You can build a web crawler to detect websites with slow connection speeds or other server related errors. You can set up the crawler to identify email addresses listed on the site to automatically add them to a list, or even grab a business name/number and give them a call. We did something similar for a client to identify businesses for his digital directory business & map exploring website. It's pretty tough and you can get a lot of bad results if the crawler is not designed properly, but it's definitely possible to get good leads. We were able to identify millions of businesses in America for our client. Yes, MILLIONS.
As for getting better leads, we tried out a website called Bark.com
It's a LOT more expensive than 19-50 cents per lead, but they are high quality. We spent around $130 for 10 leads. We were able to develop some positive relationships with a few of them and already finished a $1,200+ project (with a $50/month recurring service fee) from one of those leads. I am only mentioning Bark because it has proven to me that good leads can cost a lot more money ($10+ each), but if they are strong leads then it can be totally worth it. We were able to secure more than a 1,000% return on our investment!
Another example of email marketing in my own life was when I actually "guessed" about 50,000 valid emails. What I did was take dictionary lists (just a bunch of words in a list like: hello, puppy, dog) and lists of names (ex: William, Sally, Lilly) and then manipulate them. I added numbers like '1' or even '123' to the end of each word & name... so Hello1, William123, etc. I then added those to various email services... so like
[email protected],
[email protected], etc etc. I generated massive lists of hundreds of thousands of "possible email addresses".I literally had like 500,000 possible email addresses in 4 different text files. I then sold this list of "possibles" to a friend of mine for $25 per list, so $100 for 500k possible addresses. Of those addresses, just over 50,000 went through without an issue and the rest "bounced". This was many years ago, so I am sure we would have had better results today than back then. Out of the 50,000 emails we contacted, his site actually received around 10,000 unique visitors over the course of a week. My friend thought this was really cool, but he wanted to perfect the art.. So I then generated new lists with new words & names, and I tried different and more common numbers/words at the end of each. I then tried out the lists myself to figure out which were the valid ones, and I ended up with around 75,000 new valid email addresses. However, he got a notice warning him about mass mailing spam, so he didn't want to email them all and he didn't want to spend another $100. I sold him the list of 75k emails for around $50. As a 13-14 year old, I was very proud of these efforts LOL!
All in all, there are many ways to identify valid email addresses and businesses.
You should try out a few different methods, make sure you are complying with the law, and if you struggle then maybe you will even consider paying $10+/lead from a really reputable leads service like Bark!
🙂
