Is $49 too low for eMail Scraping software?

[Alan Schneider]

I'm getting ready to release my eMail Scraper which allows people to enter a Google or Yahoo search and this tool crawls the results and innner pages of sites returned and creates an email list from those returned sites. These are all publicly available contact email addresses.

I've sold a few copies to freinds / marketers and had a few people test it. They all thought $49 was a little cheap. I've seen other software that sells via affiliate channels and they seem to start around $77.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thank you.

[Shaun Lee]

It depends on your features and the benefits for your potential users.

If your software is better than your competitors, you can naturally charge more.

Pardon me for asking, but what exactly is the purpose of an email scraper?

-Shaun

[Alan Schneider]

Basically it performs 2 things...

1) You enter a Google or Yahoo search term like "animal grooming in chicago IL email contact." It crawls the search results and scans each site listed for a sitemap (or manually crawls the site for inner pages). Then it lists the sites in the display window. You can manually view the list and exclude sites that are not desireable.

2) Aftter the site list is done, the "Scrape" button goes thru every page of the site listed and looks for a publicly available contact email address. It then creates 2 log files, one contaiing a detailed log of the scraping process, the other is simply a cr/lf delimited list of the emails found.

I am working on an example video that shows how I used it in reselling wholesale pet care products last Fall. I entered the searches for a lot of major cities (or whole states in some instances) and developed a list of over 2000 publicly available contact email addresses that were specific to that niche industry.

I wrote the tool because I saw that buying generic email lists cost a lot of money, and they didn't give me people that would be specifically interested in those types of products.


Thanks for the reply!

[Martin R Butler]

I have found these sort of email harvesting software will get you known as a spammer.
I trialed one a few years ago and had so many complaints to my ISP that I was spamming that I never recommend people use this type of software for internet marketing purposes.

I don't mean to disrespect your software but maybe you could share how it could be used constructivley.

[Kunj K]

It's too low... but is this kind of software above board?

[Garland Coulson]

This is software used by spammers to send out huge amounts of spam email.

There is no legitimate use for this software.

[Alan Schneider]

There is no legitimate use for this software.


So how is it different than sending sales emails to some generic list of 1,000 people that have been tricked into giving their email address and who aren't specifically interested in your product? At least this is targeted to a niche that the user specifies. It's simply a method of targeting your email campaigns instead of blindly sending to a junk email list... IMHO.

Anyway, the software is out. Let's see how it does @ $49

I'm working on my next marketing software which is a blast social bookmark program. Once an article is written, it will submit the link to all subscribed social bookmarking sites (well, most anyway... I have about 60 in the list). It will auto log in and auto post the article bits based on user entry and then do the submissions automatically. Beats the hell out of the manual method.

[citrus]

Alan,

Do you know what another name for spam email is? Unsolicited commercial emails.

What your software does is gather emails of people who did not give you their explicit permission (by opting in) to send them commercial emails.

Let's say I start a list in IM. I offer a report called "The #1 secret to generating traffic through Twitter" for free on a squeeze page. Someone decides they want and they opt-in. No trickery here.

By opting in for this Twitter traffic report, they show me that they are interested in Twitter and in generating traffic. Therefore, if I promote stuff related to Twitter, traffic gen, or even social media in general, I can probably get a better response rate than if I were to promote random IM stuff.

From what I can tell, you're emailing a bunch of people who have never heard of you before. They have not shown an interest in you. They have not shown an interest in learning or buying from you. And, again, they have not given you their permission to market to them.

You mentioned sending sales emails to a generic list of people. How can the list be generic if they opt-in to receive a specific product (such as a Twitter traffic gen report)? How could they have been tricked into giving their email to me if they knew what they were getting in advance, and, upon going through the report, liked what they say?

Do you know what's worse than being tricked onto a list? Being forced onto one.

Even if what you're doing isn't illegal, it's still unethical.

Curtis