Email marketing is still one of the ultimate ways to drive demand and generate revenue online. And no matter how advanced search engines get or how many new social media networks pop up each year, email marketing still holds the digital marketing crown for ROI.
Sources vary but a proper email marketing strategy can generate upwards of $36 for each $1 spent on emails. Not even SEO can beat those numbers.
However, there is a lot that goes into an email marketing strategy. You need to know what you’re doing, and perhaps most importantly, you need to reach out to the right people.
Today, we’ll show you a few tips on how to find email addresses for anyone you can think of, from free and easy ways to paid and still relatively easy ways.
Let’s get started.
Why look for a personal email address in the first place?
The voice inside your head might be thinking – why do I even need a personal email address to reach out to someone? There are different ways that you can still get in touch with someone but without all that research and hard work.
For example:
- Reaching out to a [email protected] email address
- Reaching out to a role-based email address such as [email protected]
- Reaching out on other platforms such as LinkedIn (with paid InMail messages) instead of digging for a persona email address
- Reaching out to someone in the company and hoping they forward you to the right person in the same company after numerous followups
And all of these are valid. However, having direct access to someone’s work or personal email means you can reach out to that person and not circumvent them, hoping they’ll get the message.
In short, if you want anything close to those $36 for $1 spent, you want to make an impact and send emails to the right person’s business email address.
Looking for email address online – 7 ways to get started
Finding the email addresses of people you want to offer something to can be hard. For some contacts, it’s as easy as going to their website and looking up their contact details. However, most people nowadays hide their emails from plain sight because of how many spam messages and sales offers they get.
This is why on most websites, you’ll only find a generic email address and contact info that will not yield any results.
Having this in mind, there are multiple ways to find personal email addresses. Some are free, some are paid and some might not work for your specific needs. However, you’ll certainly find at least one method that works for you in the list below.
#1 Go through the company website
Sometimes, proper research is all it takes. Go to your target company’s website and see through pages such as About Us, The Team, and similar. If a person has a profile on the website, there is a good chance they have an email address listed as well.
If all you can find is a generic email address such as [email protected] or a contact form, this is a sign that the website is a dead end.
Pro: it’s free and you can make unlimited searches per month
Con: not suitable if you need a large number of email addresses at once, lots of manual labor involved, especially for a more complex company website
#2 Google the person you’re looking for
Google has the answers to (almost) everything. Google the person you want to find and type the word “email” after it in the search bar to find someone’s email address with ease.
You can start with, “John Doe email” and if the name is very common, add the company name too, e.g. “John Doe Acme Inc email”.
Using Google search operators, you can get closer to finding your target person. For example, you can use an advanced search query such as “site:example.com John Doe” which will search the target website only and look for that specific keyword.
These advanced search operators can help out quite a bit. And the best of all is that an advanced Google search is free and takes just a few minutes to start searching for email addresses.
Pro: it’s free, tons of options with advanced search queries, good if you know the most common formats for emails
Con: not very reliable, time-consuming if you need a large volume of email addresses, not very accurate
#3 Go to LinkedIn and search for an email address
This is a pretty straightforward method as all you need to do is find a person on LinkedIn, click on their profile, and see their professional email address. Easy, right? Well, not so much.
To see their professional email addresses, they have to be in your LinkedIn connections first unless they left their address public or if they’re in your mutual connections. Most people don’t do this. You’ll have to send them a connection request first to be able to see the prospect’s LinkedIn profile.
Most people won’t accept a connection request if they sense that you’re trying to pitch them something (and if you don’t have a mutual connection). And even if they do, there is a good chance that LinkedIn has their personal address and not the business one they use every day.
Last but not least, sending too many connections and spamming people on LinkedIn is sure to break LinkedIn’s terms of use and can get you banned from the platform before you find the address of your target person.
You can also use LinkedIn Premium, which will give you all the data that you may need to reach out. As mentioned though, some people don’t use their business email addresses for their LinkedIn profiles.
Pro: free service (for the most part), unlimited searches per month
Con: can be time-consuming, and only works well if you’re paying for a premium account
#4 Look at their social media profiles
LinkedIn is not the only social media platform out there, but it is the most important one for business email addresses. However, there is a good chance that your target(s) use other social media platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook and others as well as LinkedIn for marketing and other purposes.
Make sure to check out those profiles and see if there are email addresses somewhere in the About section or their bio. This could be a quick win provided that they left that information public.
Pro: it’s free and relatively easy to do email hunting this way
Con: very time-consuming and a high chance that the email addresses are hidden or not disclosed
#5 Do a WHOIS search to find a person’s email address
This is a very specific use case, but let’s say you need to find the email of someone who owns a website or is an entrepreneur with their own business. When registering their domain, they need to leave their personal info, including their email contact.
So, head over to who.is and type in the domain name and the search results should hopefully show you the contact details you need. Besides showing the domain availability status, this tool can help you find an email address in seconds.
You can do the same procedure with other platforms such as GoDaddy, Namecheap, ICANN and other tools with this search feature.
Pro: free and easy
Con: you can only find certain people and roles this way. As previously mentioned, they need to have a personal blog or website registered to their name.
#6 Use an email lookup tool to find email addresses quickly
It’s no secret that most people nowadays use some sort of paid service to find email addresses. Using these email lookup tools, all you need to do is enter someone’s name and company and the tool gives you their email address, usually with great accuracy.
Email lookup services allow you to do just this and with a few dollars, you can find just about all the email addresses there are. The downside is the price, of course, but you save lots of valuable time.
You can get access to an entire company’s database and search their known email addresses to find the right person. There is also a Google Chrome extension for most of these tools that lets you search email addresses immediately as you’re on a target website.
Note: most email lookup tools claim to find real email addresses, but it’s still a good idea to verify your lists internally too. Just download a CSV file and upload it to Bouncer – we’ll show you the specific accounts that you need to remove from your outreach list.
Pro: very accurate, quick exact match results
Con: costs some money
#7 Check your existing email lists
There is a good chance that you already have the email address of the person your sales professionals trying to reach out to. It is a great idea to stay on top of your existing email lists and jot down any interesting addresses that show up.
Besides doing all of the methods mentioned above, make sure to check your email marketing software and look up possible email addresses. You just might get lucky.
Pro: free and easy to do
Con: you rely on luck to get results
Wrapping up
As you can see, finding someone’s correct email address in 2023 isn’t rocket science. There are plenty of free methods that anyone can use with just basic access to the internet. And if all else fails, there are paid email lookup services that can help you find email addresses in a matter of minutes.
One thing is for certain – you need actual, real email addresses to get meaningful results from email marketing.
But email addresses can get stale and outdated – people leave their jobs, stop using an address or change it. Or maybe you accidentally entered a typo when copying the address to your email marketing tool.
This is where Bouncer comes in. Using Bouncer, you can clean up and validate your list so that you’re left only with real, valid email addresses. Sign up for a free trial and watch as your bounce rates vanish while your email ROI skyrockets!
Frequently asked questions
Is it legal to send someone an email if you found their address online?
It depends. If it’s a cold email that you’re sending to them, you could get ignored and sent to spam. However, it’s not illegal. On the other hand, if you’re adding them to your newsletter or any kind of list that they did not agree to be on – that can get you in trouble. To legally send emails, they need to come from your opt in form.
Do cold emails work if I send them to people whose addresses I found?
Yes, cold email does work but how well it works depends on a lot of factors. You need to find the right person, personalize the message and send at least a few follow-ups. In short, they do work, but you need to put in some effort to do them well.
Is it a good idea to purchase email lists?
You may be tempted to buy email lists with leads from a certain industry. This seems like saving a lot of work, time and money but in reality, it’s a bad email marketing practice. You risk getting your messages flagged as spam and hurting your sender reputation. Never purchase email lists as they may be filled with generic email addresses, and outdated data files and could ultimately do more harm than good.
What is the easiest way to find verified email addresses?
If you have a list of contacts you want to do email outreach to in your prospect’s company, you need to use email verification tools such as Bouncer. Our app checks your target’s email address and makes sure that it is real and exists on specific mail servers. This way, you get fewer bounces and overall better email marketing results.
