How to Find an Email Address of Any Prospect? — The Best Methods and Tools

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It seems like every other marketer today is saying that email marketing is dead. If you’ve heard about this, you might also be wondering — is there any truth to this claim? Should I invest in email marketing, or would that be a colossal waste of time and money? Let’s take a look at some facts and statistics and see if this is indeed the case.

There are over 3.9 billion email users across the globe. Statista predicts that the number will grow to 4.4 billion in 2023, with 34.3 billion emails opened daily. For every $1 spent, email generates $38, which is an astonishing 3,800% ROI. Looking at these statistics, we can see why it makes sense that email is still one of the best options for a marketing campaign. What might confuse a lot of people is that their efforts aren’t producing the desired ROI. 

Instead of wondering if email is still an effective marketing tool, we propose a better question — Am I using the best methods, practices, and tools for the job?

The first step of creating a successful email marketing campaign is generating an actionable list of contacts. You need to find relevant and verified addresses of leads that you can send your campaign to. There are a variety of methods for doing so, some more and some less fruitful.

We’ve covered the best methods on how to find email addresses, so you can determine the best course of action for your marketing efforts. Here they are:

1. Figuring out the format and verifying the email address

2. Leveraging business social media channels to find email accounts

3. Using Google search operators

4. Visiting the company’s website

5. Using an email lookup tool

Figuring Out the Format and Verifying the Email Address

The majority of business email addresses conform to a similar pattern. Most companies enforce this rule to maintain a professional image. While this can make finding emails significantly easier for you, you still need to verify all the addresses you send your campaigns to. Emailing a lot of non-existent inboxes is a significant waste of time, and it can be seen as spam by some email service providers. This is specifically the case because many of those emails can be spamtraps.

Let us take a look at the most common formulas and examples:

Figuring out the exact formula of your prospect’s email will take more time than you’ve got. The good news is that there are ways to speed up the process.  You’ve got two free options that can help you generate lists of possible email address patterns in a couple of seconds. You can either use the Email Permutator spreadsheet created by Rob Ousbey from Distilled, or the Metric Sparrow’s Email Permutator+ tool that is even more practical because of its user-friendly design. 

When you’ve got the list, you need to use an email verification tool to ensure that all those addresses belong to real people. If you don’t want to spend money on more sophisticated software solutions, there are a couple of free options for you to check whether those emails are valid.

Gmail can help you with this. The downside to this method is that it only covers potential prospects who’ve got a Google account. The basic approach is simple and goes like this:

1. Open your Gmail client

2. Click on Compose and Copy + Paste all the email address patterns from your list into the To field

3. Click on any of the addresses and hold your mouse pointer over it. If the email is connected to an existing Google profile, it will show up in the popup screen

While it is a useful method, it still takes a lot of time. You can speed it up by using some of the free tools specifically made for this purpose. The Chrome extension Name2Email does the job for you by filling up the To field with all the addresses you’ve got so you can verify them right away. 

You can also try out LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator for Gmail. It is another browser plugin, with the difference that it’s used to determine all the addresses that are connected to LinkedIn. The way it works is similar to the previous solution. You need to:

1. Populate the To field with your list of possible email address patterns

2. See if any of the names appear in LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator

Leveraging Business Social Media Channels to Find Email Accounts

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Twitter is most useful for finding email addresses, thanks to its advanced search feature.

A lot of Twitter users don’t put emails in their bios because they want to avoid spambots. The good news is that they often share them in their tweets. The way they do it is that they “hide” the addresses by replacing the “@” and “.” symbols with the appropriate words — at and dot. Use Twitter’s advanced search to look for those words, including the terms such as contact, email, or reach. There is a high probability you’ll find just what you’re looking for.

You can also try to reach out to the Twitter users and ask about their email address. Be sure to write concise messages that contain no more than 280 characters. You must also use a Twitter profile that clearly shows who you are. This approach is significantly less effective because people take time to respond and might even decide not to.

When it comes to Facebook, smaller businesses and bloggers tend to include their contact emails in the About section. There is also the possibility that you’ll only find info@, contact@, and hello@ addresses that are essentially useless for your outreach purposes.

LinkedIn users’ Contact Info sections most often contain their email addresses. The problem is that you need to send connection requests and wait to be accepted. You can’t see those sections of their profiles otherwise. This takes time, so it makes more sense to use a tool for extracting emails from LinkedIn accounts.

Using Google Search Operators to Find an Email Address

Google is, naturally, one of the best ways to find an email address. Sometimes you can get lucky and find what you need by simply typing in the prospect’s name and the phrase email address.

Most of the time, it isn’t that easy. Even if the person doesn’t have a common name, a simple search might not be of much use. Google search operators can help you specify and narrow down the results. Let’s take a look at some of the examples according to the two categories:

Visiting the Company’s Website to Find an Email Address

You can always go straight to the company’s website and search for essential information there. Look through the Contact Us, About, and Team pages to see if they have any pertinent email addresses listed. If you can only find the director’s address, you can always write an explanatory email, asking to be connected to the person you are looking for. 

Companies are often willing to help people out, so it is probable that your message will be delivered to the right person. You should keep in mind that there is commonly a secretary responsible for corporate mail, so if your message doesn’t seem vital, you might also not get a response.

Using an Email Lookup Tool to Find an Email Address

The best option for finding email addresses crucial to your business is to use an email lookup tool. Manual searching methods can provide you with valuable results, but using them takes more time than your organization has to spare. Some of them depend on connecting with and getting a response from a prospect, which can sometimes take days. To make it worse, the person can simply decide to deny your request, making the whole effort a waste of time.

The most important feature that email lookup tools have to offer is automation. Instead of manually looking up single addresses on various platforms, you can automate the process and bulk search hundreds — and even thousands of emails — in just a couple of seconds. A lot of these programs have filters that enable you to search for emails based on precise factors, such as:

• Domain

• Industry

• Demographics

• Location

• Job title

There is a wide variety of email lookup tools on the market. You can find free solutions, but they often have limited features. It is also important to note that, while most paid tools have extensive features, some are quite expensive. To help you find the best option for your email marketing efforts, we have compiled a list of top five email search tools in the industry. This includes:

1. Sell SaaS

2. Hunter

3. FindThatEmail

4. Anymail Finder

5. RocketReach

Sell SaaS

The Sell SaaS software holds the #1 spot because of two major advantages over its competitors.

The first advantage is that we don’t offer just one email lookup tool — we’ve got three!

With the enrichment data software, you can scour our extensive list of B2B domains and companies to find cold leads. You can set up the search parameters according to the size of the company, geographical location, industry, etc. When you receive the results, you can export them into an XLSX spreadsheet. The file will list vital email addresses and all the other data that you might need for your marketing campaign.

If you want to extract information from a list of domains that you have compiled yourself, you can use our email, phone & social media extractor. Just upload the CSV file that lists the domains you want to scour and let the tool gather all the email addresses that it can find.

We’ve also got the email finder. You can use it to find particular prospects’ email addresses based on a list containing their names and domains of companies they work for.

Next to these three tools, you can benefit from using the email campaign creator for reaching out to your audience. If you need to use WHOIS to pull information from the domain registry, you can try out our daily registered domains collector.

What is the second advantage of Sell SaaS? It’s that all of our products are white-label software. Besides using them for your marketing and other business purposes, you get to resell them under your brand for a price of your choosing.

Hunter

Hunter is a quick email lookup and verification tool. You can input a domain, and it will extract any associated email addresses. If you are looking for a specific prospect, you can enter their name and the company’s website, to see if Hunter can find the associated email account. To make sure that your results are fruitful, you can verify all the addresses. The verifier uses domain information, mail server response, format, and comparison as parameters.

The free version of the tool is limited to 50 searches. To get more, you need to subscribe to one of the pricing plans, ranging from $49 to $399 per month.

FindThatEmail

FindThatEmail is an email search tool that works both as a web app and a handy Chrome extension. The developers present it as the yellow pages of email. It searches for email addresses based on the first name, last name, and domain. Every email you find is verified and ranked according to the confidence level determined by the tool. 

You get 50 monthly searches and 100 verification credits when you opt for the free version. If you want more extensive options, such as bulk searching, integrations, and credits rollover, you need to choose a pricing plan. The plans range from $29 to $149, with the option to set up a custom plan according to your needs.

Anymail Finder

Anymail Finder looks up individual prospect email addresses according to their name, job title, and domain. There is also an email verification feature that, as the developers claim, provides you with addresses that have a 97% delivery rate.

You get all the features and 90 credits for email verification when you sign up for the free trial. The good news is that the tool won’t charge you if it cannot verify an address. If you want to get more credits, you need to choose one of the pricing plans — from $49 to $149.

RocketReach

RocketReach extracts essential prospect information from social media channels, such as LinkedIn, AngelList, Crunchbase, and more. It comes both in the form of a web app and browser extension. The company behind the tool claims that it has the most extensive and accurate database. It validates the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) of every email address that you extract.

The free version provides you with just a glimpse into what the tool can do — you only get five credits. To use it properly, you need to opt for one of the pricing plans, ranging from $59 to $299 a month. When you subscribe to a plan, you also get to use the RocketReach API.

Why You Should Use Our White-Label Software to Find People’s Email Addresses

With a wide range of marketing tools to choose from, there are a couple of compelling reasons why you would want to opt for the white-label software solution that Sell SaaS provides.

For starters, you can have an additional stream of revenue. Regardless of whether you decide to subscribe to any of the tools and use them, you can get them for free and resell them.

White labeling puts the spotlight on your brand. You get a refined product that has been tested and fine-tuned by us. This enables you to skip all the pains that come with creating and launching a product from scratch. You can focus on your primary business efforts while gaining the attention and loyalty of customers who appreciate the software that you’re selling.

There is also significantly less pressure with white-label products. If anyone has a problem with the software, we will cover customer support.

We offer a plan that enables you to resell our tools for the price you set. You only have to share with us a percentage of your revenue. Depending on how many sales you make, you can earn from 60% up to 80%.