Contrary to popular belief, email is still growing. Global email users reached 4 billion in 2020 and are projected to reach 4.6 billion by 2025. Maybe you want to reach out to an influencer, a prospect for business, or maybe you have a quick question for someone. Email remains the most effective method of communicating privately. But the challenge is how do you find someone’s email address?
Finding an email address has gotten a lot easier thanks to an explosion in the number of email look-up and discovery tools. But the difficult part is always verifying and validating the email address once you find it.
Only 8.5% of the outreach emails get a response so getting that email address right is critical. We have listed down some of the techniques we have used to find someone’s email address and listed some bonus tips to help you get started.
12 Ways to find someone’s email address
1. Use Email Look Up or Email Discovery Tools
There are literally hundreds of email look or email discovery tools that you can use to find someone’s email address. Some of these email look-up tools are absolutely free, while others are paid.
We have listed only the ones that have worked for us, but it is important to note that you will have to validate some of these email addresses to verify their accuracy.
- Hunter.io: Hunter provides you with 50 free email searches every month. All you need to do is create a free login using your business email address. The platform allows you to find email address by using someones full name, domain or via authored article by recipient. Hunter also allows you to verify someone’s email address. But the plafrom occasionally still gets the email address wrong.
- Name2Email: This is free Chrome extension that allows you to find email addresses using someone’s first name, last name, and domain name all within gmail. The extension is managed by the folks at Reply.io which is a leading sales engagement platform.
- Leadleaper: Lead Leaper is a Chrome extensions that allows you to perform 100 email searches every month. The platform seemlessly integrates with Office 365, Google Workplace, and SendGrid. The paid version of the platform starts at $29 per month and allows you to perform 2,000 email searches every month.
- Viola Norbert: Besides offering standard look-up and verification capabilities, Viola Norbert also provides email enrichment features. The Chrome extensions allows you to perform 50 free searches every month and paid version starts at $49 per month and allows you to download upto 1,000 leads per month.
- Find That Email: The platform integrates with over 500 platforms using Zapier. The Chrome extension allows you to download 50 email address every month and the paid plans start at $29 per month with 500 credits. The platform has seperate plans for email discovery and verification.
- Snov.io: The plaform allows for 50 free searches per month and paid accounts start at $39 per month for 1,000 single searches ($0.039 per result). Snovio also has capabilities to run custom drip email campaigns from within the platform.
- Anymail Finder: The platform allows you to download 90 verified emails as a trial. The paid accounts start at $49/month for 1000 searches ($0.049 per result).
While email discovery or email lookup services are great, they are not perfect. It is important to validate the accuracy of the email addresses once you discover them.
2. Partner with a Database or Business Intelligence Provider
If you are a mid-market or large business trying to build your brand with a large number of prospects, you should consider partnering with a database or business intelligence provider. Needless to say, such solutions are more expensive than some of the standard email discovery and look-up services we have mentioned before.
Such solutions provide you with technographic and firmographic data for each of the contacts, which could be valuable for your business, especially when it comes to prospecting. If you are new to the concept of first-party data, we recommend that you read our guide to get started.
- ZoomInfo: The platform allows you to download contacts with its monthly subscription, while the platform is expensive the contact accuracy score is as high as 90-100%. Over the years, the platform has morphed from being pure play B2B database provider to offering solutions like intent data, website chat and sales engagement.
- Uplead: Uplead pricing starts at $74 per month for 2,040 credits and provides verified email addresses and phone numbers. The higher tiered plans also offer data enrichment, technographic data and other capabilities.
- Fundoodata: Fundoodata is the largest B2B database provider in India. If you’re looking to build your prospect data base in India they are most viable alternative.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator: The platform allows you to do prospecting within LinkedIn and build your contact list. Sales Navigator also provides rich insights on companies including latest news, promotions and more. The professional subscription to the platform starts at $74 per month if billed annually.
- D&B Hoovers: Dun & Bradstreet is among the most popular database provider especially when it comes to B2B companies. D&B Hoovers is the companies commercial data cloud that allows you to download and enrich your first party data.
- Slintel: Slintel is viable alternative to ZoomInfo and other platforms. The platform offers capabilities to discover prospects, identify buyer intent and data enrichment.
- Lusha: The platform is aims to create the world’s largest crowdsourced data community for B2B salespeople. The professional subscription starts at $99 per month and offers 100 credits.
- InsideView: Insideview claims to have the highest contact accuracy compared to some of the leading platforms like Dun and Bradstreet and ZoomInfo. The platform was acquired by Demandbase this year and is considered a market leader when it comes to firmographic data.
- Datanyze: The platform offers 1080 credits every year at $39 per month if billed annually. Datanyze offers standard contact extraction capabilities like some of the other platforms covered earlier.
- Buzzstream: If you are running a blogger outreach program or looking to contact journalists and influencers then Buzzstream is the ideal platform for you. The pricing starts at $29 per month for 1,000 contacts.
3. Find Email Pattern
According to a study conducted at Hunter.io, nearly 49.9% of the companies use the “{first}@example.com” email pattern or format. You can guess someone’s email address by trying a few permutations and combinations.
To make the process easier, you can use Email Format; the platform allows you to discover the email patterns based on the domain name that you input.
Email Permutator is another nifty tool that allows you to create various permutations and combinations to find someone’s email address. There are also few other tools that you can use to guess someone’s email address.
- Email Address Guesser is similar to Email Permutator, but it finds fewer emails (28 vs. 34);
- Email Permutator Spreadsheet is a spreadsheet developed by Rob Ousbey, ex-VP Operations at Distilled, which allows generating upto 46 email suggestions.
4. Use Twitter’s Advanced Search
You would surprise to see how often people share their email addresses via Twitter. But to hide the email addresses from bots, they often use dot” and “at” instead of “.” and “@”.
To find someone’s email address, use Twitter’s Advanced Search and look for the words “at” and “dot” in tweets from the target person. You may also include words like “email,” “contact,” or “reach” in your search to narrow down the results.
But more often than not, you will also find people sharing their email addresses without ciphering them.
5. Subscribe to your target’s mailing list
If the person you plan to reach out to has a newsletter, you should subscribe to the newsletter by opting to their mailing list.
You can reply to the newsletter email with a quick question, and you will surprise to see how often people respond. If you have responded to a generic email address ([email protected]), chances you are might get a response from ([email protected]) so make sure you check the email address once you receive the response.
6. Use Google Search
Using search operators on Google search is the most frequently ignored technique when it comes to finding someone’s email address. We have listed down some of the search operators that you can use to search for an email address below.
You can narrow down your search for email addresses using some of the below search operators:
- [name] + email (or) email address
- [name] + contact (or) contact information (or) contact me
- [name] + “home town”
- [name] + “company name”
- [name] + contact
- [name] + LinkedIn
- [name] + ZoomInfo
If you have additional information about the prospect, like, for instance, where they work, you can also use these additional search operators.
site:companyname.com + [name] + email
site:companyname.com + [name] + contact
site:companyname.com + firstname.lastname [at] companyname.com
site:companyname.com + firstnamelastname [at] companyname.com
site:companyname.com + firstname [at] companyname.com
site:companyname.com + firstname_lastname [at] companyname.com
7. Check Social Media Profiles
You can also find someone’s email address by simply checking their social media profiles; whether it is LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram, people sometimes mention their email address in their bio section.
Most bloggers and small businesses do leave their email addresses in the about section. On LinkedIn, you will only be able to see someone’s email address after they have added you as a connection. Make sure you craft a nice non-salesy invite to connect with your prospect on LinkedIn.
8. Submit the contact us form
If your prospect has a website or works for a company, you can submit the contact us form. Most forms now have a double opt-in enabled, which means you will receive an email like the one seen below to confirm your email address.
You can respond with a quick question or ask the team to connect you with the prospect. If the prospect owns the website, then chances are you will find the prospect’s email address in the same autoresponder emailer shared for double opt-in.
9. Ask for an introduction
This is more of a long shot but works really well as it also enables you to build trust if your prospect has a LinkedIn profile, check whether you have mutual connections.
Once you identified the mutual connection, ask them to introduce you to the prospect. When you are asking for an introduction, be brief and straightforward.
“Hey [name], I saw you are connected to a [target person]. Would you mind making an introduction so I can [1-2 sentences maximum about the reason you want to connect]?”
It is important to note that the person making the introduction knows the prospect really well; otherwise, the chances are you might never hear back from your prospect. Also, if the purpose of the request is to talk about new business, chances are, more often than not, you might not get a response from your mutual connection.
10. Check a WHOIS
If you have a website or domain name, you can use the WhoIS service to identify the website’s owner.
WHOIS is a query and response protocol extensively used for accessing databases that hold the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, IP address block, or autonomous system.
All you need to do is run a WHOIS search on your prospect’s domain name using one of the numerous websites that allow access to the WHOIS database. Most registers provide the option to hide contact information, which means you will not be able to access contact information if the domain owner has utilized this service.
11. Ask your contacts
You have tried every possible technique listed above, but the person you are trying to reach is a ghost, like Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher. Then your only option is to ask your contacts whether they know someone who might know the prospect.
The easiest way to source contact is via being part of a WhatsApp group or community. Whatsapp, in many ways, is a modern-day Craigslist. The larger the size of the community, the higher the chances of getting a response.
12. Verify Emails
You have finally found the email address you were looking for, now comes the hard part you have to verify the address to make sure it is authentic. Almost all the services we have mentioned, including Hunter, Lusha, Email Hippo, and others, provide this service.
Personally, we have been using Kickbox, which has prices starting from $5, to verify up to 500 email ids.
Get Started: Email Hunting
It is getting easier to find someone’s email address. The challenge is always to verify the authenticity of the information gathered. Most tools that promise a high degree of contact accuracy are paid, which means if you are planning to do prospecting at scale, you will have to use a database provider or business intelligence service.
The most effective way to get a prospect’s email address is to create compelling content that gets them to come to your website and fill that subscription form.
If you are looking for ways to enable content marketing, you should definitely check out our content marketing guide. The guide gives you an in-depth overview of what you need to get started with your content marketing efforts.
