I’ve recently started working with a client. He want’s to scrape emails from instagram and other place from the internet and cold email for his shopify store. Is this legal?
also I’m trying to tell him that it can seriously affect his deliverability as people will be reporting as spam.
Would I be correct in saying this?
Yes, I agree with you. This is not a good way to go for many reasons, mostly because:
That’s correct, they should not scrape and email Instagram users without their consent.
But if there are other ways they can get Instagram followers onto their email list, like using an Instagram giveaway as an incentive (e.g. chance to win a small prize). You might use rules like these:
You’ll find that, on average, over 40% of the people who enter will ALSO opt-in to your email list.
For example, the results from one customer campaign shared publicly are below. TL;DR they only had 3,000 Instagram followers, but got 70 new email subscribers from a single 2-3 day campaign, and they could repeat that a couple times a month.
You could imagine a brand with 10X or 1,000X the followers using the same prize and getting many more subscribers since this approach scales well.
Lastly, a couple tips: If you start using giveaways to drive opt-ins, automate as much as possible (e.g. our app does it for Shopify, but there are others) and DO NOT use an expensive prize. For example, Hydroflask drives TONS of engagement just giving away $30 water bottles. So rather than do one giveaway with a huge prize, do a couple a month with smaller prizes -- you’ll see much better returns.
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