Email has become one of the most influential marketing channels in the last couple of decades. Ever since the commercial boom in the mid-90s, email has been used as a reliable communication tool by all types of organizations, businesses, and individuals.
However, the fact that it’s one of the oldest channels of digital communication doesn’t make email marketing obsolete. On the contrary, it seems like the power of emails is constantly growing. Numerous studies already proved its importance, but we will show you only the most significant figures here:
Infographic courtesy of Oberlo.
All these facts prove one simple thing – it’s not the question of whether to use email marketing or not, but rather how to detect and approach the likely prospects most efficiently. In such circumstances, the ultimate goal is to find the right email addresses in order to reach out to the precisely targeted audience.
However, this task is often not as simple as it sounds. The digital universe is gigantic and there is not a single all-encompassing email directory. It means you have to invest additional efforts into this quest, but our article will explain to you actionable ways to find anyone’s email address quickly. Let’s begin!
Namely, some people feel like investing their time into finding a single email address is just a little bit too much, but they obviously forget the real-life advantages of this marketing channel. We want to make things clear for you, so read carefully to remember the practical benefits of email communication:
Accessibility: As we already mentioned, billions of people all over the globe use email services on a daily basis. This gives you a huge potential to reach global audiences within minutes.
Simplicity: The fact that emails are accessible worldwide also suggests it’s a simple technology that requires little skills and IT knowledge. Almost everyone can write emails and create marketing campaigns, and there is no need to take courses or seminars to figure out the basic functions here.
Credibility: This is another benefit that comes directly as the consequence of global accessibility. Since everyone is using email services, they won’t have the reason to suspect your intentions or professional credibility.
Cost reduction: Digital marketing is widely recognized as cheap, but it doesn’t have to be if you are constantly launching new campaigns. On the other side, email allows you to run successful campaigns free of charge or with minimum investments. You can always do it yourself and save the budget, but most professionals use emailing platforms to automate campaigns. You need to pay for such tools, but the price goes as low as $10 a month.
Conversion driver: The best thing about email marketing is that it gathers highly engaged audiences. These people voluntarily signed up to receive your promo messages. Needless to say, it’s a big advantage that reveals the conversion potential of this marketing format.
Shareable: You can simply synchronize email messages with other means of business communication, social media in particular. That way, each subscriber can forward the content quickly with just one click. This feature makes it easier to turn subscribers into the full-time brand advocates.
Strengthen customer relationships: Using emails, you can prove professional knowledge and authority, but you can also strengthen customer relationships. Make sure to answer inquiries coming from your subscribers because it’s a great way to establish a firm bond between the brand and its fans. Of course, you shouldn’t be too pushy when it comes to promotional messages, so let the majority of emails be educational and informative.
Easy to measure: Every email platform has a wide range of business intelligence tools. Why is this important? Well, it’s important because you can measure the results of your campaigns and see how they function. You can compare the actual achievements with the expected results to determine the return on investments. Doing so, you are able to remove weak spots from your campaigns and add other, more productive features.
You can find a lot of different email lookup platforms online, but they all function using more or less the same principles. What do we mean by this? Well, most of those services require a name and a company domain. That’s all you need to provide before launching the search. Now, let’s take a look at some of the major email lookup services:
Hunter is one of the most popular email lookup tools. More than one million professionals use this platform to build more connections and grow their businesses. Hunter indexes over 200 million official emails, so it can search and filter the targeted address within seconds.
With this tool, you can search for personal or generic emails, detect common patterns, get an email confidence score, and save interesting leads. Hunter is available as the Google Chrome extension free of charge. This version allows you up to 100 requests a month without CVS exports.
Paid packages vary from Starter ($39) to Enterprise ($319) and give you the possibility to search for from one to 50 thousand email addresses per month, along with the CVS export feature.
Clearbit Connect
Clearbit Connect is a reliable email lookup platform that powers some of the world’s largest companies such as Google, Uber, Sales Force, and many others. Your only task is to enter the name of the company you are interested in, and Clearbit Connect will instantly give you a complete list of contacts.
It also allows you to search by names, roles, locations, social profiles, and similar information units. We recommend you test it for free before deciding whether to buy the starter package of $99 per 1,000 requests a month.
Find That Email
Find That Email is, of course, a professional email searching platform that crawls through addresses of millions of different business organizations globally. The tool is great because it integrates with popular software like Pipedrive, HubSpot, MailChimp, Salesforce, and many more.
Find That Mail has five different pricing plans. The first one actually costs nothing, but it only enables you to search for 50 addresses on a monthly basis. Other solutions include Starter, Pro, Teams, and Custom arrangements that cost between $29 and $249 a month and allow up to 10 thousand search credits.
Voila Norbert
Voila Norbert is often regarded as the most efficient email lookup platform. And for the good reason since it’s able to find your leads, verify their email addresses in real-time, and enrich your contact list with up to 98% success rate.
The platform integrates with dozens of frequently-used marketing and customer service tools. It offers you a 50-request free trial, while the basic Valet plan costs $39 a month for up to a thousand leads. If you really want to save the budget, Voila Norbert allows you to search a single lead and pay as little as $0.1 per request.
Anymail Finder
Anymail Finder is yet another email lookup service that finds and verifies digital addresses. You can use it to find up to 20 emails free of charge each month, but the paid packages with the minimum of one thousand requests start at $49 a month. What makes Anymail Finder different than other services is the fact that it doesn’t charge you for emails that can’t be 100% verified, even though they have an average delivery rate of 70%.
In case, you don’t get or don’t trust the outcome of automatic email searches, you can try a variety of different methods. Fortunately enough, the tactics we are about to describe are easy and simple, delivering results very quickly:
Begin with contact pages
As strange as it may sound, sometimes you will find that much-needed email address simply by exploring the company’s contact pages. You can also search for the target client using Google, but you can also check out his or her social media accounts to look for an email. Email lookup tools will hardly miss such traces, but sometimes the problem is as simple as that.
Take your best shot
The second advice is to analyze the company’s domain and use it to come up with a potential address of the person you are looking for. This is what most people did well before the emergence of email discovery tools. How come?
It’s because the vast majority of organizations uses the same email formation principle. They combine names, surnames, and domains to create addresses, so it’s not that difficult to guess the right solution after all.
Let’s say that you are looking for an email belonging to John Jones, a member of the ABC organization. In this case, you could test the following patterns:
johnjones@abc.com
john.jones@abc.com
john_jones@abc.com
j.jones@abc.com
john.j@abc.com
You can see that email creation patterns are rather simple, so you will probably guess the client’s address on some occasions.
Search in Bing instead of Google
This tip is kind of a long shot, but it’s definitely worth trying if you run out of other options. Namely, Google displays social tags when you use the @ symbol between quotation marks, but this is not the case with Bing. Just type in “@domainname.com” in the Bing search box and it will show you all email addresses related to this domain - if these are publicly available.
Connect on LinkedIn
Most people don’t know that LinkedIn displays email addresses of all users. The only problem is that you really have to be connected with the targeted users to see his or her email info. The address is placed in the Contact Info section, so you can check it out easily.
After that, follow this string of actions: Advanced actions → Export contacts → Request archive. Once you’re done, you will receive a personal email with the requested document.
Use Twitter as a search tool
Have you ever thought Twitter could be your email lookup platform? We bet you haven’t! There are actually two ways to use it to find email addresses. The first one is simple – find the prospect on Twitter and him/her directly. Most people are more than willing to share contact info with you if your account looks credible.
The other option is to use advanced Twitter search and look for keywords “at” and “dot” published by your target customer. Why would you do that? The reason is this - some users share personal emails in their tweets, but they use words instead of symbols (. and @) to hide the address from spam bots.
You can search for the username along with “at” and “dot” to find all tweets containing these keywords. You probably won’t find more than a few results, so it’s easy to scan each one and find the desired email eventually.
Subscribe to the prospect’s email list
Some professionals write industry analyses and run their own blogs, so you can sign up to receive their articles. That way, you will discover their personal emails. However, some people send newsletters from generic addresses. In this case, we encourage you to reply by asking a good topic-related question because you will probably get an answer from a personal email. This trick is very simple, but highly efficient.
Use the Who.is service
Who.is represents a website database with domain and IP owner information. You can find all sorts of basic information like name or organization, while some webmasters also leave their private email addresses. This is the long shot, but it’s definitely worth trying on some occasions.
Ask for emails on a website
If you really can’t find an email address anywhere, there might as well be one easy solution available. Namely, you can just use the company’s generic contact form to ask about the employee’s personal email.
It’s a regular channel of communication, so your message won’t seem strange or suspicious. However, we suggest you write a polite email and add a trustworthy signature – this is the sign that you are a serious professional who needs the address for business purposes.
Although it seems like a banal reason, it actually occurs very frequently, especially in the B2B niche. For this reason, it is critical to learn how to overcome the obstacle and use different methods to resolve the issue. In this post, we showed you a full set of actionable ways to find anyone’s email address rather quickly.
Make sure to test these tactics and determine which one gives the best results for you. Of course, don’t hesitate to leave us a comment if you have something interesting to add to this topic – we would be glad to see your opinion!
Read Next: Your Guide to Email Etiquette (infographic)
About Author:
Having helped many in the challenge to write and publish an amazing blog, Barbara Mitchell is one of the most acknowledged writers at BrillAssignment and in the field. She is now a published author of many articles and blogs, as well as a blogging pro willing to share it all with everyone interested.
However, the fact that it’s one of the oldest channels of digital communication doesn’t make email marketing obsolete. On the contrary, it seems like the power of emails is constantly growing. Numerous studies already proved its importance, but we will show you only the most significant figures here:
- The number of currently active email accounts is 3.7 billion, but the figure is expected to grow to 4.3 billion in the next four years.
- Almost 90% of business professionals prefer using email when communicating for business purposes.
- Email is probably the most profitable marketing tool because the average campaign generates $38 for every dollar invested.
- Users all over the world are used to receiving promotional emails. According to the report, over 60% of subscribers don’t mind getting promo messages on a weekly basis, while almost 40% of them would like emails to come even more frequently.
Infographic courtesy of Oberlo.
All these facts prove one simple thing – it’s not the question of whether to use email marketing or not, but rather how to detect and approach the likely prospects most efficiently. In such circumstances, the ultimate goal is to find the right email addresses in order to reach out to the precisely targeted audience.
However, this task is often not as simple as it sounds. The digital universe is gigantic and there is not a single all-encompassing email directory. It means you have to invest additional efforts into this quest, but our article will explain to you actionable ways to find anyone’s email address quickly. Let’s begin!
The Benefits of Using Email Communication for Business Purposes
Before we begin describing our email searching methods, we want to make sure you understand the pros of using this type of communication for business purposes.Namely, some people feel like investing their time into finding a single email address is just a little bit too much, but they obviously forget the real-life advantages of this marketing channel. We want to make things clear for you, so read carefully to remember the practical benefits of email communication:
Accessibility: As we already mentioned, billions of people all over the globe use email services on a daily basis. This gives you a huge potential to reach global audiences within minutes.
Simplicity: The fact that emails are accessible worldwide also suggests it’s a simple technology that requires little skills and IT knowledge. Almost everyone can write emails and create marketing campaigns, and there is no need to take courses or seminars to figure out the basic functions here.
Credibility: This is another benefit that comes directly as the consequence of global accessibility. Since everyone is using email services, they won’t have the reason to suspect your intentions or professional credibility.
Cost reduction: Digital marketing is widely recognized as cheap, but it doesn’t have to be if you are constantly launching new campaigns. On the other side, email allows you to run successful campaigns free of charge or with minimum investments. You can always do it yourself and save the budget, but most professionals use emailing platforms to automate campaigns. You need to pay for such tools, but the price goes as low as $10 a month.
Conversion driver: The best thing about email marketing is that it gathers highly engaged audiences. These people voluntarily signed up to receive your promo messages. Needless to say, it’s a big advantage that reveals the conversion potential of this marketing format.
Related: Don’t Waste Time! These 16 Gmail Hacks Will Make Your Small Business Hum (INFOGRAPHIC)Audience segmentation: Email campaign creators say that the majority of subscribers sign up directly from your website: “This means you can track and analyze their online behavior to divide prospects into different groups. Not everyone wants to read the same content, so you can segment the audience and customize emails to provide them with the right type of content.”
Shareable: You can simply synchronize email messages with other means of business communication, social media in particular. That way, each subscriber can forward the content quickly with just one click. This feature makes it easier to turn subscribers into the full-time brand advocates.
Strengthen customer relationships: Using emails, you can prove professional knowledge and authority, but you can also strengthen customer relationships. Make sure to answer inquiries coming from your subscribers because it’s a great way to establish a firm bond between the brand and its fans. Of course, you shouldn’t be too pushy when it comes to promotional messages, so let the majority of emails be educational and informative.
Easy to measure: Every email platform has a wide range of business intelligence tools. Why is this important? Well, it’s important because you can measure the results of your campaigns and see how they function. You can compare the actual achievements with the expected results to determine the return on investments. Doing so, you are able to remove weak spots from your campaigns and add other, more productive features.
Best Email Lookup Services to Find Online
The main purpose of our article is to help you find the desired email address as effortlessly as possible. While there are tons of other ways to initiate an email quest (most of which we are going to describe later), the truth is that email lookup services remain the fastest-performing tactic available.You can find a lot of different email lookup platforms online, but they all function using more or less the same principles. What do we mean by this? Well, most of those services require a name and a company domain. That’s all you need to provide before launching the search. Now, let’s take a look at some of the major email lookup services:
Related: 12 Best Tools for Hassle-Free Influencer OutreachHunter
Hunter is one of the most popular email lookup tools. More than one million professionals use this platform to build more connections and grow their businesses. Hunter indexes over 200 million official emails, so it can search and filter the targeted address within seconds.
With this tool, you can search for personal or generic emails, detect common patterns, get an email confidence score, and save interesting leads. Hunter is available as the Google Chrome extension free of charge. This version allows you up to 100 requests a month without CVS exports.
Paid packages vary from Starter ($39) to Enterprise ($319) and give you the possibility to search for from one to 50 thousand email addresses per month, along with the CVS export feature.
Clearbit Connect
Clearbit Connect is a reliable email lookup platform that powers some of the world’s largest companies such as Google, Uber, Sales Force, and many others. Your only task is to enter the name of the company you are interested in, and Clearbit Connect will instantly give you a complete list of contacts.
It also allows you to search by names, roles, locations, social profiles, and similar information units. We recommend you test it for free before deciding whether to buy the starter package of $99 per 1,000 requests a month.
Find That Email
Find That Email is, of course, a professional email searching platform that crawls through addresses of millions of different business organizations globally. The tool is great because it integrates with popular software like Pipedrive, HubSpot, MailChimp, Salesforce, and many more.
Find That Mail has five different pricing plans. The first one actually costs nothing, but it only enables you to search for 50 addresses on a monthly basis. Other solutions include Starter, Pro, Teams, and Custom arrangements that cost between $29 and $249 a month and allow up to 10 thousand search credits.
Related: How To Be A Gmail Power User [INFOGRAPHIC]At the same time, paid versions of Find That Email offer you some more features like social network support, bulk find, monthly credit transfers, API access, and unlimited users.
Voila Norbert
Voila Norbert is often regarded as the most efficient email lookup platform. And for the good reason since it’s able to find your leads, verify their email addresses in real-time, and enrich your contact list with up to 98% success rate.
The platform integrates with dozens of frequently-used marketing and customer service tools. It offers you a 50-request free trial, while the basic Valet plan costs $39 a month for up to a thousand leads. If you really want to save the budget, Voila Norbert allows you to search a single lead and pay as little as $0.1 per request.
Anymail Finder
Anymail Finder is yet another email lookup service that finds and verifies digital addresses. You can use it to find up to 20 emails free of charge each month, but the paid packages with the minimum of one thousand requests start at $49 a month. What makes Anymail Finder different than other services is the fact that it doesn’t charge you for emails that can’t be 100% verified, even though they have an average delivery rate of 70%.
How to Find an Email Address Manually
The platforms we described above are all excellent email lookup tools, but none of these can guarantee accurate results in 100% of situations. But it’s in human nature to strive for the best, so you might be thinking of alternative ways to reach your leads.In case, you don’t get or don’t trust the outcome of automatic email searches, you can try a variety of different methods. Fortunately enough, the tactics we are about to describe are easy and simple, delivering results very quickly:
Begin with contact pages
As strange as it may sound, sometimes you will find that much-needed email address simply by exploring the company’s contact pages. You can also search for the target client using Google, but you can also check out his or her social media accounts to look for an email. Email lookup tools will hardly miss such traces, but sometimes the problem is as simple as that.
Take your best shot
The second advice is to analyze the company’s domain and use it to come up with a potential address of the person you are looking for. This is what most people did well before the emergence of email discovery tools. How come?
It’s because the vast majority of organizations uses the same email formation principle. They combine names, surnames, and domains to create addresses, so it’s not that difficult to guess the right solution after all.
Let’s say that you are looking for an email belonging to John Jones, a member of the ABC organization. In this case, you could test the following patterns:
johnjones@abc.com
john.jones@abc.com
john_jones@abc.com
j.jones@abc.com
john.j@abc.com
You can see that email creation patterns are rather simple, so you will probably guess the client’s address on some occasions.
Search in Bing instead of Google
This tip is kind of a long shot, but it’s definitely worth trying if you run out of other options. Namely, Google displays social tags when you use the @ symbol between quotation marks, but this is not the case with Bing. Just type in “@domainname.com” in the Bing search box and it will show you all email addresses related to this domain - if these are publicly available.
Connect on LinkedIn
Most people don’t know that LinkedIn displays email addresses of all users. The only problem is that you really have to be connected with the targeted users to see his or her email info. The address is placed in the Contact Info section, so you can check it out easily.
Also Read: Social Media, SEO, Email, Graphic Design: 100 Free Tools For Digital Marketers (Infographic)Another useful detail is the option to export all LinkedIn emails coming from your contacts into a single spreadsheet. Just go to ‘Your Connections’ in the ‘My Network’ department to enter ‘Manage synced and imported contacts.
After that, follow this string of actions: Advanced actions → Export contacts → Request archive. Once you’re done, you will receive a personal email with the requested document.
Use Twitter as a search tool
Have you ever thought Twitter could be your email lookup platform? We bet you haven’t! There are actually two ways to use it to find email addresses. The first one is simple – find the prospect on Twitter and him/her directly. Most people are more than willing to share contact info with you if your account looks credible.
The other option is to use advanced Twitter search and look for keywords “at” and “dot” published by your target customer. Why would you do that? The reason is this - some users share personal emails in their tweets, but they use words instead of symbols (. and @) to hide the address from spam bots.
You can search for the username along with “at” and “dot” to find all tweets containing these keywords. You probably won’t find more than a few results, so it’s easy to scan each one and find the desired email eventually.
Subscribe to the prospect’s email list
Some professionals write industry analyses and run their own blogs, so you can sign up to receive their articles. That way, you will discover their personal emails. However, some people send newsletters from generic addresses. In this case, we encourage you to reply by asking a good topic-related question because you will probably get an answer from a personal email. This trick is very simple, but highly efficient.
Use the Who.is service
Who.is represents a website database with domain and IP owner information. You can find all sorts of basic information like name or organization, while some webmasters also leave their private email addresses. This is the long shot, but it’s definitely worth trying on some occasions.
Ask for emails on a website
If you really can’t find an email address anywhere, there might as well be one easy solution available. Namely, you can just use the company’s generic contact form to ask about the employee’s personal email.
It’s a regular channel of communication, so your message won’t seem strange or suspicious. However, we suggest you write a polite email and add a trustworthy signature – this is the sign that you are a serious professional who needs the address for business purposes.
Conclusion
Email marketing gives you a plethora of practical benefits, ranging all the way from lead generation and brand building to service promotion and conversions. However, sometimes it’s not so easy to reach out to the targeted customer because you can’t find his or her email address.Although it seems like a banal reason, it actually occurs very frequently, especially in the B2B niche. For this reason, it is critical to learn how to overcome the obstacle and use different methods to resolve the issue. In this post, we showed you a full set of actionable ways to find anyone’s email address rather quickly.
Make sure to test these tactics and determine which one gives the best results for you. Of course, don’t hesitate to leave us a comment if you have something interesting to add to this topic – we would be glad to see your opinion!
Read Next: Your Guide to Email Etiquette (infographic)
About Author:
Having helped many in the challenge to write and publish an amazing blog, Barbara Mitchell is one of the most acknowledged writers at BrillAssignment and in the field. She is now a published author of many articles and blogs, as well as a blogging pro willing to share it all with everyone interested.