You’ve got a personalized, customized pitch for the perfect prospect. What you don’t have? Their email address.
Not to worry. If you have a mere five minutes, you can find this crucial piece of information.
The nine methods below are guaranteed to surface almost anyone’s business email address. If you’re absolutely positive your email will benefit the intended recipient, don’t let an unknown email address stand in your way.
Very important disclaimer: Use these tools for good, not evil. Spamming is never acceptable. Each and every single one of your sales emails should be personalized to the recipient and provide them some value – whether big or small. A good test to determine whether your email is actually spam? If the message isn’t customized enough to be appropriate for one person and one person alone, don’t send it.
Without further ado, here are nine hacks to find just about anyone’s email address in a matter of minutes.
1) Press releases
When a company announces news, the PR manager writes and publishes a press release. And what’s at the bottom of most every press release? Contact information.
Companies often list a generic contactus@business.com email address, but the PR manager’s direct email address will usually be printed as well. Now that you have the email convention for the company, simply apply the formula to your prospect. Voila!
2) Mailtester
Have a good idea of what the person’s email might be? Enter it into Mailtester to verify if the address exists on the company’s server.
3) Email Format
Enter the domain your contact’s email address lives on and click search. Email Format will turn up any email addresses it finds on the domain, and you can mimic the convention from there. If no email addresses pop up, the tool will list possible conventions in order of confidence:
4) Call the company
Sometimes to get an email, you have to call. Try calling the company’s general inquiries phone number and asking for the contact information of the person you’re looking for.
However, for this tactic to work, you’d be wise to turn down the “salesy” aspect of your request. You should never intentionally lie to or pull the wool over the gatekeeper’s eyes, but choose your words carefully so as to avoid putting the person on guard. For instance, instead of saying “I’d like to get in contact with Jill Smith to tell her about an amazing new product my company released,” you could explain, “I’d like to get in contact with Jill about HR expenses."
Check out this video for an example of how to gently ask for contact information over the phone.
5) AllMyTweets
From time to time, people will give out their email addresses on Twitter, usually in response to a direct comment. But considering the volume at which active Twitter users post, pressing "load more tweets" over and over again until you find contact information will probably take you all day (if not all week).
To view all the tweets someone has ever posted on a single screen, enter their handle into AllMyTweets. After the page is populated with tweets, you can simply search for "email” or “company.com,” and their email address will appear if they’ve ever tweeted it out.
6) Email generator + Rapportive
This one is a two-step process. First, visit an email generator site such as Email Address Guesser and enter your potential recipient’s name and email domain. The tool will generate a comprehensive list of all possible permutations of the person’s email address.
Next, download Rapportive if you don’t already have it. When you compose an email, this free Gmail add-on will display a sidebar with the recipient’s public LinkedIn information such as contact data, recent social posts, and title.
Finally, open a new message in Gmail and copy and paste the list of potential email addresses into the “send to” line. Expand Rapportive and click on each email address. If Rapportive finds a LinkedIn account associated with that email address, the sidebar will autofill with data. Correct email address found!
For a step-by-step explanation of how to pull off the email generator + Rapportive hack, watch this video:
7) Thrust.io
It doesn’t get much easier than this. Thrust.io asks users for the intended recipient’s name and email domain. It then returns an email address.
Not sure it’s the right one? Run it in Mailtester to verify the email address exists on the company domain.
8) Voila Norbert
Different tool, exact same functionality. Now with a digital butler!
9) Sell Hack
Sell Hack’s email search extension functions similarly to Thrust.io and Voila Norbert, except that users can also input social profiles. But be warned that after a certain number of uses, the tool will ask you to replenish your credit by sharing a link on social or emailing a friend.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in June 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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Good suggestions but to make sure it would be best to use a better email validations service, I would personally recommend Zerobounce, it's not free but they do have a trial period for 100 emails , the service is very good and accurate and if you want to keep using it it's very cheap.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.zerobounce.net/