Best Email Extractor Tools in 2021 [Review]
Despite the fact that email marketing is a fairly old technology, it still works, and quite effectively. Even with the high popularity of social networks, the promotion of goods and services through email marketing is still a very effective tool. As Forbes experts noted a couple of years ago, the effectiveness of email marketing in terms of conversion into purchases was three times higher than the effectiveness of social networks. The volume of purchases after mailings exceeded by 17% the volume that was the result of advertising on various platforms. These are the reasons why this tool is still relevant today.
Extracting email addresses: why do we need it?
The purpose of harvesting email addresses is to create databases for mailing lists which are the above mentioned effective marketing tool. However, it is necessary to extract only the addresses of the target audience but not all the addresses. In this case, the effectiveness of the mailing increases significantly.
Extracting of email addresses is carried out for so-called “cold” marketing. This means that the mailing will be conducted mainly for the target audience, but with those people with whom you haven’t contacted yet. In other words, it is a certain “acquaintance offer” to attract interest to your product and yourself. The effectiveness of such a mailing depends on two key factors: the email addresses that are as relevant as possible to existing targets, as well as the impressiveness of the e-mail.
Addresses can be harvested both by companies and individuals. As a rule, it is made for the purpose of attracting potential clients to the goods or services. However, in some cases, the goals may be different, such as increasing brand awareness, promotion of certain sites, and even finding an employer or partner.
Correctly selected and systematized database of addresses will help in the following:
- Increased sales — a direct consequence of the right choice of the target audience;
- Feedback — the ability to monitor feedbacks from customers and partners about a particular product;
- Personalized offers — careful study of the needs of customers will enable you to offer them exactly what they need;
- Increase of conversion — extensive and, most importantly, interested audience will guarantee an increase in the number of visits to the site, likes, discussions and reposts.
You can achieve great success only in case of competent extracting of email addresses. This procedure is the foundation for further work, so you should pay special attention to it.
Ways of extracting email addresses for the mailing list
To harvest such a base is not an easy thing, especially since it is necessary to follow certain rules. For example, the email base can be bought, but for self-respecting companies it is not an option. Firstly, there is no guarantee that the base will contain up-to-date addresses (even if the sellers assure that it is so). Secondly, the mailing to such addresses can be considered as spam, and it is an illegal method of marketing. It can even bring harm, so it’s better to refuse to buy dubious databases. Especially since there’s no guarantee that the database hasn’t already been sold several times and the recipients’ mailboxes are simply littered with spam. To speak plainly, it’s a waste of money.
A much better choice would be to use legal methods of scraping email address databases. A great option would be an honest exchange — a user gives you his email address, and in return he receives something interesting, for example, a useful article. You can implement such subscriptions in various ways, but a person will be already mentally prepared to receive the letters. This will not irritate him and will not be considered as spam, if, of course, you do the mailing correctly.
A very common option for scraping databases of email addresses is to use feedbacks. In this case, you can get not only a large base, but also immediately divide the addresses according to relevance to certain areas. For example, the email addresses of those who left reviews about smartphones or about kitchen appliances, will fall into different databases. Thus a focus on the target audience will be clearly observed. By the way, you can stimulate users to write reviews together with specifying the email address. To do this, offer people bonuses or other interesting things in return.
Other methods of extracting email addresses include all kinds of offline events — presentations, seminars, workshops. This is also a good choice, although such events will not bring a large number of addresses. Also, do not forget about various guest posts, subscriptions for a fee, contests, forum registrations and more.
Programs and services for harvesting email addresses
Now we should pay attention to how you can grab databases of email addresses without using the methods described above. The scraping will be carried out by automated methods, but with a mandatory focus on relevance.
The extraction can be done with the help of special parsers, scripts or separate online services. The effectiveness of each of them is different, as well as a set of features. With the help of such tools you can get a good base of email addresses for the purpose of “cold” marketing.
Top 5 best tools for extracting email addresses
Today it is possible to get databases for your business not only using standard tools, but also using a specialized software. This is much faster and much more effective than the methods mentioned above. Let’s look at some programs that are the most popular in this area.
LetsExtract Email Studio ($39 USD)
An absolutely new and very interesting tool. This program can be confidently put in the first place for its set of advantages and conveniences. It allows you to easily search not only email addresses, but also phone numbers and user pages on social networks.
LetsExtract Email Studio is guided by keywords and then chooses email addresses from those pages that match them. It parses forums, online stores, social networks and other pages. It can also extract emails from folders and archives. At the same time these addresses are checked for availability — the user will receive a set of up-to-date working mailboxes. It also has a convenient feature for analyzing and exporting addresses.
The advantage of this program is that it collects only relevant addresses, i.e. fully matching the specified keywords. The purchase of the program is done only once, without any subscription or update fees. It is a very convenient and functional tool.
ePochta Extractor ($55 USD)
Another one quite good program for scraping email addresses. It also works with keywords and harvests addresses from sites. It has the ability to work with social networks and post services. You can set up a search by any parameters, including country and additional information about the user. Unfortunately, unlike the previous program, ePochta Extractor does not check the availability and relevance of mailboxes.
RS Email Extractor ($59 USD)
Easy, fast and functional program with a possibility to set up the search of email addresses according to the set parameters. Check your email addresses for validity. The program is very recommendable, but expensive, because you have to pay for every function separately.
Email Finder ($20 USD)
The program is different in that it not only extracts email addresses, but can also detect encrypted JavaScript. It is possible to set not only keywords for search, but also general subjects, such as gadgets or computer games. In addition to grabbing addresses, it has a separate and quite good mailing function.
Email Grabber ($16 USD)
The program without any special “bells and whistles”. Allows you to simply and quickly build a database of email addresses on the specified parameters. The software is extremely simple and inexpensive, there is an opportunity of free testing within one month. Unfortunately, serious functions are not available here.
So what is the best email extractor?
It makes no sense to consider free programs and services for obvious reasons. In general, we can separately identify only the first option — LetsExtract Email Studio. This program has shown itself on the best side in terms of price and functionality.