The 18 Best Growth Hacking and Web Scraping Tools
Acquiring qualified leads is a significant challenge for businesses, but the process often turns out to be lengthy and tedious. Fortunately, we are in 2021, and hundreds of no-code tools have emerged over the past few years to support sales teams in these tasks. Targeting, contacting leads, sending follow-ups, and updating your CRM are all tasks that can today be automated thanks to a multitude of tools. Beyond just saving time, these tools also enhance your prospecting efforts with more precise targeting, mandatory retargeting, fewer errors, and shorter response times. These tools allow you to automate certain stages of your sales process, thereby establishing a genuine prospecting dynamic: web scraping tools, retargeting tools, marketing automation, LinkedIn prospecting, CRMs, and more.
In this article, we will specifically focus on tools dedicated to automating data collection: web scraping tools. Discover the best tools for automating the collection of data on your prospects, including email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, etc.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is a practice that involves extracting data from the internet, whether from websites, search engines, social media, etc. Also referred to as harvesting, this technique entails retrieving a variety of information using software, allowing you to reuse it later.
Imagine your manager asks you to find a prospect's email address. Your first instinct will be to visit the company's website to try to identify the typical email structure: local part, @, domain name. However, more often than not, after spending several minutes, if not hours, you end up receiving an error message indicating that the address cannot be found.
This is where web scraping tools come into play, saving you time and boosting productivity! Automating this process enables you to collect large volumes of more reliable, structured data. No more Ctrl + C / Ctrl + V (Cmd for Mac enthusiasts); bots handle filtering the internet, moving from one page to another, identifying, and retrieving the data you've requested. This process is referred to as "crawling," which pertains to exploring web pages.
Web Scraping Practices
Web Scraping and Negative SEO
Web scraping is a computer technique used to meet various needs. Initially, one might think of retrieving content from a competitor’s site to quickly boost their own site. Indeed, some companies use it to improve their SEO content strategy and, in doing so, increase their organic traffic with relevant web content: this is known as "negative SEO." Companies divert traffic to their site, positioning themselves in your search results. Fortunately, the era of copying and pasting is long gone, as search engines like Google penalize such practices: penalties in terms of organic ranking can lead to outright blacklisting of the site.
Web Scraping and Sales Prospecting
As you may have guessed, web scraping is also used to enhance companies' sales strategies. As we've seen, it's a means of collecting data to enrich your prospecting efforts by gathering email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, company size, revenue, etc. This information can be utilized to enrich and update your CRM.
Web Scraping and Competitive Intelligence
Web scraping is also employed for competitive intelligence. By collecting data from several competing sites, you can analyze your market positioning, compare web, marketing, and content strategies, or even monitor price variations and offer evolutions.
Top Web Scraping Tools to Extract Data on Your Prospects
Web Scraping Tools to Collect Prospect Information
Imagine you are searching for prospects in the restaurant industry. One way to collect information would be to visit a site like Yellow Pages to contact each establishment individually. The problem is that you would have to explore the site page by page, entry by entry, copying data manually, etc. With scraping, you can extract a large volume of data from directories like this one.
Small Volume Scraping
1 - Octoparse : allows you to extract data from a website in three steps: input the URL of the site you want to extract data from, click on the targeted data for extraction, run the extraction, and retrieve the data.
2 - ParseHub : follows the same extraction system as Octoparse: URL, targeting, download.
3 - SpiderPro : a very user-friendly tool that allows you to collect the data of interest with just a click on the site. The data is organized and can be downloaded in JSON or CSV format. The advantage is that SpiderPro only costs $38!
4 - Datanyze : for simple export of emails and phone numbers
5 - Simple Scraper : allows for multiple data exports from websites
6 - Sumo : helps generate more traffic, collect more emails, and convert more clients.
Mass Scraping
7 - Prospect .io : find emails, launch, and automate marketing campaigns.
8 - Drop contact : an ideal tool for enhancing your databases
9 - DataMiner : to export data in bulk from search engines
10 - Import .io : a comprehensive yet more complex scraping tool.
11 - Agenty : competitive monitoring of prices, products, barcodes, competitive web technologies, lead generation, etc. Intended for web scraping professionals
Scraping Data from Social Networks (LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.)
12 - Waalaxy : obtain the email addresses and phone numbers of your LinkedIn contacts and schedule automated prospecting scenarios.
13 - Phantombuster : deploy a growth hacking strategy by tracking activities across your various networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Quora, Medium, etc.)
Web Scraping Extensions and Plugins
Here are two Chrome extensions that will help ease data extraction from Google.
14 - Webscraper .io : with a simple point-and-click interface, extracting thousands of records from a website takes just a few minutes to set up the scraper.
15 - Scraper : a very simple (but limited) data exploration extension designed to make online searching easier when you need to quickly obtain data.
Filtering Tools for Scraping
16 - Prospectwith : Before exporting your data, find companies by defining precise search criteria such as size, revenue, location, sector, etc.
Tools for Finding Email Addresses
17 - FindEmails .com : find emails of an entire company and verify their validity with this tool.
18 - hunter .io : find existing email addresses simply by providing the company's domain name.
Is Web Page Scraping Legal?
What the Law Specifies
This subject is extremely complex, particularly because the web has no borders. In France, here are the contested practices in data scraping:
- Lack of information for targeted individuals
- Absence of consent from individuals being contacted via email, phone, etc.
- Non-compliance with individuals' rights to object
Collecting data from internet users, even if publicly accessible online, can in certain cases be non-compliant with the Data Protection Act and GDPR. This practice involves several disciplines and cannot be approached in the same manner across different branches of law.
Generally, while data extraction may be allowed, companies engaging in such practices must remain vigilant about the terms of data reuse as stipulated by the CNIL: data origin, consent, respect for the right to object, data retention, GDPR obligations, etc.
Our Recommendations and Best Practices at Digidop
1 - Avoid unfair collection methods: using data collected without individuals' knowledge is, in any case, a very ineffective prospecting method. Receiving a cold sales email with no prior contact or interest from the recipient is neither effective nor legal.
2 - Prefer direct contact to obtain genuine and engaging consent from the prospect.
3 - Utilize transparent data collection forms:
4 - Implement a "permission marketing" approach aimed at creating a genuine relationship with your prospects. The goal is not to sell your product at all costs but rather to show interest in theirs.
5 - Prioritize enriching and updating your professional database.
6 - Automate the removal of inactive contacts for over 3 years.
7 - Incorporate an unsubscribe link in your marketing emails: explaining why they receive these emails, the sender, etc.
