How to Find Email Addresses for Anyone

Need to find a lead contact information?

It's a common scenario: you come across someone online who would make a great connection, and you just need to contact them.

We may be someone you'd like to network, a new potential lead, or a seasoned industry veteran whose brain you'd love to tap. Whatever the situation, you need an email address to contact them.

The tactics below help you do just that — find email addresses for just about anyone you want to reach.

1. Check their social media.

 Most people have a professional email address listed on their Twitter bio, LinkedIn or similar. While it seems like an obvious strategy, first search all their social platforms before you think about digging deeper.

Another starting point? A very detailed Google search— more often than not, a basic "Firstname Lastname email address" search will bring you results, and adding as many additional details as possible (such as location, place of employment, industry, etc.) will improve your likelihood of success.

On a similar note, check out "About Us," "Who We Are," or similar introductory section, or see if you can find your own personal website or blog.

2. Using their network: locate their coworkers ' emails

 If you can find, for example, the LinkedIn site for one of their colleagues, you can deduce what the email address of your desired contact is. Of instance, when you find out their coworker has a specified email of "firstname@theircompany.com," you can almost guarantee that all fellow employees will have an email address which fits the same structure.

3. Play the guessing game: Try variants of popular email structures

 You may not find any of their coworkers ' email addresses listed, but just want to try your luck. Try common email structures like "firstnamelastname@theircompany.com," "lastname@theircompany.com," "firstinitiallastname@theircompany.com," etc.

Find your contact blog or the "About Us" website of your employer can be a good way to find email addresses. Image from Unsplash.

4. Use their website: check out WHOIS data

If your contact has a website, you may find an email address by searching through WHOIS. By buying a domain, your contact information is publicly available, unless you choose to pay to conceal it.

However, this tactic will only work if your contact has personally registered their domain, so if you're looking up somebody's personal website instead of a larger company's website, you'll be lucky.

5. Use browser extensions to find email addresses

If you'd rather avoid playing the guessing game (I can't blame you), there are plenty of tools at your disposal to help you find an email address.

First, the Chrome extension Clearbit Connect aims to locate every email address in less than five seconds— a pretty bold statement, but with companies like Uber, Slack, Zendesk, Asana, and many more using the app, it's certainly one to try.

Similarly, the SellHack extension was built specifically with sales lead prospecting in mind. The service is mainly charged, with various price rates, but also allowing you to check for 10 free email addresses a month. Ultimately, LinkedIn Sales Navigator (as well as Rapportive) are extensions for accessing information about your LinkedIn connections.

Find email address Use technology to help you find email addresses. Image from Unsplash.

6. Pay to play: Subscribe to a SaaS solution

If you regularly need to find email addresses for more people (for example, lead prospecting), you may want to look for a more sophisticated, long-term solution.

There are many programs specifically designed for this use case— although most are charged. Headreach goes beyond just email addresses and can also identify the social profiles and job positions of those you're interested in, something that can be extremely helpful when prospecting sales leads (so you know you're bringing your sales pitch to the right decision-maker at the organization). Another option is FindThat, which bills itself as "yellow email address pages." However, both of these options come with monthly price tags. Headreach starts at $49 a month, and FindThat's most basic plan (which includes finding but not verifying email addresses) starts at $29 a month. Do note that there are plenty of SaaS services like these two, and do some work before committing to a monthly subscription.

7. Experiment: Try free online software solutions

While most available software is paid to help you find email addresses, there are some free solutions as well — (It's worth noting that the above-mentioned solutions all come with free or trial options, so it's a good idea to try them out — you might find that one is enough of an advantage to subscribe to, or that you only want it once in a while.) For instance, Hunter.io provides 100 free searches a month, so if you're only interested in a few different contacts (or work with a smaller volume of leaves) While the app has paid rates, the free version is one of the more generous out there.

8. Only ask: Contact them on social media

While it makes sense that you often prefer to find an email address to formally meet someone, if you can find the social profiles of your desired connection, it can save you time and effort (and maybe money) to simply send them a message and ask for their email to see if you can contact them further.