How to collect emails from Sales Navigator in 2023? [No Code]

Linkedin is an exceptional source of data: according to the site, there are more than 850 million (!) users in more than 200 countries and territories in the world. The corporate world in its almost totality, within a click's reach.

Moreover, according to a study conducted by McKinsey in 2012, email remains an ultra-relevant user acquisition tool and 40 times more effective than social networks. While the study is now a decade old, the gap is considerable.

Top, we have our winning ticket! All we have to do now is to go and find the profiles of our choice on Linkedin, to get the emails, and to send emails by the thousand. It's easy.

Yes but... professional emails are simply... not available on Linkedin. Which prefers to monetize InMail, its internal prospecting tool.

In this tutorial, we will see how to collect 10 profiles, with 6 valid business email addresses in less than 100 seconds, with lobstr, directly from Linkedin Sales Navigator. In a few minutes. For free. Without a single line of code.

This tutorial is for you if you need emails to:

1. carry out a sales prospecting campaign
2. recruit in your team a profile of choice
3. build a market trend

It's up to us.

tl;dr

And here is a complete video! 5 minutes, no more - easy: https://www.loom.com/share/f61b020217a74410a3dec843aef49e44

Prerequisites

Before you start the maneuver, 3 simple tasks to complete upfront:

1. create a Linkedin Sales Navigator account
2. create a lobstr account
3. get your API key from dropcontact

Let's go.

Create a Linkedin Sales Navigator account

First, we'll create a Sales Navigator account. To do this, make sure you have a linkedin account, and go to the Linkedin Sales Navigator premium offer page.

Simply select the "Core free trial" offer - that's enough:

Finally, fill in all your banking information. It will cost 80 EUR per month.

A real question arises at this level: after all, why not just use a Linkedin account? In other words, what is the point of this premium Sales Navigator account?

Of course, the Sales Navigator account allows you to use many advanced search filters, unique to Sales Navigator: industry, company size, seniority. But, we clearly could have done without them.

No, the main thing is elsewhere.

The Sales Navigator account allows you to massively increase the tacit browsing limit allowed by Linkedin.

1. 250 profiles per day with Sales Navigator
2. 50 profiles per day with Linkedin

In other words, with Sales Navigator, you can collect 6x more profiles.

Create a lobstr account

Then, simply create a lobstr account!

Go to the account creation page, and fill in your email and user password, then click on "Create an account":

And that's it!

Now the real work can begin.

Recover your Dropcontact API key [optional]

Attention, this part is optional: when choosing the enrichment tool, you can either choose dropcontact, and we ask you to give your API key, or choose lobstr.

In the second case, we take care of everything!

And with the free plan, you get 60 free email credits per month.

At this point, one last question remains: how does this mysterious email address retrieval work?

Well, it's simple: lobstr provides dropcontact with the name, the first name, and the domain name of the profile's company. All this information is public, and retrieved from Linkedin, by our collection tool.

The enrichment company will then test all possible combinations of emails, and for each combination, test the validity of the professional email in question.

f.last@domain
first@domain
first.last@domain

For example, the following case - totally coincidental:

1. first name: sasha
2. name: bouloudnine
3. domain: lobstr.io

Dropcontact will test the following combinations:

s.bouloudnine@lobstr.io
sasha@lobstr.io
sasha.bouloudnine@lobstr.io

The first two are not valid, so the emails will be discarded. The third one is completely valid. And that's it!

Emails are good, you'll tell me. But dropcontact promises to enrich emails and phone numbers. So a final question arises, how does dropcontact get the phones it provides?

Well, for the time being it's simpler, the company directly retrieves the public business phone numbers on the company's website. It's that simple.

To use Dropcontact with lobstr, nothing could be easier: create an account on dropcontact, and in the "Integrations & API" section, simply copy your API key:

https://app.dropcontact.com/fr/api

And there you have it!

Last thing to know, 1 dropcontact credit does not always correspond to 1 email. The success rate depends on the type of business targeted:

1. 60-80% success rate on large companies
2. 30-50% on small and medium-sized companies
3. 2-5% on crafts or independent professions

In other words, our tool is ultra-relevant if you want to retrieve emails from professionals of large and medium-sized companies, including startups.

Be careful, however, to avoid freelancers, who are not attached to a particular domain name. Without a domain name, it is impossible to recover an email. This explains the very low success rate. It's as simple as that.

The field is now perfectly marked out. Let's go!

Step-by-step Tutorial

This tutorial is going to take place in 3 simple steps:

1. get the Sales Navigator search URL
2. synchronize your Sales Navigator account
3. create the lobstr automation

At the end of this collection, we will have retrieved 10 linkedin profiles, with 6 emails. In 2 clicks. No more, no less.

Let's go!

Retrieve the Sales Navigator search URL

First thing, we'll get the Sales Navigator search URL!

First, we go to the Sales Navigator profile search area, and we choose the set of criteria that correspond to the target of our choice.

Unlike Linkedin, Sales Navigator offers unique advanced filters, which will allow you to target the people of your choice very precisely:

1. seniority
2. industry
3. company size

Collect only the profiles that match your needs.

Once you have made your selection by criteria, press "Enter", and retrieve the search URL from your browser:

Here, the URL in this format:

https://www.linkedin.com/sales/search/people?query=(spellCorrectionEnabled%3Atrue%2CrecentSearchParam%3A(id%3A2232136066%2CdoLogHistory%3Atrue)%2Cfilters%3AList((type%3AREGION%2Cvalues%3AList((id%3A105015875%2Ctext%3AFrance%2CselectionType%3AINCLUDED)))%2C(type%3AINDUSTRY%2Cvalues%3AList((id%3A96%2Ctext%3AServices%2520et%2520conseil%2520informatiques%2CselectionType%3AINCLUDED)%2C(id%3A6%2Ctext%3ATechnologie%252C%2520information%2520et%2520Internet%2CselectionType%3AINCLUDED)))%2C(type%3ASENIORITY_LEVEL%2Cvalues%3AList((id%3A10%2Ctext%3APropri%25C3%25A9taire%2CselectionType%3AINCLUDED))))%2Ckeywords%3Alobstr)&sessionId=cesQFswfQuS%2BX2TW%2FUwnNQ%3D%3D&viewAllFilters=true

And here we are good!

The robot, when launched, will go directly to the page indicated by this search URL. This is the entry point of the collection. A good start.

Let's move on to the next step.

Synchronize your Sales Navigator account

On Sales Navigator, the data is accessible behind a login, once you are connected to your account. So we will start by synchronizing our Sales Navigator account!

Just go to the lobstr interface, in the "Accounts" section, and add a Sales Navigator account. Fill in your username and password, then click on "Synchronize":

Wait about 10 seconds... and that's it! Your account is now properly synchronized:

The robot will be able to connect to Sales Navigator and collect data directly from your account. No more tedious cookie management and unfortunate desynchronizations: we take care of all that for you.

Let's get on with the rest of the operation.

Create lobstr automation

The preparations are completed.

With 2 tasks accomplished:

1. retrieving the search URL
2. synchronization of the account

We will be able to serenely attack the main course.

First go to the main page, and click on "Create a new Cluster":

In the search bar, type "Sales" - and select the long awaited crawler: "Sales Navigator Leads Search Export":

And that's it, the cluster is created!

Let's go to the last details of configuration.

In the "Account" section, simply select the account you have just synchronized, and click on "Save" to go to the next step:

In the "Add Tasks" section, paste the search URL retrieved above into the space provided, and press "Add". The task is added to the cluster! Then click on save:

In the "Settings" section, select "Email" to make sure emails and phone numbers are collected. As discussed above, you can either use our enrichment service "Lobstr" - and voila!

1. or use "Dropcontact", and fill in the API key retrieved above. At your convenience.

By the way, for the purpose of this tutorial only, we only collect the first 10 results. This will do the trick. Also, we inform the value 10, in the box "Max Results". The robot will stop once the first 10 profiles are collected.

In the "Notifications" part, 3 possibilities:

1. none: do not receive any mail
2. on success: receive a mail when the run is successfully completed
3. on error: receive an email in case of error

We'll choose "On success": good news deserves to be announced joyfully!

Finally, in the "Launch" part, we have 2 choices

1. manually: launch the collection by hand, 1 time
2. repeatedly: launch a collection automatically, n times, at regular intervals

For the purpose of this tutorial, we will launch the machine only once by hand. That should be enough!

Finally click on "Yes":

And there you have it: the machine is launched. It's wonderful!

Enjoy!

And now the collection is launched! Now you just have to watch the robot working from our servers, peacefully.

On the console screen you will be able to see the progress of the collection and the task being processed.

Above all, you will have live access to the names of the collected profiles, and... the emails (!) as soon as they are available:

Once the collection is complete, click on the "Download" button:

Once opened on Excel, you have access to a data set of about ten lines, structured, readable and directly exploitable:

We collected data from 10 profiles, with 45 attributes each, including last name, first name, company name, location and seniority. And 6 valuable emails, that is to say a success rate of enrichment of 60%, which will allow us to activate an immediate solicitation campaign.

Without a line of code. In less than 100 seconds. And without paying a cent.

Congratulations!

Limitations

Beware, no immense powers - without immense responsibilities!

Also, if the tutorial allows you to collect a large volume of profiles, there are 3 clear limits

1. max. 2500 profiles. per search URL
2. 3-5 profiles per minute per account
3. 250 profiles per day per account

First of all, Sales Navigator has a raw display limit i.e. it is impossible to collect more than 2500 profiles per URL, even if your search URL returns several tens of thousands of profiles.

In fact, there are 25 profiles per page, and the last page accessible is page 100:

On the other hand, qui va piano va sano. Also, for optimal collection reasons - and without risk of blocking the accounts used - it is only possible to collect 3-5 profiles per minute per account.

Furthermore, we will not collect more than 250 profiles per day and per account. Beyond this threshold, your account is restricted on our side, the current run is paused, and restarted, if needed, the next day!

This is what we find in the "Account" part, after clicking on "Max per day":

If you want to go faster, it's entirely possible - thanks to multithreading, and this in 1 click, directly from our pretty interface. And we'll tell you about it in a future article.

And the price?

Much has been said about the free plan - which allows you to collect 50 profiles per day, including 60 email credits per month. But how much does it cost if I want to go further?

For starters - if you want to optimize the cost per lead, you'll need to get a lobstr subscription and a dropcontact subscription.

We offer email credits, but not enough to make the price as competitive as if you were to take the package directly from the original provider.

Divide and conquer.

OK, once that's done, how much does it cost?

A quick example - we start with the 50 EUR per month plan from lobstr.

With this plan, you get 3 hours of collection time per day. At 3 profiles per minute, a low estimate, you will be able to collect 180 profiles per day, or 5000 profiles per month.

On the dropcontact side, you need 75 EUR for 5000 email credits per month. This makes a total of 125 EUR.

Attention, we will not forget the Sales Navigator account, which costs 80 EUR per month.

Finally, the cost per email depends on the enrichment rate. In the end, it will cost you between 0.15 EUR and 0.05 EUR per valid GDPR-compliant email:

For 1500 to 4000 business emails. 98% valid. Tied precisely to your Sales Navigator search criteria. And collected in just 30 days.

Definitely the most competitive price on the market.

Conclusion

That's it, that's the end of this tutorial.

We were able to get 10 profiles, with 45 attributes per profile, and 6 valid business email addresses, which is a nice success rate of 60%.

Without having written a single line of code. In less than 100 seconds. And totally free.

Happy scraping!

🦀