Getting email addresses

Once you have a rough prospect list. You’ll need to find the email addresses of each person in your prospect list in order to reach out.

There are two main ways to find emails:

• Publicly available data: know where to find emails on websites or through databases.
• Email-finding Tools: software that unlocks emails using other profiles or information.

We’ll skip the basics and assume you’ve already searched “contact us” and “about” sections on your target’s website and social media accounts without any luck.

Here are the best ways to find email addresses:

• Lookup services
• Guess
• Twitter
• Mailing lists

Lookup services (and how to scale the process)

Email lookup tools are probably the easiest way to find an email address. Think tools like Clearbit, Hunter.io, and Apollo.io.

Simply feed them a person’s name and website, and they’ll return an email address for you.

The best part? This method scales. Here’s how:

Step 1: Build a spreadsheet of the names and domain names of people you’re trying to contact. There are many ways to do so, but here are a few that we like, depending on the reason for your outreach:

• Sales: Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to create a list of targets. You can get lists of people by job title, industry, company size, seniority, and way way more criteria. Export the list. When you pair this with a tool like Clearbit or Hunter.io, you can turn LinkedIn data into emails quickly.
• Sales alternative: Manually create the list using the steps we mentioned above in finding the right people to target.
• Backlinks for content marketing: Use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer to search for bloggers in your space. Export the file and you’ll have names and domains.

Step 2: Use Hunter for Sheets to utilize Hunter.io’s email lookup service to get email addresses for your entire list.

Now you have a targeted list of contacts and emails.

The catch? Even the most effective tools don’t return perfect results. Expect at least every tenth email address to be incorrect.

Guess

Email addresses are so predictable that you can often guess and get it right.

Since most email addresses follow a standard format, if you know your target’s first name, last name, and domain, you can find the right email.

The most common format is name@domainname.com

Popular formats include:

• First name: nick@demandcurve.com (please don’t)
• First name and last name: nick.costelloe@demandcurve.com
• First name and initial: nickc@demandcurve.com
• Last name and initial: ncostelloe@demandcurve.com

You can use guessing tools like this or this to generate all possible email addresses.

Once you generate the possible variants (as we did above), you’ll want to validate one before sending.

So go to Gmail, click “Compose” and paste all the email variants into the “To” field. Move the cursor over the email address one by one.

A pop-up will show you if the email address is associated with a Google profile.

That’s the email you want.

If you’re looking for further validation before you send, simply Google the email address. If it exists on the web, it’ll return in searches.

This process is a bit time consuming, so consider hiring a freelancer through Upwork or Fiverr to do this for you and return a list of confirmed emails.

And if you’re not able to validate particular emails, you could Bcc a number of the guessed emails you generate.

Another reason to attempt guessing?

If you can find at least one other email from the target company, you can apply that syntax to your target prospect guess.

Twitter

If your prospects have Twitter accounts, you can leverage Twitter to find their email addresses.

People occasionally share their emails in tweets, but to keep them hidden from bots, they replace symbols with words like “dot” and “at”.

So try this:

1. Go to Twitter Advanced Search.
2. Search your target person, and include the words “at” and “dot.”
3. If that doesn’t work, try the words, “email,” “contact,” or “reach” in your search to narrow down the results.

Another way to leverage Twitter? Reach out to your target directly on Twitter (through a Tweet or even a DM) and ask for their preferred method of contact. They’ll often prefer that you reach out to their email address.

Note: This last tactic typically works if you have an active Twitter account and you are reputable enough that your target is willing to provide their contact information.

Tip from behavioral psychology: When you reach out to people on Twitter first and then send them an email, they’re more likely to feel obligated to respond.

Mailing lists

If a person you’re targeting has an option to subscribe to a newsletter on their website, sign up for it.

Most email newsletters come directly from their personal email address.

Then all you need to do is reply to one of the newsletter emails with a quick question.

Even if the newsletter is coming from an email address like, “hello@domain.com” or “team@domain.com”, your target, if they reply to your reply, will likely do so from their personal email, not a shared email.

Hacks

If you’re up for a few hacks, try these:

• Going into Facebook groups, cross-referencing the people in them with their LinkedIn profiles, and using the ContactOut Chrome extension to extract the email from those profiles.
• Programmatically scraping GitHub for designers who followed specific projects.
• Look in relevant Slack channels (as we indicated in our section on finding the right people to target). Take the names and companies and run them through hunter.io to get email addresses.
• Consider purchasing emails wholesale from a reputable vendor (example here).

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Once you have a list of emails, run them through a list clearing service like this to make sure you’re not sending to incorrect email addresses (which will hurt your email deliverability—covered in this module).