How to Find an Email Address: Tips & Email Finders
No doubt, we all have sometimes been in this space — how do I get someone’s email address? How do I send my perfect pitch to the right person and fill in my outreach pipeline?
I’m sure we all know the need to spot the right email address. The obvious one is to reach out to the right person so you can reduce the spam score of your email list & domain.
Personalization makes your cold outreach work like a breeze. In a study by Backlinko analyzing 12 million outreach emails, it’s found that emails with personalized message bodies have a 32.7% better response rate than those that don’t personalize their messages. And, email address plays a big role in sending the right email.
As marketers, you must be looking to get in touch with a marketing collaboration, guest posting, link building & influencer marketing campaigns. And as a sales rep, you’re probably doing it for cold outreach emails, business & partnerships pitches.
We’re here to help you populate your pipeline for outreaches. In this blog, we’ll elaborate on how to find email addresses using the most widely used email finders (free+paid) and easy-to-use tips & tricks.
We’ve divided this into two categories: if you’re looking for either a single email address or bulk emails. Jump to the category that suits your need and get started from there :)
Best Ways to Find an Email Address for a one-time check
1. Do quick Google search & lookup social profiles
Who can use this?
When you know the person whose email address you have to search, where he/she works, and other details like a job description. Or, when you have a single email to find out.
In these cases, going through the traditional way of doing a manual search across the dozens of entries (& databases) available on the internet is the best way to lookup for an email address.
How do you do this?
- Google Search: Do a simple Google search for the person with their name and other information that you already know. And while you do this, you’re bound to find a few SERP results that’ll help you with the email address.
- Social Profiles: If you are sure that the person you’re finding has a social profile, check LinkedIn, Twitter & Facebook profiles. Here’s where you can find email addresses in each of these categories:
LinkedIn: This is the best social platform to start off with to find out email addresses of professionals.
Twitter: While you can’t directly find anyone’s email address on Twitter, it’s a detective job to hunt for the email. Many of them have their website links & contact email in their bio.
Facebook: This is the last resort on social platforms. Facebook, which is meant to be used for personal use and many times professionals don’t keep their email addresses public. But it’s worth a try since the rise of Facebook for business.
- Company Website: Go to their website and check if there’s anything on their ‘About Us’, ‘Careers’, or ‘Blog’ section. While a few companies do add email addresses here in these pages, if you don’t find anything here, proceed to the tools mentioned below in Section 2 to give you more enhanced research on prospective employees at that company (with email addresses).
Want to know if you’ve done it right?
There’s a verification service to make sure you’ve gathered the correct email address. With Voila Norbert or Clearout, you can upload a list of raw emails that you’ve collected manually or any other tool, sit back while the tool cleans up and presents you with a ready-to-use email list for your campaign.
2. Experiment with the Trial & Error Method
While most of the tools have a proven track record for 99% accuracy, finding someone’s email address might feel like a trial & error method.
Shoutout to Rob Ousbey, VP Product at Moz, who put in efforts and was the first one to come up with a permutator sheet that allows you to plug in the first name, last name & company domain to give you the possible combinations of email addresses.
Once you get the combinations from the permutator spreadsheet, test it out in Gmail.
Try composing a sample email and plug in the email address into this. If you see a contact pic, or the First & Last Name appearing, then your email address has high chances to be a legit one.
Here’s an Email Permutator Spreadsheet that you can access and add it to your Google Spreadsheets and get started to find email addresses.
3. Leverage the Twitter Advanced Search
We’ve seen how to scrape someone’s email address using manual ways on social media, looking at their bio and other personal information that’s available. But, if that’s not available?
A lot of times, people are asked their email addresses on Twitter. So, if the person has ever replied or mentioned his/her email address in any of his tweets, you can search for it.
Twitter Advanced Search comes to your rescue! It helps in scanning through the tweets if the user has ever mentioned their email address anywhere.
How to use this?
- Go to ‘Twitter Advanced Search’
- Search for this — ‘(at) (dot)’ in “All these words” under the ‘Words” section
- Enter the Twitter handle in “From these accounts” under the “People” section
- And there you go!
While this might not be feasible for a bulk set of research, it’s useful for a one-off search.
If nothing works, just ask away, by tweeting them!
4. Reach out via Livechat & Ask for Email Address
This one is my personal favorite and this sounds too far fetched idea, but believe me, this works like a charm!
What’s the easiest way to contact someone at a particular company & make them talk to you immediately? Like, immediately when you land up on their website.
Chatbots!
Yes, chatbots help you connect with the Support Agent (maybe after 2–3 automated replies). But definitely, you can land up talking to a human at that company, send in your query & ask for help to connect with the right person.
This is your trial and error method, and if your pitch is right, you’ll end up getting the email address of the concerned person.
Here’s a simple experiment I’d run and was lucky enough to get it right.
5. Use Google Search Operators
Who is this for? If you know Google comes with a HUGE database and running a few simple queries there might help you as well.
So, if you just know the name of the person, you should be trying these basic queries first:
- [name] + email (or) email address
- [name] + contact (or) contact information (or) contact me
And, if you also know where he/she works, let the creative juices flow in and apply varied combinations of Google search operators. Try running a search for their company website, like so:
- site:companywebsite.com + [name] + email
- site:companywebsite.com + [name] + contact
Let’s dig into an example where I know where my prospect works. For example — I’m looking to email Tim Soulo, CMO @ Ahref, so my query would be — “site:ahrefs.com + [Tim] + email”. Hit this on Google and voila!
Find Bulk Email Addresses using Email Finders
6. Use Email Finders & Lookup Services
Who is this for?
Sales reps, outbound teams, and marketers, who wish to run big campaigns that require bulk email addresses enriched efficiently. Use these to prospect quick, enrich contacts, and add to your CRM.
Using lead enrichment & email lookup services you can ensure that you’re reaching out to the correct person, right time. Ultimately, the right reps are assigned to them and help in developing a personalized selling strategy.
Most of these intelligent sales tools are designed to make your sales pipeline filled with quality contact info, with all relevant details and data insights. So, if you’re looking to grow your sales pipeline, below is a list of the best tools to help you do so.
- Hunter.io: With Hunter.io, you can get access to 50 free searches per month. And after that, paid plans start at $49/month for 1,000 searches ($0.049 per search).
- Skrapp.io: It lets you do 150 free searches per month. And post that, plans start at $34/month for 1000 searches ($0.034 per search).
- FindThatLead: With this, you can do 50 free searches per month. Paid plans start at $49/month for 5000 searches ($0.010 per search).
- Find that Email: This lets you do 50 free searches per month. Paid plans start at $29/month for 500 searches ($0.058 per search).
For each of the tools, check the number of emails you can search for FREE, cost per email search, and alongside emails what other contact fields do they provide. This way you can choose the best email finder tool for your business.
How to find email addresses for FREE?
Considering that you’re low on budget or have a one-time bulk purpose, say 100 emails/mo. It makes sense to opt for free tools to find email addresses, rather than go for a monthly subscription. Here are the free options you can test:
- Clearbit Connect: A chrome extension and Gmail Add On, Clearbit Connect will help you with 100 searches per month for FREE. You can get the prospect’s email address, company details like location, funding rounds, etc.
There are a few other upcoming tools worth checking out like Wiza (for LinkedIn), Name2Email (a Gmail Plugin), and AeroLeads that can help you with searching email addresses & plan your outreach pipeline.
Pro Tip: Reduce the manual grunt work on your plate, and easily add all these email addresses to the CRM.
Once, you’ve got the data on a Google Sheet, sync it with your CRM using Automate.io. Enrich your sales emails, make them more personalized, and automatically add social profiles, timezone, and other contact information in your CRM.
Connect Google Sheets to Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Pipedrive, Infusionsoft, and many more apps.
7. Export LinkedIn Connections
Who is this for? Sales & Outbound reps, who’ve connected with their prospects on LinkedIn.
While a lot of times, LinkedIn messaging can work for selling to your prospect, it’s always a good practice to add them to your contacts list & CRM too.
How to export email addresses from LinkedIn Connections?
LinkedIn has a hidden way in its advanced settings that let you export your connections, giving you an up-to-date email address, which can be added to your database.
Here’s how to do it:
- Click the profile image icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
- Select Settings & Privacy from the dropdown.
- Click the Privacy tab at the top of the page.
- Under the How LinkedIn uses your data section, click Change next to Download your data.
Note: You will only see email addresses for connections who have allowed their connections to see or download their email address.
There’s another tool — Reply, that’s made email search made easy for LinkedIn. So, while you search for prospects on LinkedIn, Reply automatically searches the email addresses for you and you can send them emails, messages or setup calls immediately.
Miscellaneous Ways to Find an Email Address
If you’ve tried all your ways and faced hard luck, never mind! You can still give it a shot with the below trick to find an email address.
8. Find Email Address on Crunchbase, AngelList & Review Sites
Who is this for? So, if you know only the company name, this might help you. It’ll help you if you’re on the lookout to reach out to CEOs, Investors, Company Employees & Board Members, etc of a particular company.
A lot of companies and software products are listed on various listing sites for their company, software review sites, and hiring websites. So, you can always head out to these top websites in each of these categories and check for the email addresses there.
Some of these are Crunchbase, Glassdoor, Angellist, Gartner, etc.
Let’s take an example of how to find out email addresses from Crunchbase. Crunchbase has varied options to search via Company name, People, Investors, and many more. But, among these, there are chances to find generic email addresses under the Company segment.
That said, Crunchbase and other such company listing sites can be your source to generic email addresses and employee names. Combine this data with the above tips & tricks to complete your research.
Wrapping Up
After our research, we have put out those tools, tips & tricks with examples to find anyone’s email address on the web. So, if you’re a marketer or sales rep handling vast outreach campaigns, head out to the section of tools to find an email address and see how seamlessly they populate your CRM of your choice.
Note to remember: While you hunt & find email addresses, you have to make sure to not fall trap to companies selling leads which may or may not be legit ones. It’s always a great practice to let your prospects know how you’ve found them so you don’t annoy them.
And, if you’ve got any tricks that have worked for you to find someone’s email address, reach out to us via email (using these tips you should find me) and we’ll be happy to feature you!
