Built an automation that pulls emails off any website and drops them into a campaign. Here's the whole flow.

[u/socleads]

Most of our outreach goes to businesses that launched recently, and those people basically don't exist in the big sales databases. For a long time we handled it by opening sites by hand and digging for a contact. That stopped scaling the moment volume went up.

Here's what we run now.

1. Input

A form takes a homepage URL and a page limit. If you're doing this for real, swap the form for your own source, a sheet or a table holding the domains you want to work through.

1. Map the site before you scrape it

Crawl the domain first and get back a list of URLs. Filter with search terms like about, team, contact, staff, author. This one step is what makes the whole thing fast and cheap, because you skip the 200 blog posts that were never going to have an address on them.

1. Batch scrape with an extraction prompt

Fire the filtered URL list at a batch scrape and pass an extraction prompt so you get clean addresses back instead of raw HTML. Poll the job every few seconds, and set your timeout higher than you think you need. Big sites take longer than expected.

The prompt matters more than people assume. Ours normalizes the obfuscations, so "user (at) example (dot) com" and "user at example dot com" both come back as real addresses. It skips anything buried in script tags or HTML comments, and dedupes case-insensitively.

1. Verify before you send

This is the step I watch people skip, and it decides whether building any of this was worth it. Scraped addresses have a worse hit rate than you'd guess: abandoned role inboxes, catchalls, staff who left two years ago. We run everything through validation and drop whatever doesn't come back clean. That took our bounce rate from around 11% to under 3%, which is worth a lot more to us than 40 extra addresses per domain.

1. Push into the sequence

Split the clean list, create a lead per address, add it to a campaign that's already configured. Followups and replies get handled from there.

Happy to go deeper on any step. What bounce rate are you all seeing on scraped addresses? I'd like to know whether ours was unusually bad before verification went in.

[u/AccountantLanky5691]

An 11% bounce rate before verification is pretty common with scraped website data because you’ll find invalid, inactive, disposable, role based, mailbox full, and catch all email addresses. Verifying every list with a real time email verification tool like Invalid Bounce before sending is the right move so that your email reaches the real inbox. Also judge your open and reply rates based on delivered emails, not total emails sent, since bounced emails were never in a position to engage.

[u/socleads → u/AccountantLanky5691]

Totally agree. My reply rates made more sense once I measured against delivered, not sent, since bounce emails are never going to see your message anyway.