With the right approach, email is one of the most efficient channels for connecting with prospects.
The catch, of course, is that email outreach only works if you can reliably find accurate, up-to-date email addresses.
Finding someone’s correct email address is something many of us find challenging. The good news is that there are several easy ways to find email addresses online. All you need is to know where to look—and maybe have a few tools up your sleeve to help you do so more efficiently.
So, to help you get started, we’ve rounded up 11 tips and tools you can use to find email addresses online.
But first, here’s a quick recap of why building an accurate email list is so important and why being able to find up-to-date emails is so vital to your sales process.
Why You Should Know How to Find Email Addresses Online
Whether you’re trying to get in touch with a specific individual or build a targeted email list, there are quite a few benefits to knowing where to look for email addresses online. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest reasons you should know how and where to find anyone’s email.
Email Offers the Highest ROI of Any Marketing Channel
When you consider that email marketing provides a 4,100% return on investment, it’s easy to see the value of knowing how to find a prospect’s email address. That’s right, every $1 spent on email marketing generates an average return of $42 in revenue.
Email Plays a Crucial Role in the Sales Process
It’s important to know how to find (and verify) someone’s email address because having the correct email address improves your delivery rate, allows you to send personalized cold emails, and ensures you can get in touch with decision-makers more quickly.
Email Gets Through to People
As the most popular digital channel, email is one of the best ways to reach your target audience. The average person spends five hours per day checking their email! So, the chances are that your prospects check their inbox multiple times a day.
Email Allows You to Build Relationships at Scale
Finding a prospect’s email address is the first step toward converting them into a customer. With the right tool stack, you can automate much of your email outreach and marketing campaigns to save time while still getting results.
11 Tips & Tools for Finding Anyone’s Email Address
When it comes to finding accurate email addresses online, most solutions fall into one of three buckets:
- Manual searches for individual email addresses. This approach is best for small-scale, targeted outreach.
- Automated tools for finding email addresses more quickly. These are ideal for larger outreach campaigns and growing an email list at scale.
- Email verification tools that confirm contact information, so you can build a clean, accurate list with high deliverability.
Let’s take a look at how each of these approaches can play a role in finding emails and building your prospecting list.
Where to Manually Find Emails Listed Online
The following tips are the best ways to source email addresses manually. Since they don’t rely on any tools or paid apps, these are budget-friendly options best for when you need to find one specific person’s contact information.
That said, if you’re looking to build a larger email list from scratch, consider skipping ahead to our section on using tools and automation to find emails more quickly and at scale.
Visit Their Website
This is perhaps the most obvious way to find someone’s email, but it’s also a safe bet. If you can grab an email address from their personal or business website, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get through to them (since they wouldn’t list an incorrect or outdated address on their own site!).
Furthermore, if you check out the business’ website and find a generic contact email, you can leverage that info to figure out a specific prospect’s contact info. You can either email the generic address asking to be put in touch with your target or you can guess the target’s email address by copying the format used in the address provided. (For instance, by trying their first name “@” the domain name).
Or maybe you visit their website and can’t find an email listed anywhere, but you do come across a contact form that can be used to send a message. In this case, the prospect is still inviting you to contact them on their own terms. You can politely submit a request for their most relevant email address as well as provide them with yours so they can message you directly.
Check Social Media Bios
Anyone who really wants to be contacted will list their email address on their website or social media page. So, take a look at their bios on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If you’re lucky and they list their email publicly, you’re good to go!
Checking someone’s social media profiles might seem obvious, but it’s not very practical if you’re looking to build a list of emails at scale. However, if you’re targeting one or two specific leads, checking social media as well as their website’s About Us and Contact page can be a great starting point.
Try a Google Search
As with anything you want to find out online, sometimes a quick Google search is all it takes to locate someone’s email address. If a person lists their email address online anywhere, you can often surface it by using the right combination of search terms.
This approach works best in a case where you know the person’s first name, last name, and business name (or likely domain name). In this case, you could do a search for:
- “[first name] + [last name] + @[domain]”
For example, if you were looking for the email of someone who works at Datanyze, you might try searching for “[first name] + [last name] + @datayze.com”.
However, if you don’t know the domain name, you can search for any of the following formats:
- “[first name] + [last name] + [business name]”
- “[first name] + [last name] + email”
- “[first name] + [last name] + contact”
- “[first name] + [last name] + gmail”
Subscribe to Their Newsletter
If you need to connect with someone and can’t find their email listed anywhere online, double-check their website and social profiles for an option to join their mailing list.
This might sound a bit backward (aren’t you the one trying to reach them?) but subscribing to your target’s newsletter can be a clever way to get in touch. Plus, this is a great way to learn more about the target and find tidbits to help you personalize your first outreach email.
Note that while some newsletters are sent from do-not-reply addresses, it’s becoming more common for professionals and businesses to encourage subscribers to reply.
Tools for Finding Someone’s Email Address
If you don’t have the time to manually search for someone’s email address (and, let’s face it, most of us don’t), the following tools can help. Not only will using technology to uncover emails faster save you loads of time, but it will also make building your email list or generating leads a more scalable process.
AllMyTweets
Another great way to locate someone’s email is by searching their Twitter post and reply history. Why? Because even people who don’t list their emails in their social media bios will sometimes share their email address in a public tweet or reply.
If your prospect has ever invited someone to continue a conversation outside of Twitter, they may have tweeted out their email. These types of networking threads can be a goldmine for surfacing accurate email addresses.
Unfortunately, they’re also time-consuming to sift through (which is why we didn’t list this tip under how to find emails manually!). The good news is that you can use a tool like AllMyTweets.net to speed up the process.
Connecting this tool to your Twitter account makes it possible to quickly search past tweets. Simply enter the prospect’s Twitter handle in AllMyTweets and use Control + F to search the results for instances of “email” or “gmail” or “dot com”. The tool will then highlight any tweets containing these phrases and, with any luck, reveal the target’s full email address.
FindThatLead
This tool is a Chrome extension that helps you find email addresses connected to a specific domain. If you’re looking to message someone at a particular company, this can be a decent option so long as you know the domain name in question.
Datanyze
Salespeople and founders rely on the Datanyze Chrome extension to quickly find accurate email addresses (along with other important contact information). Datanyze simplifies the search for emails on LinkedIn, so you don’t have to waste time digging around manually.
All of our contact data is ethically sourced and verified through a combination of human-powered research and AI-powered technology. Even better, Datanyze offers a range of free and premium packages to accommodate your business needs.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s paid tool for generating leads. It provides helpful data about LinkedIn users who fit your ideal customer profile and gives you access to leads outside of your existing network.
However, there is one major drawback: Sales Navigator doesn’t actually provide you with email addresses.
That said, the tool does provide you with a list of high-quality prospects, including names and companies—which is just enough information to make an educated guess about their email addresses (especially in tandem with one of the other tools mentioned above).
From there, you can then run those guesses through an email verification tool, like the ones discussed in the next section.
How to Verify Any Email Address Before You Hit Send (Don’t Skip This Step!)
Before you hit send on your next cold email, you need to verify and validate the recipient’s email address. Otherwise, you could be sending that personalized outreach message to the wrong person or (more likely) an inbox that doesn’t even exist.
So, once you find someone’s email address, the next step is to verify it using one of the following tools:
Hunter
Hunter is a popular email-finding tool in part because it’s free to use, but also because it provides reliable data. You can search for emails associated with a specific domain, filter results by role or name, and see which emails are verified along with a confidence score.
ZeroBounce
ZeroBounce is an email validation service that uses AI to help increase your delivery rate. If you just want to test it out or use it for small scale outreach, there’s a free version that lets you verify 100 email addresses per month. For bulk email verification, ZeroBounce offers a pay-as-you-go plan based on credits (starting at $16 USD for 2000 credits).
NeverBounce
NeverBounce is a paid tool that helps clean up your email list with real-time email verification. Not sure which addresses are still valid and which ones you should scrub from your list? You can upload your list to their dashboard or connect their API to identify any invalid or misspelled email addresses.
How Datanyze Makes It Easier to Find Anyone’s Email Address
Once you know where to look, finding someone’s email address isn’t all that difficult—but it can be time-consuming. Even once you find a person’s email, you might need to take extra steps to verify it before you can send them a message.
Fortunately, with the right technology on your side, you can find emails and validate your list faster than ever.
Want to stop wasting time guessing someone’s email or spending ages searching online? Simply download the Datanyze Chrome Extension and start sourcing emails right from LinkedIn. Not only will you save hours, but you’ll also end up with a clean list of verified contacts to maximize your deliverability and ROI.
If you want an all-in-one tool that can help you generate leads, find accurate emails, and validate contact data, then Datanyze is here for you.
Want to start finding email addresses the easy way? Try Datanyze for free.
Sign up for free today and discover how effortlessly you can find anyone’s email address.
