Lots of debates have been raised on whether to uses email harvesters to collect email addresses from the internet or not.  As for me am of the opinion that: any information that has been put on the World Wide Web and hence indexed by Search engines like Google is therefore suitable for public consumption.

In the offline world we have directories and Yellow pages where people list contacts they wish to be contacted on. There are also contact cards like Business card for example. In a post that I had posted over a year ago on unusual list building methods and also include Email harvesting as one of the methods. This might seem radical and probably classify me together with the spammers.

However, look at it this way a Developer has made a website and given some contact information, where this information is intended for potential clients or business to business transactions. Similar developers have made websites for various companies and are all gathered in a monster directory called the World Wide Web. I don’t see the reason why one would be seen as evil to send a crawler on what has already been indexed by Google on the public domain and use it for contact information.

On another angle, what if you were to visit each of the website and pick the email address, mostly sales@ or info@ and send an individual introduction letter about yourself and the solutions you have to each of these emails. This would be okay, right? What if you invested in Technology and sent a crawler to pick all those emails from targeted companies and gather them in an excel sheet. Your work would be easier, right? But does it make the act of collecting email addresses wrong? No. You didn’t hack anybody’s website or portal or a database but you just used the contact information they have given in their public domain.

However, what you do with those contact emails is what determines whether your acts are illegal or not. Say for example, I harvest 100,000 emails I can choose to sort them by geographical region using the cc Tld (Country Code top Level Domain) like .co.uk this means the emails are for contacts in the UK. What I can do with them if a small business in the UK is: Introduce myself and how I got their email (from a website) and what I intend to offer them. Then also include in the introduction letter an OPT Out option via email or unsubscribe link where you will add these emails to a suppression list so that you don’t send them the emails in future.

Say out of 100,000 | 20,000 will Opt Out, 1,000 or so will confirm and request you for future information, the other due to bad experience from spammers who abused this method will report you as spam even when they consider you information useful. It’s therefore advisable that you indicate your physical address, telephone contact, business name and registration number to raise the trust level. Also don’t try to sell anything in your first email, but rather develop a squeeze page on your website where they can submit their details (Preferably, first name and email) and you can now consider having their permission to market to them and are now your potential leads that you can follow up with autoresponders to close sales.

Using your first 100,000 emails less (those who opted plus the undelivered emails)   send a second email with a different but compelling subject line and recruit some more leads. After one week, send a third email to those who have not responded and recruit even more leads. Give it a break for a month, repeat the process again and keep on adding emails from the harvester to the funnel.

I have seen micro – businesses grow into big enterprises through email marketing. The problem with Successful email marketers is that they don’t reveal the true steps they made to recruit big lists by permission marketing to what they have today. Some of theses “Gurus” had their accounts closed by ISP and Web host providers since most web hosts limit you to sending 500 emails per hour.

I noticed this is the uphill task that most small businesses go through “Building a List” and with that in mind I had my software developers create several products listed thus:

Softwares

Supreme Email Extractor Plus – For harvesting Emails on the Internet

Supreme Mail 5.0: Bulk Email Sender – For sending emails campaigns from your PC

Services

Email Broadcasting – Solution for those limited by ISP’s and Web hosting        companies.

You may access all of the above products on Supreme Internet Marketing Products website.

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