How to Find Anyone's Email Address for Marketing or Sales Outreach

Intro

Whether you want to connect with unicorn investors, cold outreach prospective clients, build links, or simply network with professionals in your industry — you need to find their email addresses. Sending a personalized message to their inbox will increase your chances of success.

However, you want to stay efficient in your email search to reach more people. Here are the top seven strategies to boost your email research efforts in 2023.

1. Leverage Email Finder Tools

While some good old internet scouting can help you track down emails, lookup tools are one of the easiest ways to find emails with high deliverability. Typically they require you to enter the person’s name you want to prospect and their website.

Most of these tools offer limited free searches. So depending on your budget and email campaign goals, you’ll need to opt for a paid subscription. Let’s look at a few that offer reliable contact info and their pricing:

1. Hunter - It’s an industry leader and offers 25 free monthly searches. Its paid subscriptions start at $49 per month for 500 monthly email searches.
2. Clearout - The leading tool for bulk email finding, linkedin prospecting and bulk email verification offering 100 free credits. The paid plan starts at $21 for 3000 credits.
3. Clearbit Connect- It’s a free chrome extension that can find the email in under 5 seconds. But to get full results, you need to use paid Clearbit solutions.
4. Voila Norbert- They offer the first 45 email leads for free. The starting paid plan ‘Valet’ starts at $49 per month for up to 1000 leads.
5. Find That Email - Their free plan offers 50 find credits and 100 verify credits. Their “Starter” paid plan starts at $29 and offers 500 find credits.
6. Find The Lead- Meant for B2B prospecting — the software offers a suite of tools. The paid subscriptions start from $49/month for 5000 credits.
7. Finder Expert- Allows you to look up 2000 contacts for free every month — from domain or even using LinkedIn and Twitter data. Its paid subscriptions start from $39/month for 5000 credits.
8. GetProspect - A LinkedIn email finder, its free plan lets you find 50 valid emails. Its paid plans start at $49 per month and offer 1000 emails.

2. Subscribe to The Prospect’s Email List

Another quick and easy way to find your prospect's email address is to subscribe to their mailing list. Most company newsletters are sent from the personal email addresses of the founder or a key person from the C-suite. For instance, Close’s email newsletter is sent from Steli’s email:

If you receive emails from a generic business email address, try replying to the newsletter at your prospect's company. It can kick off a relationship with the email marketer. They might be willing to connect you to the person you want.

3. Use Twitter’s Advanced Search

Did you know that Twitter’s Advanced Search allows you to search for your prospect’s email address if they have mentioned it in their bio or past tweets?

However, to hide their email addresses from bots, Twitter users often use “dot” and “at” instead of “.” and “@.” They may also use words like ‘contact’ or ‘reach’ instead of ‘email’ while sharing their email addresses. So you may need to play around with multiple words to find the email address.

As you scroll a bit, you get a field to mention the Twitter account of your prospect or their company that the platform will search across:

If you don’t find any success through this tool, you can try to initiate a conversation with your prospect. Reply to their tweets and request their email address. While doing so, keep your message short and relevant to the recipient to get their attention.

You can also send a direct message to connect with your prospect directly in their Twitter inbox. However, depending on their privacy settings, reaching them may require you to follow each other.

4. Reach Out To Your Prospect On LinkedIn

If your prospect has a LinkedIn profile, you can send a personalized message highlighting why you would like to connect with them.

Here’s what your message can look like -

“Hi prospect’s name,

I was delighted to read your article, which mentioned relevant pointer from the article, and found it very interesting. I’ve been following your work closely and appreciate your work at name of their company.

It would be great if we could connect on LinkedIn.”

Try to add value by sharing insights on their LinkedIn posts or getting their quotes for your company blog article — before sending this connection request. The idea is to build a relationship with them and make a product pitch further down the line.

LinkedIn premium users can also send InMails to users they aren’t connected with. If you’re open to spending on boosting your profile, here’s an InMail message you can model for sending yours:

For better response rates to your InMails:

• Keep them personalized,
• Short (under 400 characters),
• and avoid sending them on Fridays & Saturdays.

5. Check the Company’s Website: About Page & Contact Page

Every company website has these two pages: “About Us” and “Contact Us.” You can use the contact information listed there to reach the company. Remember to keep your message non-salesy. Simply ask if they can connect you with the right person in the particular department to address your query.

Ranktracker, for instance, has a chat form that pops up when you try to contact them:

You can also scan the company's blog page to see if your prospect has authored any blog posts. In that case, their author page could have their social media handles or email addresses. When you connect with them, you can mention how their post was (genuinely) helpful for you.

6. Guess The Person’s Email Address Using Gmail

You can also use Gmail to guess and verify your prospect's email address — given they host their email ID on Gmail.

How does it work? Go to the ‘Compose’ section in Gmail and guess the email address in the ‘to’ section. If you see the picture of your prospect typing a certain email, you’ve successfully found the email address you’ve been looking for.

7. Search The Person’s Email Address on Google

If the above-mentioned methods prove unsuccessful for you, roll up your sleeves and get creative with Google Search operators. If you know your prospect’s company, you can simply put in the following search queries on Google to search across the company website for their email address.

• site:companywebsite.com + name + email
• site:companywebsite.com + name + contact

If even this search doesn’t give you any results, then it’s time for some intelligent guesswork.

Most companies have a uniform email address structure. If you know your prospect's full name and company name, you can try out various combinations and search for their valid email address. Here are some you can use to begin:

• FirstName @Prospect’sCompany.com
• FirstName LastName @Prospect’sCompany.com
• LastName FirstName @Prospect’sCompany.com
• FirstName FirstCharacterOfLastName @Prospect’sCompany.com

Check out free email trackers

What Not To Do While Finding Email Addresses?

Now, you might think it’s a lot of effort just to get to one prospect’s email address. Can I simply use a service provider that sells a list of email addresses in a certain industry in a CSV file?

While buying emails can seem like a quick way to populate your pipeline with leads, it can set you up for failure.

Why?

• These lists are often filled with fake email addresses that damage the sender’s reputation.
• Even if you get your emails to your prospect’s inbox, the chances of getting a reply are meager.

To ensure high-quality lead contact info, spend some time finding it.

Found Your Prospect’s Email Address? Great. Now Do This…

Once you’ve found the correct email address to reach your prospect, here are three tips to maximize your response rates:

1. Personalize Your Email Message

Your prospect must have dozens of emails land in their inbox every day. On reading an email, they can figure out if it's the kind of email that’s been bulk sent to an entire email list or uniquely crafted for them.

While you should use cold email templates for scaling your outreach, add personalized sections to your email. Crafting such a message requires you to highlight:

• Why you’re reaching out to that person,
• How you can add value to their business,
• And why they should care about responding to you.

2. Follow Cold Emailing Best Practices

Prospecting without knowing someone is challenging. Your pitch needs to stand out in a cluttered inbox. Here are a few ways to do that:

Stay relevant: Are you contacting an enterprise company to pitch your SERP checking tool? Unless your recipient can understand and take help from such software, they are unlikely to sell it to their company leadership. So before making emails personalized, make them relevant!

Validate yourself: Is there a way to show your prospect you’re credible and trustworthy? Have a case study showing results your product or company has driven for companies similar to the one you’re outreaching? Then use such social proof.

Keep your emails crisp: Short emails are more likely to be read than longer emails. Here’s some info you can include in your messages:

• Make it clear why you’re contacting the specific person,
• Your brief introduction,
• Try to connect with them over something you have in common,
• Make a clear request that is easy to follow through.

End with a CTA: ‘Let me know if you would like to meet up later’ would be a terrible way to end an email. It sets the onus on the recipient to figure out a time.

Instead, you would tell them something like: “I can meet on Tuesday or Wednesday between 8 AM and 11 AM at location. Does that work? If not, here’s a link to my Calendly to choose a time - link to your Calendly.”

If there’s another action you would like the recipient to take, nudge them toward that.

Picking the right cold email outreach tool might be good solution.

3. Use Email Verification Tools

After doing all the hard work of finding an email address and crafting a personalized email, you deserve to reach their inbox. But if you’re experiencing low deliverability, email verification can help.

Once you have a CSV file of possible email addresses created with email finder tools, use an email verifier such as ZeroBounce, MailFloss, or MailerCheck. These tools use a variety of different checks to remove invalid emails. It can ensure a better reputation and higher deliverability.

Parting Thoughts

Whether you’re searching for emails for lead generation, outreach campaigns to improve your website’s SEO, or simply networking — the above tactics work. The simplest one you can begin with is: email lookup services. But mix up your tactics to scale your outreach efforts.