How to create an email extractor or find email addresses for free

I am not going to comment on whether SEO is dead or not. I will also not talk about your user acquisition channels. But what I see, it’s more challenging to bring regular traffic through SEO and social media until or unless you have a great content marketing process in place.

I could figure out one thing clearly, focus more on retention than user acquisition. I will talk about some good tips on “how to retain users?” in my next post. For now, let’s see how we can find out relevant email addresses for our email outreach or email marketing campaigns. Yeah ‘cold emails” work.

Before starting the process, you need to have access to Google spreadsheets and web scraper. If you are good at Google spreadsheets formulas, especially importing data through XML, hopefully, you don’t need a web scraper then.

Now, visit one of the web directories that list businesses & their respective websites.
Step 1: Visit any of the business page and select the website address.
Step 2: Now ‘right click’ using a mouse or touchpad and select inspect, this should open a dock similar to the image shown below.

Step 3: As you already have installed the web scraper, that would be visible to you in the Dock menu.

Step 4: Click on Web Scraper and create a new sitemap. There would be two fields i.e. sitemap name and start URL. You can name it anything but in ‘start URL’ put the website URL (as marked red in the image below)that is showing the name of the business with their respective profile page URL.

Step 5: Once the sitemap is created, you need to add a new selector. So click on it and then put down the id (again a name without any space or special characters). In type field select ‘Link’.

Now the most important thing is the selector. Click on the ‘select’ button against it and then click on business names showing on the website one after one. After two or three clicks, you will see the same rule has been applied to all the business names over there.

Now click on done selecting and then click on data preview.

Step 6: Copy and paste the data in the active sheet of your Google spreadsheet.

Step 7: Click on any of the business profile page URL and visit it. Find out the div where the website URL has been placed. Or simply select the website address and inspect it. This will give you an idea about the div class or section.

Step 8: Go back to the active sheet. Apply import XML formula in the column next to the profile URL. The formula should look like =IMPORTXML(A1, “//div[@class=’business-address-card]”). The formula can be further extended to different elements or attributes.

Step 9: Now put this =REGEXREPLACE(REGEXREPLACE(A1,”(http(s)?://)?(www\.)?”,””),”/.*”,””) in the third column to extract the domain name out of the website address.

Step 10: Lower the text case by applying =Lower(C1) in the fourth column.

Step 11: Now add five more columns next to Domain name column (see below)

To get the email address in SPOC 1, you need to put this formula in column G1 =CONCATENATE(D1,F1,C1). Similarly, you can get the email address for SPOC 2 by concatenating E1, F1 & C1.

You can keep using the sheet to extract email addresses from different web directories by making some changes in your web scraper sitemaps and import XML formulas.

Still, if you believe this is too much work, you can simply look for great products on SaaStraQ that helps you find & try different software products in OneClick.

Disclaimer: This post doesn’t intend to promote sending unsolicited emails but to show how Google spreadsheets can be used to find out email addresses of support and sales teams of different companies in less effort.