Web scraping can be used to gather contact information, such as email addresses and phone numbers, from websites. This information can then be used for lead generation or enrichment.
In the following example, I am going to demonstrate how to use one of the web scrapers to easily get thousands of contact data.
We will need:
Data source (Clutch.co, TheManifest.com, etc.)
Web Scraper (Octoparse)
Enrichment tool (Findymail, Apollo)
The process:
Find a database that is easy to scrape. Check if there are enough results for your search and that the database includes both company name and the website. We will need this info for enrichment.
Some of the free data sources for company search:
Clutch.co is a free datasource and it is easy to scrape it because all the main info is on the first page.
Choose the industry, location, size of your niche.
For example, Human Resources companies in the United States, size 1-249.
Click on All filters to get more granular:
Grab the URL once you are happy with the results.
2. Open Octoparse and on the first page, enter the URL.
Click Start.
Turn on the Browser mode to get a better view of the page (accept cookies, close ads, etc) and then turn it off.
3. Click "Autodetect Webpage Data" to scan the page:
4. Keep the Pagination feature on so it automatically opens and scrapes the next page. Click Create workflow:
In the Data Preview window, delete unnecessary columns by clicking the three dots and selecting Delete Field:
5. Click Run to start scraping:
6. Click Run on your device (Standard Mode)
The scraping process starts. Free version of Octoparse allows you to export 10k rows per session so when you reach the desired amount of leads you can stop the process.
Click Export Data to get the CSV File.
Upload it to your Drive, and delete unnecessary data columns (but keep the Company name and domains).
How to clean the file
Select the Title column, click Data, Data Cleanup, and choose Clean whitespace to remove extra spaces in the Company name.
Now your CSV File is ready to be enriched with other tools to get the leads from these companies.
