How to find a prospect’s email address

Writing the perfect email to a new prospect you’ve never spoken with before can be difficult, we’ve written a lot on how to write the perfect cold email but today we’re going to take a step back and write about how to find their email in the first place.

There are a surprising number of ways to do this and a few tools that bring the harder to find emails within reach, so without further adieu.

Using Linkedin to find emails

A lot of people ignore this because they don’t think they’ll find any emails on here and simply use Linkedin to research the interests and pain points of a target prospect before launching their cold outreach.

But you should always check their profile for their email address, a lot of people leave their email address up. Just expand their contact info details and see if their email is there alongside the usual social media links.

It won’t always work but at least when you do strike gold you know it’s a legitimate email and it’s a quick first pass to run when looking for a prospect’s email address.

Use Hunter.io

Hunter.io allows you to find emails to connect with the people that matter for your business. All you have to do is type in the company name and it’ll go out looking for the emails of people within that organisation. You get 100 requests a month for free.

Use the Contact Out plugin with Linkedin

Contact Out is a free chrome plugin that allows you to find email addresses, it goes hunting for a prospect’s email address through all of their social profiles online.

Contact Out has over 600 million emails in their database. They claim all the emails provided are triple verified and 97% accurate. As of writing it has over 100,000 users and a 4 star rating from over 500 reviews.

Email Permutator

Email Permutator is an awesome tool that takes the name of the prospect and their company domain and comes back with all the possible permutations that email can take.

In addition, it places the most common email formats at the top which is doubly helpful. Then all you need to do is verify the email address with something like email checker and you’re good to go.

Another easy way to verify is posting the email address into gmail and then hovering over it, if the prospect’s face shows up you’ve got their email, that’s not an unimpeachable rule but usually it works in most cases.

Check social media

Twitter profiles, check them for an email address. If you find nothing then you can try twitter’s advanced search. Just enter (at) (dot) in the “all of these words” box, and the Twitter handle of the person’s email address you’re after in the “from these accounts” box. If they’ve ever mentioned an email address in a tweet, you’re going to get it.

Call the prospect

If all else fails you can always call them. You presumably have their name, their company name and so the company contact details and hey with the cold call you can warm them up for the email which will give you a better shot at getting something out of the interaction.

There’s an old saying; don’t ask don’t get. So ask. We’ve created a pretty awesome video guide on how to cold call prospects you can check out here.