Have you ever struggled to find someone’s email address? Spent countless hours crawling the web to try and find even a hint to how you might be able to get in touch?<\/p>\n
Finding email addresses can be hard;\u00a0there is no denying that, but this guide is here to help.\u00a0We have some tips below to help you discover multiple options that will help you find a\u00a0seemingly mysterious address when you feel like you have tried everything else.<\/p>\n
Hopefully, this guide will introduce you to a few new approaches and help speed up prospecting or hunting for email addresses.<\/p>\n
You might need to find someone’s email address for any number of reasons as a marketer, but by far, the most common reasons are for an outreach campaign for\u00a0link building<\/a>,\u00a0influencer marketing, or sales prospecting.<\/p>\n Most of the approaches described below can be used for multiple reasons; any specific to a particular tactic will be marked clearly.<\/p>\n Perhaps the best place to start is a company or publication’s website. It might sound simple, but it is often the quickest way to find a way to get in touch with the person you need\u00a0to make contact with.<\/p>\n That said, contact info\u00a0is not always where you would expect them to be, and knowing where to look can make it easier (and quicker) to find the info you need.<\/p>\n A website’s contact page should be your first port of call.<\/p>\n While\u00a0you will often find that there is only a generic email address listed, that is not always the case.<\/p>\n If you are running email outreach to promote content, you can often find an editor’s details here. And it is not uncommon to find key contacts within different\u00a0sections\u00a0of a company website.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Whether you are looking to pitch a journalist or a key person within a business, you can often find that team and author pages contain the contact information that you are looking for.<\/p>\n You\u00a0usually find these linked to from within a site’s navigation, or sometimes on a site’s ‘About Us’ page\u00a0if it is a business.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n If you are looking for an author bio page, you\u00a0usually find this linked from any article a journalist has written.<\/p>\n In some cases, you might not be given an\u00a0email address, rather a form, as in the example below; but this will still mean you are able to get in touch with the recipient (it is worth a shot).<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n If you have had no luck on the company or publication’s website, a Google search using one or more\u00a0advanced search operators<\/a>\u00a0could help you to find the details you need.<\/p>\n These are simple\u00a0ways to refine your search and receive more granular results.<\/p>\n When you are looking to find someone’s email address, here are search operators that you can try:<\/strong><\/p>\n With the latter, you are essentially trying to guess email variations based on their name and domain and using Google to verify and validate this.<\/p>\n Often, you will see the correct variation returned even if you get it wrong.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Sometimes, the easiest way to find someone’s email address is to use one of a number of dedicated tools that exist to help you do just that. Some of these tools are free to use and will help you to find a person’s email address in seconds.<\/p>\n Here are our recommendations:<\/p>\n Hunter<\/a>\u00a0claims that they will help you ‘find email addresses in seconds’; if you know the domain name of the person’s email address, this is a pretty factual claim.<\/p>\n Once you have entered the domain, you will be served suggestions on email format and sources, backing up the validity of the address. You\u00a0get 50 free searches per month on a free account.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Find That Email<\/a>\u00a0refers to themselves as ‘The Yellow Pages for Email.’ Besides\u00a0helping you find email addresses, the tool also verifies\u00a0lists of any size to prevent hard bounces and integrates with over 500 apps such as Mail Chimp, Salesforce, and Hubspot.<\/p>\n What makes the tool really useful is that you can also use it to find the email addresses of a person from their social profile, ‘with a single click.’<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Unlike the other suggestions above,\u00a0Discoverly<\/a>\u00a0can help\u00a0you find a prospect’s email information from right inside your inbox\u00a0and\u00a0aggregates social information from across Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.<\/p>\n It then populates a small sidebar in your email inbox. You will need to try a couple of different variants on an email address, and Discoverly will highlight the most likely.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Of course, these aren’t the only tools that can help you find someone’s email address; other options include:<\/p>\n The Semrush\u00a0Link Building Tool<\/a>\u00a0can help you to find email addresses for link building outreach prospecting.<\/p>\n Once you have reviewed the prospects recommended by the tool and have moved one or more into your ‘in progress’ tab, you will see recommended email addresses right below the ‘contact’ button.<\/p>\n The tool is a great way to see the options that exist, and it is worth running your prospects through this tool if you have struggled to find it elsewhere.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n You are also able to track the progress of any emails that you send through the tool, making it easy to keep track of who has\u00a0or has not\u00a0acted upon your request.<\/p>\n While this is not a low-budget option, if you are working in PR and outreach, it often pays to subscribe to a media database to help you find contact details for journalist prospects.<\/p>\n The beauty of using a media database is that these typically have teams who continually add to\u00a0and update\u00a0their offering, meaning that if a journalist moves to a new publication, their details will be updated.<\/p>\n You can expect to pay $$$ and up, per month, for access to a media database. However, it is worth it if you are conducting PR-driven outreach and pitching at scale. It is a great way not only to find someone’s contact details but also to build full media lists and find new prospects, all inside a single platform.<\/p>\n A number of options exist, but we have some recommendations on the\u00a0most popular media databases<\/a>:<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n There are a number of ways that you can use Twitter to find email addresses, and it is a quick and easy way to try to find a contact you have been struggling to find.<\/p>\n If you are able to find a journalist (more so than a sales prospect) on Twitter, there is\u00a0a good chance that you will find that they have listed their email address within their bio.<\/p>\n Journalists need story pitches and PRs sending pitches and information is usually welcomed; this means they need to be sharing their contact email with the masses.<\/p>\n If you have a journalist name, head to their Twitter page and check their bio.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n This is just one example, but there are others out there to be found.<\/p>\n If you don’t see a contact email on someone’s Twitter page,\u00a0that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to find it through the platform.<\/p>\n Using Twitter’s\u00a0advanced search<\/a>\u00a0may help. It is not uncommon for someone to share their email address in a Tweet. Perhaps someone reached out and asked for it, or they responded and gave it as a way to carry on the conversation. But,\u00a0this is often done by replacing the . and @ signs in an address with ‘dot’ or ‘at.’<\/p>\n But you can use an advanced search to help you find this; it offers you a variety of options to choose from:<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Don’t forget to try different variations if you are not successful the first time. You can also try searching for mentions of:<\/p>\n If you can’t find someone’s contact email address publicly available on Twitter, consider Tweeting at them and asking for it.\u00a0As we can see from our advanced search results, this is often effective and definitely worth a try.<\/p>\n LinkedIn is the perfect platform for sales prospecting, but you can also use it to find contact details for journalists, marketing teams,\u00a0and others who you may need to reach out to as part of your work.<\/p>\n Head to someone’s LinkedIn profile, and you will see a ‘Contact info’ button on their profile.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n If you are connected with someone on LinkedIn, you can export your connections. This import may include their email address, depending upon how they have set their visibility.<\/p>\n To export your contacts:<\/strong><\/p>\n When signing up for an email newsletter, you will often find that this comes from someone’s account within the business, or you get an introduction to someone at the company in the first email you receive.<\/p>\n It may, of course, use newsletter@domain.com, hello@ or similar, but it is worth a try and can sometimes at the least point you in the right direction of understanding the structure of email addresses that the business uses.<\/p>\n Once you have signed up, keep an eye out for an email and check the address that it comes from.<\/p>\n Another option\u00a0is to reply to an email newsletter that\u00a0it is likely to go to someone within the business who can at least introduce you to the person you need to speak with.<\/p>\n This option is more effective when you\u00a0target\u00a0smaller local businesses with fewer staff members, but taking a look at any local listings that a company has, including their Google My Business profile, can help you find an email address.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, what you find will often be a generic email address. However, if it is a small, owner-managed company, you may find that it is the founder or director that replies.<\/p>\n When starting a business, it is common for the owner to set up a lot of listings, and you might find that their contact details are listed.<\/p>\n If all else fails, take a guess. It might sound simple, but it can\u00a0better than missing out on an opportunity.<\/p>\n In most instances, email addresses follow a pretty standard format within a company (and publication), with options for you to try including:<\/p>\n In most cases, there really aren’t too many variants, but some\u00a0larger companies have been known to use middle initials or numbers on the end of duplicated names within the business.\u00a0This is rare, however.<\/p>\n If you guess wrong, you\u00a0receive a bounceback on any addresses that do not exist. If you don’t get a bounceback, there s a good chance that your email has successfully been delivered to someone.<\/p>\n This is definitely a last-ditch attempt, but it is better than missing out on an opportunity, and, in most cases, you have nothing to lose \u2014 worst-case scenario, your email bounces.<\/p>\n Looking for and finding someone’s email address is common, but we must understand the rules and regulations around cold targeting people via email.<\/p>\n There has\u00a0been a lot of talk about\u00a0GDPR<\/a>\u00a0over the last few years, and quite rightly so; it is\u00a0important to understand that this does not govern cold emails. Even now that GDPR is fully enforceable, it is still permissible for a business to send a cold email.<\/p>\n So, why does GDPR exist? Put simply, its main purpose is to protect the personal data of EU citizens. GDPR is all about personal data protection, not to prevent businesses from sending emails.<\/p>\n When sending emails as a business, you are processing personal data, so it is not something that you can simply forget about.<\/p>\n Here is a great article<\/a>\u00a0on what GDPR means for businesses regarding\u00a0email.\u00a0There is no GDPR equivalent in the US, but companies must still abide by these regulations if you are emailing businesses in the EU. The US does have the CAN-SPAM\u00a0act and provides a\u00a0compliance guide\u00a0for businesses<\/a>.<\/p>\n You should never aim to spam. Never. Be sure that the emails you send are targeted to individuals and businesses who may genuinely benefit from your offer or pitch. Always be courteous and remove any requests to stop mailing an individual.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How to Search For and Find Any Email Address Have you ever struggled to find someone’s email address? Spent countless hours crawling the web to try and find even a hint to how you might be able to get in\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-email-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A Company or Publication’s Website<\/h3>\n
Contact Pages<\/h4>\n
Team and\u00a0Author Pages<\/h4>\n
Finding Emails with Google Search Operators<\/h3>\n
[name]\u00a0+\u00a0email<\/code><\/div>\n[name]\u00a0+\u00a0contact<\/code><\/div>\n[name]\u00a0+\u00a0\"company\u00a0or\u00a0publication\"<\/code><\/div>\nsite:website.com\u00a0+\u00a0[name]\u00a0+\u00a0email<\/code><\/div>\nname@domain.com\u00a0\/\u00a0firstname.surname@domain.com<\/code><\/div>\nEmail Finding Tools<\/h3>\n
Hunter<\/h4>\n
Find That Email<\/h4>\n
Discoverly<\/h4>\n
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Semrush Link Building Tool<\/h3>\n
Using a Media Database for Email Collection<\/h3>\n
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Twitter Options for Email Research<\/h3>\n
Twitter Profiles<\/h4>\n
Advanced Twitter Search<\/h4>\n
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You Can Always Tweet and\u00a0Ask!<\/h4>\n
LinkedIn<\/h3>\n
LinkedIn Profiles<\/h4>\n
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LinkedIn Contacts Export<\/h4>\n
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Newsletter Subscriptions<\/h3>\n
Local Listings and Google My Business\u00a0(GMB)<\/h3>\n
You Can Always Guess<\/h3>\n
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Regulations Around Cold Contacting Targets via Email<\/h2>\n