Instagram Email Scraper | Boost Email ROI by 700%
How to build and use an Instagram email scraper online and scale almost any brand.
Important note: Please be advised that automatically accessing Instagram is against their terms of service.
This is just an educational resource and for those of you who don’t have the time, resources, and want to be 100% on the legal side of things, get in touch with Influencers Club and just buy email addresses from Instagram.
Why B2C Brands DESPERATELY Need Instagram Email Scrapers
Working in B2B means having a whole specter of email scraping tools to choose from. Anyone with either a bit of coding skills or some extra cash to spend can find a given person’s business details (email address).
The formula here is very simple, you either install a browser extension like skrapp.io that can crawl LinkedIn data to get business details such as company name + the first and last name and from there you can literally guess the email address of everyone in the company. Sure, the pattern varies for every business but it’s a very limited number of choices. After you have let’s say 30 combinations of an email address, you can use an SMTP server that can check the validity and go from there. That’s it.
So my spoiled ass took this for granted before I started working for a B2C company. Being used to easily make a cold outreach campaign and start experimenting I promised my company that we are going to grow our revenue by 2x in the next month.
Boy was I wrong…
We had an Instagram agency that offered any kind of Instagram automation including tactics that were very popular back then like unlimited story viewing, the mother-slave tactic, and so on.
Our primary personas were fitness instructors and photographers. So I jumped into LinkedIn to quickly find out that most of the target audience wasn’t very active on LinkedIn. Also, a ton of them worked for a company that wasn’t so easily found because they were too small.
Fuck.
Needless to say, I didn’t 2x the revenue that month (Spoiler I 5x it by the end of the article)
I learned the hard way that our customers were almost exclusively active on Instagram (with some activity in Facebook groups). But what could I do here? How could I go from a targeted Instagram profile to a personal email?
The early days of the Instagram email scraper (me visiting profiles 1 by 1)
The initial bump I faced was how to find someone’s email address on Instagram.
While looking at some targeted users and engaging in a chat I found that the button Instagram added a while ago on business accounts could give me the personal (Instagram) email if I click it. Cool. Some users had their email and phone number in their bio. Also cool. I started the manual process of visiting Instagram profiles one by one and manually extracting emails in a google sheet. I for all intent and purposes was the real-life Instagram profile scraping technology/tool we needed. After days of hard manual labor, I had about 300 emails extracted and just about enough to run my test with.
I was thinking about how to get email addresses from Instagram at scale but first I needed to prove that this works. I was praying that the campaign wouldn’t work so I didn’t have to do all that work again. On the other hand, if this did work I am sure the whole company would be impressed.
And the results were…. (drum roll) 🥁🥁🥁
Amazing. 25% clicked on my email!! Out of those about 30% actually signed up for a trial. This was huge!!
We had to scale our Instagram email scraper. There weren’t any Instagram email scraper tools online out there and this was clearly working!
How to Build an Instagram scraper tool (aka the coding part & Github)
Again an important note here will be that we’ve heavily invested in our research team that goes over Instagram user data that is publicly available + influencers that personally sign up to be in our database.
This way we help you be 100% on the safe side, both from an Instagram ToS perspective and GDPR / CCPA / ACMA.
But back in my previous company using our Instagram scraper tool we were already working with the unofficial Instagram API ie the mobile endpoints. That meant that to achieve any action, you had to simulate a device and log in to the Insta profile. From there, you just call the same endpoints as you would using a normal phone.
To get emails from Instagram, we learned how to parse the returned JSON file and look up the email address. Sounds easy but it’s not. The problem was that our Instagram email scrapers were getting blocked left and right. The data was amazing, but it just wasn’t sustainable.
I called my coding prodigy friend to see if we could figure something out together. As an android developer, he was a crucial part of getting this solved. We narrowed our obstacle down to two essential parts:
Problem number 1: We have to use Instagram accounts to do the data crawling. The Instagram API has a very, very limited API calls limit. The crawling took ages.
Solution number 1: Create 10 Instagram accounts and try to split the work between them.
Problem number 2: There were emails to be extracted from user comments, description of pictures, on the user profile as a button, link to a website that has an email of the person there. We wanted to get all of that.
Solution number 2: Create 1000 Instagram accounts and crawl the entire activity of a particular user. Hunter.io has a great extension for finding emails from profiles that have a website link included so we used them too.
To do this yourself, use any python scripts from GitHub that offer this functionality or get the data from our 40+ contacts in the database. To do this simply fill out this form and we can go from there.
Revenue goals smashed by our Instagram scraper + Cold Outreach — Time to pivot?
People were clicking and replying left and right. We had 5x the trials that we got from ANY other marketing efforts including a lot of money spent on Facebook Ads. But the day came when Instagram said, enough, no more automation. We couldn’t do anything other than using our Instagram email scraper. No auto follows, comments, likes — NOTHING. I still remember the day when the entire office was dead silent. We knew there was nothing to be done and we might lose the company. And we just raised a seed round of 3M. But that was just the initial reaction. We were not defeated, we just had to pivot into something else.
What else could we use these emails for? Well, a lot of things. We were definitely not the first to sell to consumers. We googled some great e-commerce stores and promised that we can make an email campaign that was going to have an ROI of above 600%. One said “Yes, let’s try it” and we got to work.
We quickly figured out how to find the ideal customer persona, started crawling a lot, and then filtered the data using python. Our filters were done using the data points that we could scrape from Instagram + some external extensions that we found like determining the gender through the profile picture - even though Instagram does not provide that.
From there we set up the campaign, wrote the copy, tested it, and launched a blast. The results were unbelievable. We became experts in cold outreach reaching a whooping 100 000 emails sent per day and growing our client to 2.5M in ARR!
How to scrape Instagram emails: Build your own Instagram Email Scraper vs Buying Data from us
We’re totally open about sharing how to scrape email addresses from Instagram. The point is that it’s very hard to develop this kind of tool without spending a lot of time on programmers that cost a ton.
So here’s how I would sum this up:
- If you have a very early-stage startup and have a developer in-house that can build this — go for it. You don’t need to reach a scale of scraping 5 million profiles per day. Heck, I even started scraping emails from Instagram by hand so you can do it too. If you decide to build an Instagram email scraper here are my suggestions:
- Use a python library (any really from git) I have found some good PHP repos too but I’d go with Python.
- Find great sources for scraping Instagram — This should be followers of a given account, locations, or hashtags. Pick the ones that are very specific to your business.
- Use aged Instagram profiles and have phone numbers that you can validate them with otherwise you’ll lose them almost immediately. Do NOT use your personal profile for extracting emails.
- Validate your emails — About 15% of your emails will be either spam traps, catch-all emails, or invalid. If your email server ie Google sees that you just send random blasts to invalid emails, you’ll end up in spam and never get out of it.
2. If your business reached a scale of getting some revenue and you are looking for another growth channel that can scale fast, book a call with me and we can figure out whether or how we can help you with that.
How to scrape Instagram followers, locations, or hashtags
The beautiful thing about scraping data from Instagram is that you get A LOT of data points - 28 to be exact. This is really valuable because the main thing you need when reaching out to potential customers is relevant, targeted, and personalizable Instagram data.
Scraping Instagram means getting data like Instagram emails but also phone numbers, locations, usernames, used hashtags, number of followers/following, Instagram categories, Instagram bio, etc.
A lot of people want to know “how to get email addresses from Instagram followers”. You know why? Yours or competitors' followers are interested in what you‘re selling. Very few users follow brands just for the sake of it.
But we also take things further. Once we have the results from our research team of your / any account’s Instagram followers, the results will be analyzed and filtered based on exactly what you need.
Some examples of queries brands used to get targeted customer emails from our platform:
- Females that are going to high-end gyms in a specific location (US)
- Men that are followers of women’s underwear pages, have below 10 000 followers and don’t have a business email listed in their profile
- All users that have cross-fit hashtags or keywords in their bio, links to YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, or Facebook and fall within the “fitness trainer” category
You get the point. Scraping Instagram followers is one piece, filtering that data down and then validating the emails (removing spam traps, role-based emails, and invalid ones) is an inseparable piece of the puzzle.
Aaaaaaand that’s the end folks! Hopefully, you found my article helpful.
If you want to get targeted and verified emails for your business, schedule a free call with Influencers Club or fill out this form.
