We’ve all been there. You’re sending out emails and there’s someone you know you need to send this information to but you just don’t know how to reach them. Or maybe you’ve connected with someone in person and got a good foothold in their network but forgot to ask for their email. What do you do? Well, this article is going to give you 6 absolute winners for options on how to get that email you so desperately need.
Especially if you’re in B2B sales, this knowledge can help a lot: you may need to find prospects’ emails in bulk to then reach out to them.
1. Email-Lookup Services
This is a super broad net to catch fish from. There are hundreds of different tools you can use to find emails, and they all generally work the same way. Simply put in the name of the person you’re trying to reach and the website of the company they represent and you’d. Be surprised how often you get the realists you are looking for.
We’ve got a rounded-out list of the top few email finders out there: here are the most effective ones we found:
Closely
Not only an email finder but also a fully automated sales platform, Closely has its own chrome extension and comes with 50 free searches. Paid plans start at $49 per month for 500 searches.
Closely has an incredible extension that can also extract emails from LinkedIn in a CSV file FOR FREE. This extension will reveal people’s emails on their LinkedIn pages.
Apart from being a top email finder, Closely offers a bunch of other useful features for a B2B sales rep:
- Automated LinkedIn campaigns: connection+follow-ups – create a message sequence and let the tool send messages to LinkedIn users automatically
- Handy analytics
- Intuitive dashboards
- Personalization in messages: personalize the name, second name, job title, industry, etc. so your message appeal to a particular prospect
- Your LinkedIn Network can be turned into a lightweight CRM
- Inbox with CRM features
- And a lot more
If you’re in B2B sales, we recommend you join the Closers Community on Facebook.
Or read their guide on how to begin LinkedIn prospecting.
Also, you can learn how to reach out to people from LinkedIn groups, events on autopilot.
Find That Email
Specifically designed email search engine. Find That Email 50 free searches per month. Paid subscriptions start at $29 per month for 500 searches.
Voila Norbert
Relatively high yield in successfully finding the correct email, this extension gives. 50 free searches in their free trial. Paid accounts for Voila Norbert start at $49 per month for 1000 searches.
GetMail.io
GetMail offers 10 free searches per month. Their paid plans start at $49 per month for 300 searches
Name2Email
The highest yield email finder on this list. Name2Email is offered as a chrome extension and comes with unlimited free searches. That said, you are unable to run email addresses in build form on the extension.
These strategies can be extremely useful, but even at the very top of the list, Name2Email was still missing around 10% of all suggested inputs.
2. Educated Guesses
For the most part, company emails tend to be pretty straightforward. I’m not saying IT departments aren’t an imaginative bunch, but I am saying their email choices for employees are sad and unoriginal. For the most part, your mystery email will likely consist of [email protected]. While this is a very useful first step, there are some snags to still work though.
“Name” can be interpreted in a handful of different ways. Maybe it’s the first name, or its first and last name (there may be a period in between the two), or it’s an arrangement or either the first or last initial with the other full name attached. Grand scheme these are only a half dozen options, but it’s still a half dozen different emails to work through per potential client. How do we tell which one is correct? And do we have to write out all six every time to test our results?
Luckily, both of those questions have good answers.
To test our email results, we can download the email permutator Google spreadsheet created by Rob Ousbey from Distilled. This spreadsheet only requires the name of the person and the domain name (what comes after the @ symbol) and will spit out all the possible name permutations for their potential email. This tool saves time on every possible client, amassing to countless saved hours of typing.
From here we move to step 2, testing our validity.
Since so many companies are connected through Google, we’re going to capitalize on it. Either by Gmail or through Google spreadsheets, we’re going to paste all the options Mr. Ousby’s spreadsheet gave us. From there, when we hover our mouse over the different options, we will get an inside look at the profiles associated with each potential email, including the profile photo. If our potential client has a profile photo uploaded to their account, it will show up when we hover our mouse over that email option. If they don’t, it may still be difficult to tell their email apart from the others
3. Subscribe
If the person you’re looking for has a blog or a personal website, they just might have their email address available there. If they don’t, see if there’s a subscription option available for a newsletter or any kind of mailing list. If the emails are coming from your client, then there has to be a source email they’re all coming from. Wait to get a confirmation email for your subscription and you’ve got a way to contact your customer-to-be.
4. Advanced Searches
Searching for information online has become relatively streamlined and user-friendly, but there are ways of making your results even more refined. On Google and Twitter, there are advanced search options at your disposal.
To use a Google advanced search, include the name of the person you are trying to reach and the word “email’ and the company name in quotation marks (like this: “John Smith email PepsiCo”. This also works for those email options discussed in strategy #1 from the email permutator.
Twitter, on the other hand, has a different way to yield similar results. The search bar at the top of the page can have a more refined search lens if we know how to use it. By searching the word “email” and then in parentheses put “from” and the Twitter handle of the person you are searching for (like this: Email (from BarackObama), you can search through every tweet that person tweeted that included the word ‘email” in it. If your potential customer seems the. Type to advertise their email at any point, this is the move to make to find it.
5. Just Ask Them
We saved the best for last. At the end of the day, the person you are trying to reach is a human being, and probably a reasonable one at that. If they’re on Twitter, shoot them a tweet and ask if there’s a preferred way to reach them about what you want to ask them about. If their company has a helpline, a customer service rep, or a general inquiries email address, start there. Ask if you could be connected to the person you’re looking for and see if you can access them that way.
It always is nice to be able to navigate the digital waters on our own with easy-to-use tools that bend to our will, but sometimes the simplest strategy is the most effective. If we can put aside our pride we might even save ourselves some time in the long run.
What else?
Are there any other strategies you know of that have yielded consistent success? Is this list missing a simple strategy that we missed? Let us know if there are. Any tools you’ve found useful in finding whom you’re looking for.
