Here are six methods that we use in our day-to-day work whenever we need to track down someone’s contact information:
- Use email lookup services
- Make your best guess (and test it)
- Use Twitter’s advanced search
- Subscribe to your target’s mailing list
- Reach out for an email address on Twitter
- Ask for a personal connection
Email discovery tools provide perhaps the easiest way to find an email address.
Just feed them a person’s name and website, and they’ll work their magic to find an email.
There are hundreds of these tools on the market, free and paid, and some are better than others.
Each year, I take a few popular email lookup services and give them a test using the email addresses from my contact list.
This time I have tested:
- GetProspect: 50 free searches per month. Paid accounts start at $49/month for 1000 valid email addresses ($0.049 per result).
- Hunter: 50 free searches per month. Paid accounts start at $49/month for 500 searches ($0.098 per result).
- Voila Norbert: 50 free searches as a trial. Paid accounts start at: $49/month for 1,000 results ($0.049 per result).
- GetEmail.io: 10 free searches per month. Paid accounts start at $49/month for 300 searches ($0.16 per result).
- Findymail: 10 free searches per month. Paid accounts start at $49/month for 1000 searches ($0.049 per result).
- Name2Email: Chrome extension. Unlimited searches per month. Free access.
Here’s what I got this time:
VoilaNorbert won by a narrow margin with a 92% success rate.
Name2Email keeps demonstrating amazing results. Especially considering that this extension is free and does not limit the number of searches.
It has just one drawback: you can’t search email addresses in bulk.
While email discovery services offer a good solution for finding emails, especially in bulk, they’re not perfect.
If you want to learn a few more effective ways to find an email address, keep reading.
Check your contact list and you’ll see that most email addresses follow one of several formulas.
If you know the first name, last name, and domain of your target, you can simply guess someone’s email address.
Around 70% of my contact list consists of email addresses that use the [email protected] format.
The most common formats for an email address are:
| Format | Example |
|---|---|
| First name | [email protected] |
| First name + last name | [email protected] [email protected] |
| First name + the 1st letter of the last name | [email protected] [email protected] |
| The 1st letter of the first name + last name | [email protected] [email protected] |
| Initials | [email protected] |
However, picking out all the possible variants manually is time-consuming.
So here’s a shortcut:
Email Permutator Tool from Mailmeteor automatically creates a list of possible email addresses. Just fill in the fields and let it work its magic.
This tool will get you a list of possible email addresses in seconds.
Click on the “Open in Gmail” button, and the tool will create a new message with all email permutations added to the “To” field. Move the cursor over the email address one by one and observe.
A pop-up will show you if the email address is associated with a Google profile.
You can do the same check in Google Spreadsheets directly.
If this does not help, you can run another check by searching for the exact match of your best guess on Google or another search engine to see if it was mentioned anywhere on the Web.
People often share their email addresses in their tweets. But to hide them from bots, they replace “.” and “@” symbols with “dot” and “at” words.
Have you already guessed your next step?
Go to the Twitter Advanced Search and look for the words “at” and “dot” in tweets from your target person. You can also include words like “email,” “contact,” or “reach” in your search to narrow down the results.
Let’s see if this works for Sam Oh, our Grandmaster of video content here at Ahrefs.
GOTCHA!
Some people don’t even bother ciphering their email addresses in their tweets.
If a person you’re targeting has a newsletter on their blog, you can subscribe to their mailing list using an opt‐in form on their website.
Most newsletter emails will come from their personal email address.
Besides, this also provides an excellent opportunity to start building relationships.
Just reply to one of the newsletter emails with a quick question or ask for an opinion.
Here is one of the very first email outreach messages I ever sent:
I signed up for Brian Dean’s newsletter and replied to the first email I got.
Sometimes email addresses like [email protected], [email protected] or similar are used for newsletters.
But if you reply to these, the person might reply from their personal email address.
I’ve seen plenty of contact pages where people say that the best way to reach them is to drop them a line on Twitter.
But generally, the message you want to send is more than 280 characters long.
So don’t hesitate to find that person on Twitter and ask for their email address.
Our Head of Marketing, Tim Soulo, does that quite often.
Trust me; most people will eagerly answer such a message.
Just make sure you have a real Twitter profile that clearly states who you are.
Most big companies have either a contact form on their website or list a generic email address for inquiries (e.g., [email protected]). Those inboxes are mostly handled by support teams or by VAs.
Just shoot a simple message and ask them to connect you with the person you want to reach.
This works best if your email signature clearly explains who you are.
If you’re using a VA to collect email addresses for you, make sure that their signature mentions you as their boss. 🙂
What else can you try?
If you tried every method and still failed to find an email address, here are a few tips you can use as your last resort:
- Check your own contact list. Your prospect might have contacted you before.
- Export your LinkedIn connections. I found that only 7% of my list chose not to hide their email address on LinkedIn, but that’s still something.
- Check their social profiles and “About” pages.
Reaching out to the authors of articles is a crucial part of any link-building or promotional campaign. Let me show you how to find prospects AND their email addresses in bulk for your outreach.
Let’s say you’re promoting a mobile app for weight loss.
Head over to our Content Explorer and search for the topic you’re interested in.
If the article specifies the author, Content Explorer will show you their name.
You’ll also see the author’s name in the export file.
The only thing that’s missing is the domain. But you can pull that easily from the article’s URL with this formula in Google Sheets:
=REGEXEXTRACT(C2,"^(?:https?:\/\/)?(?:[^@\n]+@)?(?:www\.)?([^:\/\n]+)")
Now that you have the domains and the authors’ names, you can upload the list to your favorite email lookup tool, e.g., Hunter.
You can use Hunter for Sheets add-on to find emails in bulk quickly.
What did I miss?
That’s how we find email addresses here at Ahrefs.
Use these methods responsibly! Don’t make people hate me for teaching you to find their email addresses 🙂
And if you know any other good ways to find someone’s email address, ping me on Twitter. I’d love to learn something new!
