Python Tutorial 32: ContactOut Bot for Scraping Emails and Linkedin Profiles
Inbound and outreach marketing are a pair of close partners in the whole journey of lead and demand generation. This portfolio always creates the best ROI if you can fully well make them work together in the lead generation strategy. However, if we break down the outreach workflow, data collection and verification are perceptive which requires lots of manual work or a big amount of money investment. In fact, the saying is true, but it has more ways to go instead of having only one option. And ContactOut bot indeed can increase the efficiency and facilitate the whole process.
In this Python Tutorial, I would walk you through how to leverage ContactOut platform to grab the target lead contact data automatically. You don’t need to filter manually, but also you can save dollars to buy credits for some low-quality contact data. By the end of this Python tutorial, you can master the skills to create a contactout bot to automate the data collection work.
Python Module & Libraries: Beautifulsoup, Selenium, pandas, gspread
- What’s ContactOut
- Data Filter in Contactout URL parameters
- Nested Loop
- Name, Linkedin and Email data element
- Full Python Script of ContactOut Bot
What’s ContactOut
Contactout (contactout.com) allows you to find anyone’s personal Email, Linkedin profile, and phone number. It’s a platform to facilitate you to find contacts. It is 10x faster with the most powerful sourcing platform available, according to the ContactOut website.
So ContactOut is a great resource that not only helps in revealing the contact details but also helps in obtaining lead intelligence. And on top of that, it comes for a free trial and gives you sufficient credit to grab the contact data, compared to the peer competitors.
The app consists of over one billion email addresses and counting. And when you are asking if this app data is legit and safe. The answer is yes absolutely because the app is compliant with all U.S.A and General Data Protection Regulations and privacy laws.
You can sign up for an account for free and it has sufficient credits for you to experience and grab the data. The free credit would resume back to your free account level by month. However, one of the most challenging of signing up is that it requires you by using the company domain email address. So basically you can’t use personal email addresses and steal the free credits by creating more accounts. Unless you might have millions of company mailboxes.
Data Filter in Contactout URL parameters
There are quite some parameters ContactOut provides you to filter the search result. You can filter by title, location, skill sets, company name, years in the company, industry, people name, etc. Basically, if you are deploying the outreach marketing and generating leads, location and company name are two useful parameters I will often use.
https://contactout.com/dashboard/search?nm=&location=' + location + '&years=-1&title=&skills=&school=&company=' + company + '&keyword=&industry=&company_date=current&years_in_current_company=-1&page=’ + x
What’s more, as ContactOut has millions of data, every search has many page results. It’s controlled by the parameter – page=. So you can create a nested loop if the looping has more than one variable.
Nested Loop
It’s a very popular looping approach. A nested loop is a loop inside the body of the outer loop. The inner or outer loop can be any type, such as a while loop or for a loop. Take the ContactOut for example, the outer for loop, which is the list of company name values, can contain an inner loop that is the number of page SERP you aim to scrape.
The outer loop can contain more than one inner loop. There is no limitation on the chaining of loops.
In the nested loop, the number of iterations will be equal to the number of iterations in the outer loop multiplied by the iterations in the inner loop.
In each iteration of the outer loop, the inner loop executes all its iterations. For each iteration of an outer loop the inner loop re-start and completes its execution before the outer loop can continue to its next iteration.
Nested loops are typically used for working with multidimensional data structures. They are such as printing two-dimensional arrays, and iterating a list that contains a nested list.
A nested loop is a part of a control flow statement that helps you to understand the basics of Python.
If you notice our other bots and scrapers, you might find that you can apply this to many bots, such as Amazon best selling product scraper, Douyin content, etc.
Name, Linkedin, and Email data element
In the ContactOut search result, the scrapable data like people’s names, titles, company names, email addresses, Linkedin profiles, phone numbers, etc. Here you can use both use selenium and beautifulsoup to lock the data element location, for example, each item from the list of search results.
Here is a tip and trick. As the free account has limited credits, so I would suggest you first well leverage the free credits to grab the quality key decision-maker contact. But also you can find if your target company has quality contact in ContactOut by using Linkedin profile URL.
You can leverage the Linkedin automatic messaging bot to verify if the contact person is still valid and whether it’s the key decision-maker in the position. So you can buy credits to grab the better quality contacts, rather than wasting dollars on all data contact.
For more details regarding Linkedin automation, please check out this article.
Python Tutorial 24: Linkedin Scraper & Bot, Automate Adding Connections and Messaging
Full Python Script of ContactOut Bot
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