how to find email addresses

11 easy ways to find someone's email address

Looking to contact someone but can't seem to identify their email?

Here are seven free methods and four paid ones you can use to figure out how to find someone's email address quickly.

Look up someone's address with Email Permutator (free)
Search for an email address on Google (free)
Subscribe to prospect's newsletter (free)
How to leverage generic emails to find personal ones (free)
Find someone's email on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (free)
Check your existing email database (free)
Collaborate with your marketing team (free)
Use email address lookup tools
Email address search using online databases
Leverage data enrichment tools
Import LinkedIn leads on autopilot with lemlist 🚀 🚀 🚀

Understanding email address patterns

Before diving into what are the best tools to find someone's email, let's try to understand how email addresses work.

If you look at how work emails are typically structured, you'll notice that there are some similarities.

In most cases, business email addresses are created using various combinations of an employee's first and last name, in front of the company's domain.

This combination is called a "pattern".

In any given company, you'll usually find that all of the email addresses follow the same pattern (because it makes it easier).

For example, here's my email address.

We see here that our email pattern is the [email protected]

Ultimately, if you understand the company's email pattern, you can technically get the email address of anyone who works there. You just change Guillaume with the right name. Easy peasy!

Free personal vs. professional emails

One more thing to address before going into email lookup techniques is the golden rule of cold email outreach.

Always use professional email addresses. Avoid sending outreach to personal addresses because you can get into trouble.

For simplicity purposes, you may find two emails from me:

[email protected] (professional email since it's tied to lemlist's domain)
[email protected] (free since it's "@gmail.com")

Not only is it against the email outreach rules, but sending messages to free addresses might also cause email verification and email deliverability issues.

A lot of spammers use free accounts to blast people. Plus whenever you're verifying emails you will notice that a big percentage of invalid address comes from free domains.

Always stick with professional addresses and business email finders, for GDPR and deliverability reasons.

How to find someone's email address for free?

Here are a few methods in which you can find someone's email for free. You're going to love them, starting with...

How to find someone's email address by their name

You can try to figure out all possible email combinations using the Email Permutator.

This handy tool automates the guessing for you as you can input someone's name and company domain, after which Email Permutator provides you with all possible variations.

Step 1: Enter the prospect's information in the Email Permutator

How to find email address by name for fee

Step 2: Click "Copy emails to clipboard" button

Step 3: Go to Gmail and paste all the different email addresses. If the right one exists, Gmail will show you the information of the person (e.g. profile image). Like this...

Only one of these combinations is the real one. You don't want to send a message to all these emails because this is a bad practice that results in a high bounce rate and you being blacklisted from every internet service provider.

Spammers usually send spam to every single email address they have…so if you do the same, Google and other email providers will identify this pattern and give you hell.

Email address search on Google

There are quite a few ways through which Google can help you find someone's email address.

I'm going to show you 3 methods that I frequently leverage:

Search --> "[email protected]"

By using quotation marks in your search query, you're telling Google to search for results that contain that exact keyword.

Search --> site:ahrefs.com Tim Soulo email address

Using "site:DOMAIN" search operator will give you results only from that domain.

Search --> [Rand Fishkin] + email

An alternative way to search for an email address is to put a person's name between brackets and add "+ email" or "+ email + contact".

In the bag, job well done. Thanks Google.

A lot of entrepreneurs are using their own email address to send newsletters. Why? Because it creates a unique and stronger connection with their audience.

In many cases, you can leverage this to find someone's email addresses for free. 😉

For instance, take a look at the SparkToro's website:

There's a signup form to receive Rand's tricks. After signing up, here is what you get...

...his email 🎉.

It's not a bulletproof system as it won't always work, but quite often many Social Media platforms can lead you to someone's email address.

We'll show you how to do it on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Find emails on their LinkedIn profile

You'll notice that a lot of people, especially if they're working in Growth, Partnerships, or Sales, put their email address directly on their LinkedIn profile.

Let's take the example of our good friend Jeremy who works at Spendesk. 😎

In two clicks you have access to three important things:

💌 his email address
📱 his phone number
🔑 the pattern of his company - in their case it's [email protected]

Please don't spam Jeremy because he'll ask me to remove him from this article. 😜

And know since you you understand the email pattern - [email protected], you can identify the right person to contact in Spendesk and send them a cold email.

Free resource: 100+ high-performing cold email templates

Leverage Twitter's advanced search

Various people leave their email address in Twitter bio and, sometimes, even tweets. To fins these tweets we suggest using Twitter Advanced Search.

Here's an example of Yoni Yampolsky from the website builder, Elementor.

Here's how it looks in practice. :)

Find someone's email on Facebook

Occasionally, your target audience might include their email in the About section on their Facebook profile.

It won't always work and in many cases it won't be a professional address. But there's no harm in trying. From time to time, some of your prospects will leave their business email there.

Instagram email finder

Depending on your industry, some companies or influencers will list their email address directly on their Instagram profile.

All you need to do is just grab it.

If you want to do this on a bigger scale, you can use an Instagram email scraper like Influencers Club.

Use generic addresses to find someone's email

Generic email addresses are quite often the only ones that you can find on websites. For example, [email protected] or [email protected] Behind these addresses are real humans waiting for your email. 🤩

In order to get some valuable information, it's time to put yourself in your target's shoes. What is the company you're reaching out to looking for?

Is it more sales? More money? Partnerships perhaps? That's exactly what you can leverage to find contact information.

Here is a screenshot of one of the messages G used in the past to find an email address.

In a similar fashion, you can use live chat to experience the same outcome. G also tested this on Drift's website in the past. Here's the outcome of our conversation.

A wise sales person knows when they can get help from their colleagues in the marketing department.

For instance, in most companies, marketers put in a lot of time in managing newsletter lists and running lead generation campaigns.

They might have your lead already in their list. Or, they can have a colleague of your lead that will help you identify the email pattern.

Simply go to their email marketing tool, open the entire list and start searching. At lemlist, we use customer.io to send newsletters and lead nurturing campaigns.

So anybody from the team can fire it up and search for a lead through personal or company names to see if they are on our list.

Collaborating with marketing on inbound campaigns

As I've previously stated, magic happens when sales and marketing work together. Let me give you an example from our recent collaboration at lemlist.

The marketing team recently published this ebook called "Master the art of cold emailing". In essence, it's packed with 40+ cold email templates and tactics people can use to ramp up their reply and conversion rates.

Meanwhile, Nadja and Simon from our Business Development team are going hard at the US market. Btw, in case this sounds interesting, they are documenting the entire journey on their YouTube channel.

So, with this info in mind, our teams sat together and came up with the following flow.

Nadja and Simon keep connecting on LinkedIn with their target audience
Marketing team makes sure that the ebook includes relevant content for their audience
Nadja and Simon start distributing the ebook through LinkedIn
Marketing team filters out and enriches the leads coming from their distribution

An example would be somebody signs up for the ebook from LinkedIn. They fill in the form to get access. This information is passed to customer.io (first, last, and company name + email).

Afterward, enrichment automatically starts where we enrich the lead with team size, country where there are based, sales team size, etc.

Finally, once enrichment is done, leads who fall under target criteria (e.g. >10 sales team members + the company is US based) are segmented.

All of this is automatic and the only manual task is to export the list when ready. You can automate even that by connecting Sales' CRM to your marketing tool.

In this case, whenever somebody enters a specific segment in customer.io, they can be automatically transported to Pipedrive for further usage.

When teams work together, magic happens.

Now for a look at some faster alternatives that you'll need a bit of cash to use, which could be best if you're looking to send out bulk emails as part of your email marketing campaigns.

Use email lookup tools & Chrome extensions

A Chrome extension allows you to find anyone's email address by simply visiting his or her profile on social networks such as LinkedIn.

The number of email finder Chrome extensions on the market is huge and finding the one that works best can be overwhelming.

We've tested most of the them and Lusha came up the strongest.

It has a free option to test it out, and the pricing starts at $75 a month once you've finished the trial.

Here are a some of the most popular email lookup tools:

ContactOut - pricing starts at $49/month, one of the tools with highest accuracies on the market
RocketReach - pricing starts at $59/month, free test option available
LeadIQ - pricing starts at $75/month
Kaspr - $37/month and free trial is available
Skrapp - it will cost you $49/month
Find that email - 19/month with free credits available
Finder Expert– $39 per month with free credits available
Voila Norbert – 50 free searches, $49/month
eMail-Prospector Pro – $1,195 a year, free trial available
FindEmails.com – $19/month with free trial available

Using online email databases

Databases include people's names, job titles, emails and more.

In essence, online databases are similar to LinkedIn, except that email addresses are available and that you don't have the same amount of data.

Some online database can actually give you even more data than LinkedIn as they include external data sources. They will provide you with the tech stack used by a company, its fundings and yearly revenue.

UpLead is, for instance, a great choice. You can test it out for free, but the pricing starts at $99.

At lemlist, we like it also because it's natively integrated to our product, so we can send the leads directly into the campaign from UpLead.

But, of course, this space is also quite competitive so there are plenty of tools to test:

LeadFuze - starts at $132.30/month, free trial available
ZoomInfo - around $10,000 per year, custom pricing model
Lead411 - pricing starts at $50 per month with 7-day free trial at your disposal
Cognism - pricing starts at $750 a month
SalesIntel - custom pricing, free trial available
Adapt - starts at $49/month
InsideView Insights - custom pricing
Clearbit Enrich - $20,000 per year

Leverage data enrichment tools

On some occasions, you might end up having a list of conference attendees or export a LinkedIn search you did, but none of them will contain email addresses of your prospects.

This is where data enrichment tools come in play as they can find someone's email address for you too.

Let's imagine the following scenario. You've narrowed down your audience with a LinkedIn search. For example, everybody with the "Marketing Manager" title working in the early-stage startups in the United States.

The next thing you do is copy/paste the Search URL and use Phantombuster to download all the information. The deliverable will be a list with first, last, and company names, along with other info from their LinkedIn profiles.

On top of that, you can get really creative with Phantombuster. For example,

Export all the people who've liked or commented a particular post
Export attendees' information from a specific LinkedIn event
Extract all your LinkedIn contacts

Whatever you decide to do, it's up to you. But once you have that list of prospects, the next step is to upload it to a data enrichment tool to find their emails.

DropContact is the tool we like the most. First, their drag-and-drop interface is super easy to use. Just drop your .csv in there and they'll email you the enriched file.

DropContact also verifies email addresses at the same time. In other words, they protect you from damaging your domain reputation with a high bounce rate.

Other data enrichment tools:

Clearbit - $20,000 per year
InsideView - custom pricing
BeenVerified - around $27 per month
Data Axle Genie - starts at $99 per month with free trial available
RingLead - starts at $12,000 per user, per year
Datanyze - free option available or $55 per month
LeadGenius - starting from around $2,999 per month, per user
FullContact - pricing on request
Enrich.io - $10 per user
Leadspace - starts at $25,000 per year
Pipl - $298/mo annualy
Zoominfo - around $10,000 per year, custom pricing model
DiscoverOrg - free trial available, custom pricing

One more cool tip

Social networks like LinkedIn provide you with robust search capabilities to find your target. However, LinkedIn has removed a lot of filters for free accounts so the search is becoming less and less efficient.

In this case, this tool will help you retrieve all the filters you've been missing.

Once you get it, you now have the necessary information you need to use a data enrichment tool!

Import LinkedIn leads on autopilot with lemlist

Instead of writing about this great strategy, I'll let Briana, our amazing growth marketer, show it to you in step-by-step fashion.

Level up: Best tool to run sales engagement campaigns in 2021

Key takeaways

Overall, learning how to find someone's email address is not difficult. But it can be time-consuming depending on the approach you choose.

In our opinion, combining different tools and approaches may be the best way to get the data you need.

But at the end of the day, it has to fit the way you and your company prefer to do outreach.

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