Is email marketing still worth it? Well, on average, email drives an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent — higher than any other channel.
There’s no question that cold email marketing is one of the most powerful tools for outreach when it comes to your lead generation strategy. Because of its low cost and easy accessibility, it’s obvious why the ROI of email marketing can be so high.
But to get started on your email marketing strategy, you first have to know how to acquire your prospect’s email address. In this article, we’ll tell you 8 different easy ways to find your leads’ business email addresses.
Contents
1. Ask Them For Their Email Address
The best place to start is also the simplest.
If you have a website with a landing page, create an online form that allows contacts to put in their email address and personal information in exchange for something valuable. This “lead magnet” can be anything from a free ebook, online webinar, collection of tips, or even just a simple opt-in to your newsletter.
Remember, you always want to provide as much value as possible. People are wary about being “tricked” into giving their emails away, so make sure they’re getting something worthwhile in return.
If you haven’t yet created something like this, consider creating newsletters for leads. It’s a great way to connect with potential customers and build long-term relationships.
2. Subscribe to Their List
This tactic works the other way around as well. Several companies and bloggers send out their own newsletters to promote their businesses.
Adding your email to their list is a great way to start building a relationship with them that shows there’s a human that’s actually interested in them behind your email address.
To do this, go to the prospect’s website and find the opt-in form. Go ahead and enter your email address and subscribe to the newsletter. After that, check your inbox and there should be some sort of welcome letter within a few minutes.
Open up the email — it should have come from a viable email address! Go ahead and reply to their emails. This is a great way to open up a conversation that doesn’t feel “cold,” as you’re showing an interest in their business and interests.
3. Find Their Social Media
Just about everybody has some sort of social media presence in today’s modern world. If you can find their social media profiles, you can definitely find their email address. Let’s walk through a few different types of social media to see how to find their email addresses.
Facebook is a great first place to check for an email address.
First, go to your target individual or company’s Facebook and click over to the “About” section on their page. Under their contact information, you should see an email address if they added one.
However, many bigger companies will use generic contact emails that begin with something like:
- info@
- hello@
- contact@
If you’re looking to do personalized outreach, these might not be helpful.
When it comes to Instagram, there are two different options to find a person’s email address.
For the first option, go to their profile page and select the “Contact” button. If they added an email address here, it should show up as an option to contact.
If you can’t find it here, check their biography to see if they manually inputted their email address.
LinkedIn is the professional networking social media hub of the internet. To find their email here, you might need to connect with them in order to see personal information like their email address.
After you connect with them, click the “Contact Info” section on their profile page. Chances are you’ll find their email address here.
If not, take a look at their “Cover Picture” (the banner that lies across the top of the page). People will often add their email addresses here. If you can’t find it, move on to their “About” summary to see if they list their email there.
If you still can’t find it, you can try exporting your LinkedIn connections. Note that this will only work if they haven’t hidden their email address from their connections.
To do this, follow these steps:
- Log in to LinkedIn
- Click on the drop-down menu on your profile photo
- Click “Settings & Privacy”
- Next, click “Get a copy of your data”
- It will ask then ask you to “Select the data files you’re most interested in” — click the “Connections” box
- Click on “Request archive”
Once your export is ready, LinkedIn will email you a CSV file that lists all of your connections along with their email addresses.
Check Their Company Website
This may not count as social media, but it’s definitely worth checking out their company website to see if you can find any email addresses there. Here are some of the most common places to find email addresses.
First, check out their About Page. You can usually find brief bios, social media accounts, and detailed contact info to reach out to.
If you don’t see anything there, move on to their contact page. You’ll often find generic contact forms here, but sometimes companies will add the contact info of specific members as well.
Lastly, if the company has a blog, you might find email addresses on the author page. They’ll often provide an image and personal info that you can use to reach out to.
4. Make an Educated Guess
After trying to find several email addresses (especially from contacts from the same company), you might start seeing patterns. You can always try to “guess” your lead’s business email.
Try creating generic emails to places like [email protected] or [email protected]. If you get a response, ask for the direct contact of the person you want to get connected with.
If you see patterns in other employees’ email addresses, try to follow the pattern. For example, if you see [email protected], there’s a high chance that other employees’ emails follow the same pattern.
Sometimes, even just inserting the email into a draft will allow their picture to show up before you even send an email.
5. Use an Email Permutator
Another option is to use an Email Permutator. These are free tools that help you find a person’s email by entering basic information. Once you input the info, it will generate a list of possible email addresses that you can try to reach out to.
To do this, just go to the main page and input your lead’s first name, last name, and domain and it will produce a list.
How do you know which one will work?
Copy and paste the entire list and enter it into a draft in your email service provider. Highlight each. of the names — if one of them has a picture pop up, you’ve likely found the right one!
Make sure to not actually send an email to every single address. You could ruin your sender reputation and come up and get marked as spam — and that’s the last thing you want to do.
6. Search On Google
Google is a powerful tool to help find the email addresses of your prospects. There are three different search input methods you can do to find their email address.
The first one is to search in quotes: “[email protected]”
By using quotation marks, you’re telling Google that you want to find the exact keyword that you inputted. If their business email has ever been used publically, it will be displayed on the Search Engine Results Page.
Another option is to type site:amazon.com James Johnson email address into your Google search.
This will provide results that only come from the domain you typed in.
Lastly, search [James Johnson] + email.
This will try to find any of your lead’s email addresses wherever it is published on the internet.
7. Simply Reach Out To Them or Ask For an Introduction
If you went through all of these strategies and still can’t find your lead’s email address, there’s nothing wrong with reaching out to them on social media.
You can find your prospect on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook and ask them for their email address. Just make sure to tell them why you’re reaching out to connect with them in a friendly manner. You’ll often find people are inclined to respond to these kinds of messages with positive messages.
You can ask for a more specific email address through their company’s generic contact info. These are those generic customer service emails that often start with words like:
- info@
- sales@
- contact@
- webmaster@
- mail@
- contacto@
- admin@
- office@
- hello@
If you compose a short email telling them who you are, who you need to contact, and why, you’ll often find they are willing to connect them with whom you need to talk.
Lastly, you can even connect to the company’s support chat to see if they’ll provide you with an email address. You can say something like:
“Hello! I’m looking for the email address of someone on the marketing team to discuss a partnership opportunity. It’d be great if you could provide me with an email address or direct contact. Thanks in advance!”
An even more powerful way to get in contact with someone is to find a mutual acquaintance with the lead. On LinkedIn, you can easily see if you and the prospect have any mutual connections.
If you do, reach out to them and see if they can make an introduction. You can send a simple message like:
“Hey Sarah, I saw you are connected to [target lead]. Do you mind introducing us so I can [1-2 sentences about the reason you want to connect]?”
You can also just ask for their email address. Once you email the lead, make sure to mention the person who provided it as an icebreaker.
8. Use Email Lookup Tools
There are several email lookup tools that can help you find a person’s business email address. Depending on the service you use, you can find your prospects’ business emails — and you don’t even have to be connected on LinkedIn.
If you’re willing to invest in one of these services, it can be one of the easiest ways to find an email address. All you need to do is input a person’s name and website, and it will produce their email address like magic.
There are tons of these tools on the market, so make sure to do your due diligence to see which one works the best for what you’re trying to accomplish.
You can create a simple sequence that can help you collect verified business emails with the lowest possible bounce rates. Once completed, simply export the data into a CSV file and you’re good to go.
These can help save you a ton of time and energy by automating the entire process of scraping the internet for email addresses, which means you can focus more of your time reaching out to and closing prospects.
Start Collecting Those Leads!
These are 8 simple and easy tactics that you can use to start finding the email address of your leads.
Now it’s time to take action. Start using these tactics and collecting emails into a spreadsheet. The more you do it, the more you’ll find the strategies that work the best for people in your field.
Depending on the niche that your business is in, you’ll find that people have different ways that they prefer to advertise themselves and their contact info.
If you want to generate more sales and automate your Linkedin prospecting, get a free trial of our message automation software today!
FREE TRIAL
Generate Sales on LinkedIn
Recent Posts
