worldwide.

With the right approach, it can help double or triple the number of leads. Many companies use various methods to obtain email addresses. However, the quality of email contacts will vary greatly depending on the method used to obtain them.

Many companies use parsing to collect email addresses for building a mailing list. While this may be a simple way to get a huge number of email addresses in a short period of time, it is not without drawbacks.

There are many drawbacks to collecting email addresses using parsing technologies. Here are a few reasons why you should not rely on parsing to collect email contacts:

Personal email addresses of decision-makers will not be collected.

People in key positions in a company are unlikely to publicly share their email addresses. Even on websites that host professional profiles, the email field is never shown publicly.

This makes it impossible to obtain their email addresses using a bot. When using parsing, the emails you collect are likely to be of less business value.

So if you rely on parsing, expect to receive emails with a lower conversion probability. In the end, you'll get an email list that isn't very valuable and will make your email marketing campaigns less effective.

Bounce rate increases

Bounce rate in email marketing refers to the number of emails that were not delivered. Since the email list you took from the internet may contain all sorts of old, expired, and abandoned emails, there is a chance that when you send emails to this list, you will have a high bounce rate.

Email addresses change when people change companies or delete their free email accounts, such as Mail or Yandex. Since these emails were not sent to you directly, there is no way to verify how fresh they are.

Less targeted emails

When you want to reach your customers with email marketing, you must first choose the right email addresses. If you send emails to a less targeted list that includes role-based email addresses like info@ or contact@, your marketing efforts will be wasted.

This requires manual intervention, not a bot collecting email addresses from web pages. Services like Zoominfo and Hoover's provide contact information collected through semi-automatic mechanisms. This means that the email addresses they provide have gone through many filters, ensuring their reliability and usefulness for your campaigns. The more targeted your mailing list, the higher your conversions.

Most sites block access to pages with emails

Most well-known sites take care that user emails are not publicly visible.

Pages containing email addresses are usually hidden behind a login form, making them inaccessible to parsers. In addition, many sites can detect and block parsers to prevent data copying from their pages. In short, collecting email addresses through website parsing is not an easy task.

You are not the only one sending them emails

This is one of the biggest drawbacks of using parsing to collect email addresses from the internet. The emails you can collect from the internet are available to everyone who collects emails from the internet.

This means they already receive a significant amount of promotional emails. If you join the list of companies sending them, you will simply be ignored. People receiving your emails will view them as yet another message marked as spam.

This will cause you even more harm, as there is a risk of being blacklisted by email servers and ISPs if many people mark your emails as spam.

More effective ways to grow your email list

There are many better and less intrusive ways to collect email addresses that are truly worth the extra time.

Having an email subscription form on your website is certainly the best way. By subscribing to your newsletters or blogs, you also get their consent to send emails.

In addition, you can always use search engines like Zoominfo and Hoover's to find contact information for targeted people. Since these sites contain contacts obtained from users' Outlook accounts, they are valid and conversion is usually high. They also overcome parsing limitations and provide ready-to-use contact lists. Since the email addresses obtained in this way are targeted and active, your email marketing campaigns will yield better results.

Conclusion

Although there are many different ways to obtain email contacts for marketing, they all differ when it comes to results.

Parsing is ill-suited for this case because email addresses are scattered across various web pages, and targeted search across multiple websites will not give you the volumes needed for marketing campaigns, and it is also more expensive.

It is always better to acquire email contacts naturally or through manual intervention, as they are truly worth the extra mile. Parsing is indeed a very powerful tool if you want to obtain competitive intelligence to capture your industry.

If you are looking for reliable website data parsing services, feel free to discuss your tasks with us.