Christy Brown (cbrow11@lsu.edu)

Quinn Williamson (qwillia@lsu.edu)

An Internet marketing tool is any computer program/software that assists companies in using the Internet to engage in and promote marketing activities. An example of an Internet marketing tool used by some businesses is Email Collector Software. This software provides the tools a firm needs to keep their marketing efforts running efficiently. It also allows the firm to collect targeted email addresses in a short amount of time for the use of direct mail campaigns. The six programs listed above aid in shortening the amount of time it takes marketing managers and assistants to identify and target different market segments on the Internet.

Marketing concepts that are associated with Email Collectors are:

• Marketing mix- Four elements (product, price, place and promotion) that every company has the option of adding, subtracting, or modifying in order to create a desired marketing strategy.
• Marketing objective- Goals of the marketing effort that may be expressed in terms of the needs of specific target markets and specific sales objectives.
• Marketing research- The systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of information to help managers make marketing decisions.
• Market segmentation- The strategic process of (1) identifying groups of people with certain shared characteristics within the broader product market and (2) aggregating these groups into larger market segments according to their mutual interest and the product’s utility.
• Target market selection- Selecting the market segment or group within the market segment toward which all marketing activities will be directed.
• Time compression- Allows multiple experiences in a short amount of time.

• Threads- Connections that the program will use
• Timeouts- The number of seconds that the program should wait for the site to connect
• Bogus email- An email address that is marked specifically to not receive spam
• The Pending queue - Where all suspect URLs are placed in line waiting for an available thread to chase it down in search of email addresses.

SuperSonic Email Collector is used to locate targeted email addresses on the web as fast as possible. It uses up to thirty-eight different search engines concurrently to query for your keywords and phrases in order to locate web pages that reference those keywords. It queries the search engines and visits the web pages with a signature of a well known browser to keep web masters from denying you service. Then it optionally scans the text of each URL and verifies that the keywords or phrases do exist before looking for any email addresses on it. Unlike most other email collectors, it downloads only the text of an html page and no graphics or other links attached to it for quicker downloading.

Helpful tools that are included in this software which make it easy for you to gather email addresses are as follows:

1. Configurable to verify your search keywords actually exist in the body of the web page
2. Ability to extract a user specified URL with the option of ignoring links to web pages on other domains
3. Stores URLs, web page title, search engine and what level of the search the email was found
4. Graphical chart to display what percentage of emails each search engine produced
5. Ability to extract password restricted web sites
6. Ability to disconnect your phone line upon completion of the search
7. Ability to log emails/unique domains/unique URLs in real time as they arrive

 Step One: To get started, simply type in your keywords just as if you were entering them into the search page itself (that means, you can use '+' symbol and `"`to increase the sensitivity of the search) and then click the "EXTRACT" button on the toolbar.

Step Two: You select the Keyword Search radio button top left of the screen to enable the search engines and keyword search ability. Select as many search engines as you like or simply press the "Toggle All" button to either select or deselect all engines.

Step Three: To target a company and all email addresses within it, click the URL radio button to enable the URL search method and then type in the URL of your choice and click the EXTRACT button. You can also click the "Stay on Original Domain" button which prevents you from leaving the domain that you originally started from.

Step Four: All the URLs extracted from either Keyword searches, URL searches or Pending searches that have email addresses will end up here in a convenient sortable list of addresses. You will notice that the Username is separated from the domain so that you can sort the list based on domain if you like. You can sort the list by clicking on any of the column headers. Click the same header more than once will reverse the search.

Step Five: The Pie chart is a useful visual tool to determine where your greatest percentage of email results came from. This can help determine which engines to choose for that quick and dirty search! The Pie chart window can be displayed by clicking the "Pie" toolbar button or selecting the "View Pie" menu item in the View menu.

WebXtractor PRO enables the creation of mailing lists by extracting email addresses from targeted world web pages, such as guest books, corporate pages, for use in effective and extra low cost marketing campaigns by using bulk emailing. It comes with several features to promote the responsible use of email address collection. You can, for instance, automatically discard the email addresses marked with a bogus (i.e. josh.nospam.somewhere.com) to avoid sending messages to people that definitely don’t want to receive. It also performs a targeted search, so you can target your prospects as closely as possible. It includes a feature called XpiderScript Editor, which is a VBA-compatible language that dramatically enhances the extractors capabilities such as developing your own scripts.

Helpful tools that are included in this software which make it easy for you to gather email addresses are as follows:

1. Email address validation (no garbage)
2. Exclusive "SmartFixer", that automatically fixes incorrect email addresses
3. Retries only the failed URLs at the end of the search
4. Saves retrieved email address list as plain text (one per line), dbf file or csv file
5. Saves retrieved email addresses with their corresponding URLs
6. Automatically discard email addresses with bogus on it
7. Create/edit scripts by the exclusive XpiderScript language

Step One: The easiest way to perform a targeted search is through the use of the search wizard.

Step Two: To begin, you need to type in a URL that you want the program to search for email addresses.

Step Three: Next, you want to decide how deep you want the program to search. The more levels you choose, the deeper the search.

Step Four: Here, you need to decide what you want the program to do with invalid email addresses.

Step Five: The final decision to be made is if you want to not collect addresses from such domains as .edu or .gov or bogus email addresses.

Step Six: WebXtractor Pro is now ready to search all of your requested URLs for the email addresses you want. Just click the finish button and you are on your way!

Results: Here is an example of some results from a search of webcrawler.com.

It seems that WebXtractor Pro is a better value for the price at $249 than SuperSonic Email Collector which is priced at $399. They both offer very similar features, but WebXtractor’s price is considerably lower. Even though SuperSonic offers a few extra features, such as the pie chart, it is not worth paying $150 more for this tool. WebXtactor Pro contains a search wizard which makes it easier to use than SuperSonic.