You want to have a real name for every email address in your email list, right?
We all know this because names dramatically improve performance – only drawback is that your optin rate starts to drop when you include more fields (even just adding a “First Name” field” dropped one of my forms by near 30%). Catch 22.
How cool would it be if by magic you could take a list of raw email adresses and then automatically put a real first name and second name to it?
Enter Facebook.
You may or may not know that you can find Facebook Accounts by searching for an email address. Just type an email address in the search bar at the top of Facebook and it will return the persons full name. You don’t even need to log in. Great privacy protection, huh?
So, you could go one by one and get first and last names for everyone on your list that has a registered Facebook account.
A super smart programing fella (neek)wrote a script that will automate this for you. You can download it for free here.
Simply upload it to your webserver with a .php extension and put the list with the emails in a file called emails.txt and access the script from your browser.
The script scrapes the real first name and second name for everyone on your list (that also has an account on Facebook) and displays it in your browser. Then you just copy and paste to a CSV file and upload back to your autoresponder.
I got just a little under a 50% success rate. Not bad for a few minutes of work.
Thought I’d pass it along.
This is an awesome tool. It is really going to come in handy, I help my clients build traffic by having them offer great deals out of the gate, and then email those deals to my lead lists, depending on their category ,this is going to help greatly to expound on that.
I wonder if you would know how to build a script to automatically separate and save the ones with the first names, perhaps by targeting the ; . I am learning Ruby, and perhaps that would be the code to use. Anyway, thanks a lot!
Not automatically. I just ran a large batch of all my emails, then imported back into my autoresponder.
Was very cool…super easy tool.
After pasting the results into a CSV, how did you get the files to separate the email address from the name?
Thanks again for sharing this.
You always impress me with your posts.
I never stop learning from you.
Thanks!
-Kevin
Hi Brian
Thanks for the download.
I will be trying this out later thanks, I am just flicking over to read your post on the Google +1
Great hack…I’ve been enjoying the monthly webinars with Tim atkinson too….saw you in 2010 at Gkic super summit (info) as frank kern put it…keep up the good work and pass along more good schtuff ( misspell intentional)
Thanks brian ,!!
D
Hey Brian,
Don’t you just love these simple solutions to high profile problems? Like not having people’s names in your email list and then not being able to personalize your emails out to your list. I thrive on solving problems like this. So thank you for providing this solution!
Brian if you ever need a php based script (or any other for that matter), to solve a problem or even just to simply provide a tool or solution, feel free to contact me and I’d be more than happy to help you out.
And just so you know, my programming partner at the IMC (hopefully you remember the IMC) and I have been working together for 13+ years developing solutions much like this. So at this point there’s not much that we haven’t seen or couldn’t tackle if we put our minds to it. – Johno Messmer