How to Power Your Outreach with Claygent for Web Scraping? – Best Practices & AI Workflow

Manual data scraping has long been a bone of contention for sales teams & marketers. Whether it involves finding company information, extracting prospect details or gathering insights – the process is slow, error-prone & inefficient.

Owing to this, scaling your outreach can feel like a task. That’s where leveraging automation becomes crucial, with Clay’s AI agent called ‘Claygent‘ for web scraping serving as a gamechanger. The tool takes the complexity out of web scraping – searching, extracting & organizing data from the public web, so you can focus on strategy than grunt work.

If scaling your outreach feels overwhelming, using Claygent for web scraping can prove faster, smarter & more impactful. To get started, here’s what we’ll explore in this article:

• How to use Claygent for web scraping?
• The various use cases of Claygent for web scraping
• Key best practices to fully leverage the feature

Using Claygent for Web Scraping: What’s the Noise About?

So, what exactly is Claygent? At its core, it’s an AI-powered web scraping tool that automates many aspects of the sales outreach process. Whether you need contact details, company information, or social media profiles, Claygent web scraping can pull this data seamlessly from third-party platforms like Apollo, LinkedIn, and Hunter.io.

Instead of manually searching and compiling data, Claygent web scraping simplifies the process by handling everything automatically. With the ability to integrate natural language instructions, it makes web scraping accessible even for non-technical users.

For sales teams aiming to automate at scale, this tool is a must-have.

How Does Claygent Simplify Web Scraping?

There are a bunch of features that make using Claygent for web scraping an unmatched experience. Some of these include: 

1. Dynamic Web Data Collection

Unlike traditional scraping tools that rely on specific limitations, Claygent lets you scrape tons of data. You can not only find prospect information, but also undertake tasks like:

• Searching Google for relevant insights/enrichments (such as company information, finding company domain using company name, tech-stack related data and so on)
  
• Navigating websites and sitemaps to extract pricing-related information, product descriptions and business-specific insights. 

For example, say you’re looking to compare a competitor’s pricing with your own, you can leverage Claygent for web scraping this information from their pricing page without running manual scripts on their website. 

2. Natural Language Instructions

One of the biggest hurdles in web scraping is the steep learning curve. You need to have some level of programming knowledge to scrape specific information, which can quickly get difficult when doing outreach at scale. 

Using Claygent for web scraping allows you to define tasks using simple, everyday English. To do this, you can leverage the GPT API, instructing Claygent to help you perform specific tasks.
Here’s a quick example: 

• Task: “Find the pricing model for a company.”
• Instruction: “Search for the pricing page, summarize the tiers, and return results in a structured format.”

That’s how simple the process is, allowing you to scrape tons of relevant insights in a few minutes without any coding knowledge. 

3. Structured Output with Schema Customization

Dealing with unstructured data is a common challenge in web scraping. Using Claygent allows you to define an output schema, ensuring consistent and actionable data.

For instance:

• If you’re scraping pricing data, Claygent can structure the output as:
  • Tier 1: $139/month
  • Tier 2: $349/month

This eliminates the need for manual formatting, making the data immediately usable for CRM integration or analysis.

4. Flexible Use Cases

You can use Claygent across industries, leveraging its capabilities to find a variety of information across industries. 

Here are a few use cases we’ve tried out in the recent past (and those that have worked well for us):

• E-commerce: Scrape competitor product pages for pricing and reviews.
• SaaS: Track customer feedback on platforms like G2 or Capterra.
• Real Estate: Gather property listings and market trends.
• Job Search: Claygent can  help you scrape relevant job postings from the web. 
• Marketing: Analyse social media trends and hashtags for campaign optimization.

No matter the industry, you can easily use Claygent for web scraping information as per your requirements. 

5. Competitive Analysis with Claygent

Claygent can also be used to simplify (and automate) the collection of critical competitor insights such as their pricing, product features and customer reviews. 

You can either write a prompt from scratch, or use Clay’s own templates to extract data, segregate specific competitor insights in a structured format and use it in your campaigns.

6. Market Research with Claygent

Another interesting use case to leverage Claygent for web scraping involves market research. Using the tool, you can automate trend and sentiment analysis to further power your outreach. 

Claygent scrapes data from diverse sources such as: social media platforms, news websites, blogs and online forums. You can then filter out irrelevant information and use these insights in your sales outreach or marketing efforts. 

Key Benefits of Using Claygent for Web Scraping

When it comes to B2B outbound, efficiency and accuracy are critical to data scraping and collection. Whether you’re ramping up sales, performing market research or optimizing marketing campaigns, using Claygent for web scraping offers a variety of benefits. 

Some of these include: 

1. Time Efficiency

Manual web scraping can be incredibly time-consuming. Searching for specific details like email addresses, company insights, or social media links often involves navigating multiple websites and copy-pasting data into spreadsheets.

With Claygent, this entire process is automated, cutting down hours of work into minutes. As a result,

• Sales Teams: Can focus on closing deals rather than hunting for prospects’ details.
• Marketers: Can save time gathering data for campaigns and analyzing trends.
• Researchers: Can streamline the collection of information across different sources for faster reporting.

By automating the above tasks, B2B teams can allocate their resources towards more strategic processes like lead nurturing and refining outreach strategies. 

2. Improved Accuracy

Manual data collection is prone to errors—with incorrect phone numbers, incomplete email addresses, or outdated company details threatening to derail your outreach. Using Claygent for web scraping eliminates human error by automating the process, so that the data you collect is reliable and up-to-date.

• Validated Data: The tool cross-references information across multiple sources to ensure accuracy.
• Consistency: Data formatting remains consistent, making it easier to integrate into CRM systems.
• Scalability: As the data volume increases, the accuracy remains intact, unlike manual processes where errors tend to multiply.

With accurate data at your fingertips, your team can confidently target the right prospects without worrying about missteps.

3. Centralized Data Management

Managing data collected from various websites can quickly become chaotic. Using Claygent’s web scraping feature solves this by centralizing all scraped information in one place.

That’s not all, since you can also organize the data into different columns or export the information directly to your CRM, email outreach platforms and analytics tools. 

The feature is particularly useful for businesses juggling multiple campaigns, eliminating the need to maintain different files or spreadsheets. 

4. Customizability

One of the biggest advantages of using Claygent for web scraping is its customizability. No matter if your ideal customer is a SaaS company or an eCommerce store – using Claygent’s web scraping tool can tailor the functionality & task as per your specific needs.

With the tool, you can: 

• Extract social media information (such as campaign insights or hashtag-specific insights)
• Structure data into pre-defined schemas like name, company, email addresses and so on – enabling you to easily upload that data into your CRM. 
• Pull only the most relevant details, such as key decision-makers or geographic locations.

The tool adapts to your workflow, rather than forcing you to adjust to its limitations.

5. Scalability for Growing Teams

As your business grows, so does the volume of data you need to process. Manual web scraping simply can’t keep up. This is where using Claygent for web scraping comes in.
The tool scales your data collection effortlessly, handling everything from small batches for startups to extensive data sets for enterprise-level campaigns. 

That’s not all, since sales and marketing teams can use the tool to: 

• Handle thousands of data points simultaneously without compromising speed.
• Easily expand your data collection efforts as new use cases emerge.
• Free up team members to focus on strategic activities instead of being bogged down by cumbersome, manual data entry.

6. Enhanced Team Collaboration

Web scraping isn’t always a solo effort. Large projects often require input and collaboration across sales, marketing, and analytics teams. Clay’s user-friendly platform makes it easy for multiple stakeholders to work together seamlessly.

This is usually made possible through the following capabilities: 

• Shared Access: Enable team members to view and refine data in real-time.
• Collaborative Workflows: Assign specific tasks, such as competitor analysis or lead enrichment, to different team members.
• Actionable Insights: With clean and organized data, every team can quickly extract the insights they need.

This not only improves decision making, but also ensures you’re doling out more high-quality outreach campaigns across the board. 

7. Cost-Effectiveness

Investing in automation might seem like an upfront expense, but it’s far more cost-effective than relying on manual efforts. Using Claygent for web scraping also ensures this by offering the following benefits: 

• Reduces the need for extra hands to perform data collection.
• You get faster and more accurate data collection – enabling better and highly-targeted campaigns with improved conversion rates.
• Eliminates redundant tasks and allows you to focus on tasks that matter most.

For businesses looking to optimize their budgets without compromising on results, Claygent’s capabilities offer tons of value.

How to Use Claygent for Web Scraping? – Step-by-Step AI Workflow

From visiting websites to collecting and analyzing data, Claygent uses GPT (under the hood) to perform tasks with unmatched speed and efficiency. Plus, it allows you to use your own OpenAI API key, making it cost-effective for basic tasks with minimal fees, usually just a few pennies per request.

In the below-given Claygent web scraping tutorial, you‘ll learn how to leverage the tool for lead generation and data enrichment: 

Step 1: Getting Started with Claygent

Before learning how to use Claygent for web scraping, let’s understand how to get started with setting it up. Here’s a stepwise breakdown of what you need to do to get started:

1. Set Up Your OpenAI API Key: Claygent allows you to use your own OpenAI API key. This is an essential step as it ensures you have access to the AI tools that power Claygent’s scraping functionality.
   
2. Choose Your Task: Claygent can be used for a variety of scraping tasks, so identify what you need first. In this tutorial, we’ll focus on finding lead generation companies by scraping websites and extracting keywords.
   
3. Input Your Query: Once your account is set up, input the task you want to automate. For example, if you want to find websites related to lead generation, you’ll be looking for specific keywords like “lead” or “leads.”

Step 2: Scraping Websites for Keywords

One of the easiest ways to use Claygent for web scraping is by scraping data for specific keywords. This can help you identify companies or agencies that are focused on lead generation.

Here’s how to do this: 

1. Select Target Websites: First, gather a list of websites you’d like to scrape. For example, if you’re targeting agencies, input their URLs into Claygent.
   
2. Input Keywords: Tell Claygent to look for specific keywords like “lead” or “leads” on these websites. These words will act as triggers to determine whether a website is focused on lead generation.
   
3. Analyze the Results: Claygent will visit the websites and search for the target keywords, counting how often they appear on the page. While this is a simple approach, it’s effective for quickly identifying potential leads.

Step 3: Extracting Key Data

One of the benefits of automated scraping with Claygent is that it can expedite the extraction of critical information from websites, all without code. This can include email addresses, phone numbers, or social media links. 

Below, we’ll walk through how to extract these key data points.

Finding Email Addresses on Websites

1. Search for Emails: To find email addresses, simply input a query asking Automated scraping with Claygent to search for emails on a website. For example, you can tell it, “Find all email addresses on this website.”
   
2. Format the Output: If there are multiple emails found, Claygent will list them in a comma-separated format. You can also ask it to ignore certain types of emails (e.g., “[email protected]”).
   
3. Refine Results: If Claygent includes extra text along with the emails, you can set up a formula to extract just the email addresses, ensuring that your data remains clean and organized.

Enriching Company Profiles with Social Media Links

Another fantastic feature of Claygent web scraping is its ability to gather social media links. If you’re building company profiles, having their social media URLs (like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) can be extremely valuable.

1. Ask for Social Media Links: Input a query such as, “Find the Facebook and Instagram links for this company.”
2. Use Fallback Formulas: If Claygent outputs additional text along with the links, use fallback formulas to ensure only the URLs for Facebook or Instagram are displayed. This guarantees a clean, consistent format for easy integration into your systems.

Step 4: Streamlining and Cleaning the Data

While Claygent does a fantastic job of gathering and organizing data, sometimes extra text or irrelevant information can sneak in. Thankfully, there are ways to clean up this data and get it into the format you need.
Some of them include:

1. Extracting Specific Data: If Claygent provides too much information, you can set up formulas that extract only the data you need, such as the number of times a keyword appears or the email addresses found.
   
2. Focusing on the Targeted Information: For instance, if you’re scraping for lead generation companies and Claygent returns an abundance of data, use a formula to extract just the count of the keyword “lead” or “leads” from the response.

This step ensures that your scraping results are streamlined and easily digestible, saving time when analyzing the data.

Step 5: Scaling and Automating Tasks

As your scraping needs grow, Claygent can easily scale with you. You don’t need to manually adjust your tasks every time you want to scrape a new website or gather more data. Simply repeat the process for new websites, keywords, or types of data, and automated scraping with Claygent will handle it efficiently.

1. Batch Processing: You can input a batch of websites and keywords at once, letting Claygent process them sequentially or simultaneously.
2. Custom Prompts for Repetitive Tasks: Once you’ve created a working prompt, you can save it for future use. This eliminates the need to redo the same setup every time you need similar data.

Step 6: Analyzing and Applying the Data

Once Claygent has gathered the data, it’s time to analyze and apply it to your lead generation efforts or company profiling. Here’s how you can leverage the information you’ve collected:

1. Lead Generation: With a list of companies identified by keyword frequency (e.g., “lead” or “leads”), you can start tailoring your outreach efforts. For instance, if a company mentions “leads” often, they might be a good fit for lead generation services.
   
2. Email List Building: Use the extracted email addresses to build targeted lists for your campaigns. You can even refine these lists by excluding certain types of email addresses.
   
3. Company Profiling: Use the social media links and other gathered data to build comprehensive company profiles.
   
   This data can help your sales and marketing teams engage with the companies on multiple fronts.

Example Use Cases of Claygent Web Scraping

Having experimented with a bunch of different use cases for our clients, here are a few key ways (or use cases) for you to leverage Claygent for web scraping: 

Contact Scraping with Apollo Integration

When using Clay to power your lead generation, you need to ensure that your prospect list is both comprehensive and accurate. That’s where you can leverage the capabilities of Clay for contact scraping. It involves enriching a list of companies with valuable prospect information such as job titles, names, and work emails.

While there are a bunch of data providers, you can easily do this with the Apollo and Clay integration.

Here’s how: 

1. Prepare Your Clay table: First, you need to prepare or upload a Clay table containing a list of companies, with their name and domain being the 2 key columns.
   
2. Apollo Integration Setup: Next up, connect your Apollo account via an API key to Clay, so you can easily enrich other data fields with additional information from the company list.
   
3. Enrichment Setup: Use the “Add Enrichment” function in Clay, selecting “Find People”. This enrichment will identify key prospects by using the company domain and job titles. If you have a list of specific job titles (such as CEOs or Marketing Directors), include them in the enrichment tool.
   
4. Configure Enrichment Parameters: Set parameters such as geographical location (e.g., United States or Europe) and the number of prospects (limit the number of contacts returned if you need specific individuals like senior management).
   
5. Testing and Data Validation: Run the enrichment on a small subset (e.g., first 10 rows) to ensure that the enrichment process works smoothly without errors.
   
6. Transferring Enriched Data: Once the enrichment is complete, use Clay’s “Write to Other Table” enrichment to transfer the enriched data (such as LinkedIn profiles, job titles, etc.) to your Buyer Persona Table.

7. Email Enrichment: If emails are not enriched automatically, use “Find Work Email” to gather emails using services like Hunter, Snov.io, or Datagma. You can also integrate email validation tools like ZeroBounce to ensure that only valid emails are used.

8. Final Data Integration: After email enrichment, update your table by mapping the validated emails to a dedicated email column. This will allow for seamless import into tools like Smartlead or Lemlist for outreach.

By automating this process with Claygent, you save a significant amount of time compared to manual data scraping, especially when dealing with large sets of company information.

2. Finding Company Revenue & Headcount 

Another valuable use case for Claygent web scraping is the process of first finding company revenue and then its headcount. This information is critical for segmenting and qualifying leads based on the financial health and size of a company – especially if you’re selling a high-ticket product or service. With Claygent’s web scraping capabilities, this process becomes highly efficient. 

Here’s a stepwise explanation of how you can leverage Claygent for web scraping critical company data: 

1. Data Sourcing: Start with a list of company names. For example, in one case, a client requested data on HVAC contractors across the United States. Claygent helps scrape company-specific data like website, email address, and company domain.
   
2. ZenRows Integration: Using ZenRows, Claygent can scrape websites to gather official company emails. This step ensures that you are working with more established businesses that have professional domain-based email addresses, which are often more reliable than personal email accounts.
   
3. Google Search with ZoomInfo: The next step is to use Google Search combined with ZoomInfo. For each company name, search for its ZoomInfo profile to retrieve publicly available data like company revenue and employee headcount.
   
4. Scraping Data from ZoomInfo and Crunchbase: By visiting the ZoomInfo or Crunchbase URLs, Claygent can automatically extract key metrics such as revenue and employee size. 

For example, ZoomInfo lists revenue as less than 5 million or specific figures like $6.2 million for larger companies.

5. GPT-4 Mini for Data Parsing: For more refined data extraction, use the GPT-4 Mini LLM to parse information such as revenue and headcount directly from these platforms. You can define parameters to extract the necessary values, even customizing the level of confidence in the extracted data.
   
6. Output Customization: Claygent allows you to define what type of output is required. For instance, you can specify that the tool should output only revenue figures or employee headcounts. The data is structured and ready for further analysis or outreach.

By combining tools like ZenRows, ZoomInfo, and Crunchbase, Claygent helps businesses pull relevant financial and operational data to qualify leads, segment them based on size or revenue, and make informed decisions.

 3. LinkedIn Data Extraction for Personalized Outreach

In the age of social media, LinkedIn has become a crucial platform for professional networking and lead generation. Claygent offers an excellent solution for scraping LinkedIn profiles and using the insights gathered to create personalized outreach messages.

1. Start with LinkedIn Profiles: Begin with a list of contacts that includes basic information such as contact name, job title, company domain, and most importantly, LinkedIn profile URL.

2. Scrape LinkedIn Posts: Claygent can scrape the recent posts of each contact on LinkedIn. For some contacts, this may yield multiple posts, while for others, there may be just one recent post. In cases where no posts are found, Claygent will report this as well.
   
3. Post Extraction for Personalization: For each contact with recent posts, extract the most recent post from the “Post” column. This is the key data you will use for personalizing your outreach.
   
4. Leverage ChatGPT for Crafting Personalized Email Copy: Once the post is extracted, use ChatGPT to craft personalized messages based on the contact’s recent activity. The AI can summarize posts, highlight key points, and suggest a tone that aligns with the post’s content.
   
5. If-Then Personalization: Set up an if-then condition for outreach. For example, if the post mentions a new job or promotion, the message should offer congratulations. If the post is about a company’s ESG report or a sustainability effort, the message can be crafted to highlight that specific initiative.
   

By using Claygent for web scraping alongside ChatGPT, you can streamline and automate the creation of highly personalized outreach messages based on recent LinkedIn activity, making your outreach more targeted and relevant.

Why Choose Claygent Over Other Scraping Tools?

Automated scraping with Claygent offers unique advantages that set it apart from traditional options. While many scraping tools require complex setup and technical expertise, Claygent’s simplicity makes it accessible to teams of all sizes.

With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, Claygent ensures that businesses can quickly collect valuable data without the headaches often associated with scraping.

1. Ease of Use

When it comes to web scraping, many traditional tools can be complex and difficult to navigate, requiring extensive technical knowledge or manual configurations. Claygent, however, stands out due to its simplicity and user-friendly interface.

With its intuitive design, even non-technical users can quickly get started with scraping and extracting valuable data. Claygent makes it easier for sales teams to efficiently collect leads and data without the need for coding skills, reducing the time and effort required to access crucial information.

2. Integrations Offered 

One of the standout features of Claygent is its seamless integration with popular platforms like Google, LinkedIn, and Apollo. This integration allows users to scrape data directly from these platforms and quickly import it into their workflows.

Whether you are pulling data from social media profiles, databases, or other online sources, Claygent ensures a smooth transition from scraping to practical application. By reducing the need for manual data entry and providing automatic updates, it streamlines your outreach and boosts overall productivity.

3. AI-Powered Insights

Claygent’s advanced AI-powered capabilities go beyond simple data scraping. It doesn’t just collect information; it processes and analyzes it to provide valuable insights. With Claygent, you can gain a deeper understanding of potential leads, their interests, and behaviors, which can significantly enhance your outreach efforts.

The AI also helps identify patterns that can refine your lead generation strategy, ensuring that you target the right prospects at the right time. This makes Claygent not just a scraping tool but an intelligent assistant that improves the effectiveness of your sales campaigns.

Best Practices for Maximizing Claygent’s Impact on Your Sales Process

There are tons of use cases that you can leverage Claygent for, apart from web scraping. 

Claygent’s capabilities extend far beyond simple web scraping; it can significantly enhance your sales process by providing targeted data that drives highly personalized outreach. However, to truly maximize its impact, it’s important to integrate the tool effectively into your existing workflows.

1. Integrate With Your CRM

Once you’ve collected your scraped data, the next step is ensuring that it integrates smoothly with your CRM system. Claygent can be easily synced with CRM tools like Hubspot, Zoho and Salesforce, allowing you to automatically update your lead database and manage contacts effectively.

By integrating scraped data into your CRM, you ensure that your sales team is always working with the most up-to-date and relevant information. 

This integration helps streamline your sales process, making it easier to track leads, follow-up actions, and sales stages, ultimately improving conversion rates.

2. Personalized Outreach

The real power of Claygent’s web scraping lies in its ability to help create highly personalized outreach. Using the insights derived from the scraped data, sales teams can craft messages that are tailored to the specific needs, interests, and behaviors of each prospect.
Whether you’re sending cold emails, LinkedIn messages, or social media outreach, leveraging data from Claygent allows you to move away from generic messaging and instead engage prospects in a more meaningful way.

Personalized outreach increases the likelihood of responses and strengthens relationships with potential clients.

3. Continuous Optimization

As with any marketing or sales tool, the key to success lies in continual optimization. With Claygent, it’s important to regularly review your search queries and adjust them based on the feedback you get from previous scraping sessions. |

The more you use Claygent, the better you can refine your approach. By analyzing which queries yield the most relevant data, you can fine-tune your searches to extract even more targeted leads and valuable insights.

Continuous optimization ensures that your web scraping efforts stay relevant and effective, driving consistent results over time.

Scaling Claygent for Web Scraping with Cleverviral!

Claygent is a powerful tool for any sales team looking to optimize their lead generation process through web scraping. Its ease of use, seamless integration with popular platforms, and AI-powered insights make it a standout choice for businesses looking to enhance their outreach and scale their sales efforts. 

By leveraging Claygent for web scraping, companies can collect targeted data, create personalized outreach strategies, and continuously optimize their processes to achieve better results.

Partnering with a Clay lead generation agency like Cleverviral  can further maximize the impact of Claygent. Our expertise can help you fully leverage the tool’s features, ensuring that you not only scrape data but also convert it into actionable insights for successful campaigns. 

To get started, simply reach out to [email protected] or fill out the form on our website for more information on how they can support your lead generation efforts.