tl;dr – I saw a post on IH about the value of 100 email addresses and wanted to share some tips on where to find and build these email lists, as well as how you can avoid being part of such a list.
Why email marketing?
Regardless of what you've heard about social media, email addresses have one of the best returns. The inbox is the most personal connection you have with a customer, and email marketing maximises the effectiveness of that connection.
On reddit /u/MSchroedy explains how he made $200k from email marketing and shares tips and best practises.
Slightly old but /u/koby4u did an AMA on reddit a few years back and shared some useful tips on email collection and how to become internet famous :)
How I collected email addresses
If you've never used email marketing before, I suggest you first think about your goals and what kind of outcomes you want.
For me, I help serial entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, and new founders meet. Therefore I had to get email addresses from various sources. I segment email addresses by persona, skill, topic, interests etc.
I'm just an engineer, not a marketer. So what I've shared in this article is my own little hacks for building an email address list as well as other useful information such as conversations, text messages, and articles as fodder for my sentiment analyser.
For the most part, I lurk around a lot of internet communities recently Indie Hacker, Nomad List, Hacker News, reddit, and various other servers like Discord, Slack, Gitter, etc. where programmers and designers hang out. I also search for the top 10 people in specific fields of interest, follow them on all social media sites, and consistently scrape anything that looks like an email address.
I also discover and scrape LinkedIn, Twitter, and Github profiles of all the email addresses in my list. The data I got off these sites was used for qualitative analysis (psychological measurement). This helps me pick the right audience for email campaigns and avoid unnecessary spam.
Not everyone is cool with scraping. If you follow these methods, be sure you remain anonymous and perhaps use multiple accounts, or simply lurk and never talk about it. Scraping is not illegal. However publishing scraped information is a ToS violation (almost) everywhere. If a website or app does not have a ToS or agreement you had to accept in order to access it (walled off through a sign up) – then you have free reign.
Example from IH – Collecting email addresses from relevant individuals through discussion
Not something I've done yet - just wanted to put it here as example.
A few days ago, there was a post on IH that asked founders to share their How I met my co-founder online story. The post was a perfect set up. The OP of the post then took advantage of IH's opt-in email share system, visited the profile of every founder who replied and established contact by sending a personalised email.
Example from IH – Collecting email addresses through giveaways
Here is another fine example of giving away something for free by collecting emails or increasing the number of signups. This also a fine example of how you could boost your influence on a forum or community where you make the giveaway. The key to a successful giveaway is to understand what's in demand and catering it. In this case – who wouldn't want to be popular on instagram and get more followers?
OP of the above mentioned post also has book on sale about how to build an email list.
Example using LinkedIn – Using an influencer's post and scraping
LinkedIn is by far the cheapest, as well as the most accurate and effective way to gain leads in my playbook. The developer API in v1 served all posts and comments made in API response, but since they rolled out emberjs frontend and switched to v2 this method is dead. Scraping LinkedIn is still relatively easy.
There's a post on LinkedIn about how OP scraped over 1000+ email addresses of individuals who were interested in China, infographics, and technology.
Recruiters on LinkedIn often post job openings and ask interested candidates to comment with their email address. Scrape those as well. Also follow these recruiters and subscribe to their updates.
Marketing and Sales individuals often create a bait post (share a single slide from a deck) and use fake accounts and comment with "can you send me the full report? here's my email awesome@email.com thanks." Eventually everyone follows the format.
I follow all these individuals/users (bookmark if I don't want to sign up) and scrape their posts and profile, consistantly.
Example using Twitter – scraping email addresses off contest tweets
Shops and businesses tweet a contest, offering up $100 to $500 as reward. In order to enter the contest they ask participants to tweet something, and include their email address.
Over the years Twitter has gotten smarter and this pattern is seldom used.
Example from Product Hunt and other startups – Reward Referral programs
When timely.app was in beta, they used referral campaigns to bump you from 10,000th position to 1st position on the early access list if you referred your friends to sign up for the app. Sort of like a pyramid scheme.
I helped a startup implement the same method using viral loops and the result was over 4000+ users signed up for early access.
Other mishaps
Ghostry made the mistake of CCing nearly 500 users who had a ghostry account when GDPR update went live. That's basically 500 users who would be interested in a better and safer adblocker now. This one just came to my drop mailbox, 0 effort.
Spammers usually put images in the email with tracking as intent, and know if you read their email. Additionally some use the "unsubscribe" trick; i.e. when you unsubscribe they know your email is active and real.
Method of extraction
Most of these scraping tasks can just be scripted, but if you are serious about it consider employing an AI. You should also invest some time learning NLP and use a cloud-based scraper.
I use deamons and cron jobs to do my dirty work for me. I also use the same trick spammers use, at least once a year to classify fresh and stale email addresses. I usually give away something for free, put a link with ref=email and use both the unsubscribe and image trick.
You can also hire a data miner from sites like upwork for as cheap as $35 an hour to get this done for you.
There are also many services like Crawly, Diffbot, etc. you can use out of the box with minimal configuration if you prefer DIY but have no coding experience.
How do protect yourself from harvesters
Remember that nothing in life is free. So the next time you have to give up your email to get something free in exchange try a mail drop service like maildrop.cc, 10 minute email, or air mail.
A mail drop service allows you to anonymously receive emails. I always use them when trading my email on the internet for something "free". If mail drop services make you cringe just use a decoy email address (I use decoy email addresses).
If you are building your own email list you will figure a way to protect yourself; after all you'll be familiar with every trick in the playbook.
Other super secret techniques to build email lists that I didn't share in this article
Email addresses go stale very fast. This is because people change jobs or switch accounts. So remember to use them after you've collected them.
Now that you know about maildrop services you must be wondering if there are other techniques to harvest email addresses. Well, just send me an email with your interests and I'll send the bonus content to you ;)
It's a trap! Don't do it.