How Easy is It to Get Someones Email Address by Their Name

A single email can change your life.

The right email address contacted at the right time can result in the funding that you always wanted, strike a business partnership that puts your organization on the path of growth, or land you your dream job.

Email is a direct and professional channel of communication.

We have social media and search engines to interact with our audience. And those channels do convert pretty well online. But, they are not as direct as email is.

Because when you are on social media or search engines, you have to compromise on personalization. You talk to the masses when you use those platforms. While on email, you know whom you're talking to, anticipate their working style, their pain points, and write a highly-personalized email copy that can strike the right chord for you.

But you need to find the right email addresses to leverage that "personalization" factor and get the desired results. If you send emails to people who aren't the right recipient of your message, they likely wouldn't care about your message and ignore your email.

To put things in perspective, I spend equal amounts of time finding email addresses as much of the time I spend writing email copies.

Why should I or anybody who wants to generate massive results with email care about finding the best recipient address first? Let's brainstorm on that.

What is the core purpose to find an email address?

In one line — to get things done faster.

Humans thrive on communication. From the online marketing perspective, we have social media platforms, website landing pages, search engines, emails, and several other channels to communicate our message.

The purpose of these communication channels is to grab users' attention and convince them to buy our offer.

Email is the one channel that allows you to acquire a positive response quickly. For example, you share your guest post pitch to an email address. However, the person who manages that email address does not have relevant rights to take action on your pitch. At that time, the person will either ignore your message or forward it to the concerned person, which might take a lot of time to get through.

The right email address directly puts you in 1-to-1 communication with the right person. Even if you run retargeting ads or social media campaigns, you won't get such direct communication opportunities the same way you get with email.

Next comes the most common question. To whom should I send an email?

This is the most common yet important question that I often get asked from my colleagues at Growfusely.

Can't we just send an email to the support email address provided in the footer?

Well, of course, you can.

But there are good reasons why there are dedicated tools available to personalize email copies and verify the email addresses of people (which I'll discuss below).

Why is it crucial to find the right email address?

Personalization only works if you target the right people.

If you send a personalized email to the support desk or sales email addresses, you will mostly waste your time.

And unless your best friend is working for the company, you'd not know who is reading the support or sales email provided on the contact us page. It could be the CEO of the company or the summer intern who would have access to generic emails.

Let me explain this with an example.

In your childhood days, what would you have done if you had gotten a call from the bank for a home loan or car loan?

Certainly, you would have hung up the phone or forwarded it to your parents. (Why would you be interested in a home loan when you have homework to do!)

Similarly, if you want to talk to the editor of a website, it's not a good idea to send an email to the CEO of the company.

The CEO of a growing company is involved in bigger picture things like staffing, accounting, client calls, and whatnot. So your email for content contribution is most likely destined to be ignored.

If the email lands in the CEO's inbox at a rare time when they're free (or in a good mood!), they may forward your email address to the content manager. But why take that chance?

So, to speed up the process of getting replies and results, you should find the right email address. Let's understand the tips and techniques to find anyone's email address like a pro.

Our Comprehensive Guide to find the Right Email Address

These are tried and tested methods and I can assure you from my experience that all these tips work.

So let's dive deeper into each.

1. Assume someone's email address

The first step to finding an email address is to just guess and shoot an email.

It's. That. Simple.

There are some tweaks, hacks, and best practices that you can follow while guessing the email addresses to get it right 9 times out of 10.

Let's understand them in detail.

1.1 Think of the most common email patterns

Think of the most common formats and append them with the URL of the brand.

People usually place their legal name's initials in their professional email address.

Something like:

gaurav.belani@growfusely.com
belani.gaurav@growfusely.com
gaurav@growfusely.com
gaurav.b@growfusely.com
b.gaurav@growfusely.com

Take their first and last name to assume the email address.

1.2 Assume based on their known email address

If you're into outreaching for quite some time, you must have observed the common email patterns that people use.

Based on your understanding, you can assume what the email address of your prospect would be.

1.3 Automate guessing with Email Premutator

We are living in an era where algorithms and programs help us in our daily work.

To write a list of probable email addresses, you can use specific tools that automatically generate combinations for you instead of you having to write several email addresses for your email outreach activities.

Email Address Guesser is one such tool that uses standard permutation and combination to generate a series of email addresses for you.

1.3.1 Email Address Guesser

Go to Email Address Guesser and type the first name, last name, and the domain that you want to check for.

However, you only get 28 permutations and combinations with the above tool.

Plus, there are very few email address variations that you get. There is no way to get email variations with underscores, middle names, and so on with Email Address Guesser.

1.3.2 Use our email permuter sheet

We have created a detailed spreadsheet (inspired by Distilled.net) for you that goes deep and gives literally every combination of emails that you can try to reach out to your targeted prospect. As a matter of fact, our sheet gives 46 permutations and combinations to you.

Note: To use the spreadsheet, you need to Make a Copy of it by going to File > Make a Copy .

2. Find email addresses using Advanced Google Search Operators

Google is a goldmine for finding helpful tips. And it also helps in finding the contact details of people you wish to contact.

You need a couple of search operators to help you find the email address using Google.

Here are the search queries that you need to get started:

[name] + email (or) email address
[name] + contact (or) contact information (or) contact me
website:companywebsite.com + [name] + email
website:companywebsite.com + [name] + contact

3. Find email addresses using Twitter

Twitter has always been an engaging social media platform. As per Statista , it has around 397 million active users as of Q3 of 2021.

What most people don't realize is that Twitter also has a comprehensive search engine built-in.

It has the capability and dozens of search parameters that allow users to search almost any content, user, account, and activity. It can speed up your research and help you find tweets and account details in a straightforward manner.

Twitter also helps you identify the email address of the prospect that you want to connect with.

Let's understand what are the methods to find anyone's email address on Twitter.

Method #1 – Look at their profile

They say the best answer is often a simple answer.

All you need to do is go to the person's or brand's Twitter profile and check their bio. People mention their contact email addresses in Twitter bio to make it easy for everyone to connect with them.

And not everyone likes to get tagged or receive a DM for work-related things.

Email > LinkedIn InMail > WhatsApp > Twitter DM

— Pratik Dholakiya (@DholakiyaPratik) April 28, 2020

Therefore, try to find the person on Twitter and see if they have mentioned the email in their bio.

Method #2 – Use Twitter Advanced Search

If you would like to dig deeper, Twitter's advanced search has got you covered.

All you get to do is hit a query like "connect", "email", "reach", or "@" and add the username for which you would like to find an email address.

email (from:username)
connect (from:username)
reach (from:username)

@amitkakkar03 email works best – web at pratikdholakiya dot come

— Pratik Dholakiya (@DholakiyaPratik) September 29, 2015

With the Twitter advanced search feature, you can access email addresses that are hard to find anywhere else on the web.

Method #3: Try their Twitter handle

Most people keep their personal or professional email address's username from their Twitter handle. This method won't work all the time but it's worth the try.

Copy their Twitter handle and add them before with @ alongside their company's website URL or Gmail.com.

You may hit the bull's eye and can get in touch with the prospect right away.

If you have an email verifier tool (discussed below) then you can also verify if these email addresses are valid or not.

Method #4 – Directly ask them on Twitter

I have tried this method and I can vouch that it works successfully.

yes. Me@adamgsteele.com

— Adam at Loganix (@AdamGSteele) February 18, 2017

If you are not able to find the email address of your target prospect, just ask them in a tweet and tag them.

Tell them upfront about why you want to connect. Most people would easily share their details in replies.

4. Find email addresses on Facebook

Just like Twitter, Facebook is also a great tool to find contact details of people; after all, Facebook is the biggest social media platform.

Go to the Facebook search bar, type in the name of the business or person you'd like to get in touch with, and look for the Facebook page.

Mostly, you will find the email address on the front page of the Facebook page itself.

If not, then you can get the "About" section where there are other details of the brand.

Inside the section, you will see many email addresses mentioned.

You can also find emails by Facebook username (Facebook handle).

You need to find the person's Facebook profile, and check if they have provided an email address or not. Mostly, if they haven't added anything in their website section, you won't see the email address.

You can also send them a text on Messenger and ask for their work email address. Share your objective in a brief and politely ask them to share their contact email address. Usually, messages from unknown people go to Message Requests.

Therefore, your message will land inside their Message Request. However, if you've asked genuinely and clearly why you need their email address, you will get a reply to your message.

5. Find email addresses using LinkedIn

This is my favorite method of finding email addresses through social media platforms.

Being in the SEO and Content Marketing industry, LinkedIn, in general, has been a wonderful platform to grow, educate, and connect with like-minded people.

LinkedIn is also very straightforward to find the contact details of a prospect and initiate a professional relationship.

Here're the top ways to find email addresses on LinkedIn.

Method #1 Check the about us page on LinkedIn

If you want to reach a website's editorial team, check their LinkedIn page's About section where they must have mentioned the contact details.

LinkedIn's About section will usually have a generic email address but you can use that email address to get in touch with the brand.

You can also use that email address and ask about the specific person and specific query.

Method #2 Send a direct message

A direct message goes way beyond just acquiring the email address on LinkedIn.

You can initiate a conversation and establish a reputation with the prospect if you send a personalized message with a connection request on LinkedIn.

Just like what we discussed in tagging the prospect in a Tweet, share exactly why you are connecting with them on LinkedIn.

Now, be careful.

You cannot ask a busy editor straightaway to share their contact details just because you wish to publish a blog post. That will look bland, vague, and unprofessional, and by all means, make you sound desperate for backlinks.

Depending on the purpose of asking for the email, and the person whom you are asking from, you should make a wise move and leverage LinkedIn's direct messaging.

Remember what GaryVee says, Jab, jab, jab, and hook!

Meaning, provide them value before you ask them anything for your personal benefit. First, provide and then ask. If you directly mention that you want to know the email address, your connection request might get ignored. Therefore, the right way to nurture the conversation, win their trust, and then make your move.

The last thing you want the prospect to feel is – "Argh! One more random guy asking for my email address!"

Method #3 Use your connections

If you observe that someone from your connection is already connected with your prospect on LinkedIn, then ask them to make a move for you while you stay backstage for a while.

You can request a mutual connection to initiate a conversation for you.

For example, I want to get in touch with the Editor in Chief of Business Insider India.

So, if I see there is a mutual connection, I can request the connection to introduce myself with the editor first.

This is the generic message template to leverage mutual connections to get in touch with the targeted prospect.

"Hi [name]! Hope you're well. I saw you are connected with [target person].

Would you mind introducing me to the [target person] for [reason why you wish to connect]?"

This will look professional and will not make you look desperate for attention.

Method #4 Leverage the Contact Info tab

LinkedIn also shares the contact details of a person from their profile.

Just go to the LinkedIn profile of your prospect and tap on the "Contact Info" button.

A new window will pop up with the email address and other details which are kept public by the user.

If the prospect happens to have kept the settings off, you won't see the contact email address. In that case, you may want to proceed with Method #3 and initiate a conversation through a mutual connection first on LinkedIn.

Method #5 Use Email extractor tool

Browser extensions have always been helpful for research. I'm sure you must be using them if you're working in the online marketing space.

To find an email address from LinkedIn, there are quite a few browser extensions that do a very good job.

My personal favorites are two:

A. Kendo

Once you install Kendo, it will ask you to sign-up on the tool with a valid email address.

Then, you need to go to the LinkedIn profile of whom you want to find the email address.

As soon as the profile page loads, the Kendo will do its magic.

The email addresses (yes, it shows more than 2 email addresses and a phone number, if available) are on the right-hand side of the window.

The reason why I love this tool the most is it does not start flushing free credits even if the email address of a particular account is available.

It shows asterisks for a profile to validate that the email address is available to fetch.

Kendo does not use the credits unless you press the "Get Info" button.

Once you do, you will see the email addresses and also the phone number of the prospect if available.

You can also click on the email address to copy to the clipboard.

B. LeadLeaper

LeadLeaper is an awesome extension that extracts the email address from a profile.

Once you install the extension on your browser, you need to sign-up on LeadLeaper. It does a similar job as Kendo does.

Just go to the profile on LinkedIn and click on the LeadLeaper extension. The page will reload and the extension will give you the email address, if available.

6. Just get in touch

Remember what I shared earlier? Simplicity always works.

If you have something important and genuine to discuss with someone, ASK directly.

The generic email that you find on the LinkedIn page, contact us page of the website or the Facebook page, send an email to that address, and ask whom you wish to connect with.

If you're certain about whom you wish to connect with, mention their name in the email and request to share their email address.

Sure, it'll take more time, but the person at the other end might forward your email address to the concerned individual or add that person to the email loop.

Either way, your work will get done if you ask politely and show genuine interest in connecting with the person.

You can write something like:

Hi There,

Hope you are doing well!

I just wanted to get in touch with your team member, {Name of the person} about {share your reason}.

If you can share his/her contact details or forward this email to him/her, I'd be glad!

Either way, keep up the good work.

Warm Regards,
{Name}

7. Find email ID on a company/organization website

This is the most straightforward way to find an email address.

If you cannot trace the relevant email address in the vast worldwide web landscape, you should seek emails from the company's official site.

Check the website's footer, About Us, or Contact Us page for the email address.

However, these will be generic email addresses. Therefore, you must put clear communication as to whom you need to get in touch with as mentioned in Step #6.

Many organizations mention the contact email address of their team members on their websites.

You need to browse their website for a few minutes to check if they have listed the details of their team members.

8. Check for author bylines

Many publications share the contact details of their authors to help readers get in touch with them.

For that, you need to do some Google search with the operators and seek the bylines of the author.

To find out the author profiles use the below search queries.

intext:"full name of the author" inurl:author
Type the name of the author

Go to each byline and see if the publisher has mentioned the email address of the author.

If the prospect is regularly contributing articles on different platforms, I'm sure you will get the contact email address from one of the bylines.

9. Make better use of the company's support chat

This is one of my favorite ways to get the email address of the publisher and an individual of an organization.

Remember, speed is a game-changer in communication.

The chat support is naturally more responsive than the mailbox linked with the generic email mentioned on the contact us page.

I go to their company's website and start interacting with the live chat support.

You can still ask for an email on the generic email mentioned on the site, but there is no surety how soon you'll get a response, let alone expecting a positive response.

Therefore, live chat makes communication instant, reliable and informal. You can mention which email address you would like to get and why you want the same.

From my personal experience, live chat support is very helpful yet least talked about as a way to obtain an email address. If you genuinely share why you want to get in touch without appearing as a spammer, you can get the required email address.

Pro tip – if you get the message of "live chat offline" and the working hours are in a different time zone than yours, share your details, your contact email address, why you want to get in touch, and to whom you want to contact. Once the live chat support is back online, they will respond to your message over email.

10. Subscribe to the website's newsletter

Email newsletters are standard forms of distributing content and promoting products.

If you subscribe to an email newsletter, you may get to know the required email address to get in touch with.

This is also helpful for you to create an exciting email copy.

Let me explain how:

Once you subscribe to the newsletter, you will keep getting updates and emails whenever a new article is published on the site.
Now, you can use this information and get in touch with the editor by mentioning that you have enjoyed the new blog post that they have published.
This way, subscribing to the newsletter can give you both benefits: getting an email address and relevant updates to create a personalized email copy.

11. Email hunting on business networking sites

Crunchbase is a good platform not just for creating profiles and getting traction online, but also for finding contact details of the companies' team members.

This has worked very well for me for quite some time.

This is how I use Crunchbase to find email addresses:

I go to https://www.crunchbase.com/.

Type the name of the organization in the search bar.

When you click on the profile and scroll down, there will be a contact email address.

12. Explore web directories or white pages for the email address

Web directories are a goldmine to find anybody's contact details.

It's debatable whether one should remove the details from white pages and directories since directories often take a lot more data than just email addresses. They often know the traffic record, business details, phone numbers, email addresses, credit card details, and a lot of other stuff.

There are often many web directories that can help you with the official email address of an individual.

One such legitimate web directory is Whitepages.

It's one of the most robust web directories where you can find people's details through multiple ways—name, phone number, address, and business.

It has different parameters to fetch information. You might not get the email address right in front of you on Whitepages.com. However, you will get more data of a person to make the best guess of their email address as mentioned in other steps of the guide.

13. Check the WHOIS

WHOIS is the list of records that showcases the details of a particular domain name. It also shares other details of the owner of the domain, such as their email address, mailing address, phone number, date of purchase, and more.

If you are not able to find the email address using other conventional methods discussed above, you can also dig deep and look for the WHOIS information of their personal or business website.

If you find the WHOIS information on their company's site, you will get the email address that your prospect might not have access to. That's when you can follow Tip #6 and ask in the generic email to get you in contact with the person.

You can go to WHOIS.com to begin your search.

There are other popular WHOIS lookups that you can try:

NameCheap
DomainTools
Nominet
DMCA0s free WHOIS tool

14. Find anyone's email address by name for free

If you're looking for a "hack" or a "tool" that displays the email address right in front of your screen without you having to manually search anywhere from the web, then this is it.

Name2Email is a Google Chrome browser extension that can provide you with the email addresses of the prospect.

It's a two-step process:

1. Go to Gmail's compose window
2. Add the name of the author along with his or her company name

The tool will do the heavy lifting for you and may give you the email addresses right away.

15. Find anyone's Email address for free using Gmail

You can verify if an email address is hosted or linked to Google Workspace. If so, then that email address is using Gmail for email communications.

For that, you need to enter the email address that you find using any of the above methods in Gmail's search bar.

If the account is using Gmail, you will get other options as mentioned in the screenshot below.

16. Explore top email finder tools (Free + Paid)

Email hunting goes a long way. There are companies whose solutions are dedicatedly focused on finding the right email addresses with ease.

Here's the list of top email-finding tools, both paid and free.

Hunter.io

When you talk about email finder tools, Hunter.io tops the list. Their tool is the absolute best at what it does.

You just need to enter the domain name of the company's site or the name of the company and the tool will fetch all the email addresses mentioned anywhere on the web.

If you want to verify the source of the email address, you need to click on the sources. The tool will come with the dropdown and share the URLs from where it's fetched a particular email address.

Other notable use cases of Hunter.io are:

Finding the author of a page through the page URL
Finding the email address of a particular person from the company's URL

They also show the Green Checkmark beside to highlight that the email address is verified and you can use the email address to reach out to the particular individual.

They also have another feature dedicated to verifying the deliverability of the email address. This feature checks whether an email inbox is active or not.

If you're aggressively outreaching and have a list of domain names, user names, URLs, to find and verify email addresses, you can choose the bulk verifier to find and verify email addresses at once. With bulk verification, you can find email addresses in seconds and get rid of manual verification.

Hunter.io has a free plan with 25 searches a month. If you want to search more, you have to pick a paid plan to unlock more bandwidth of the tool.

Clearbit Connect

Clearbit is a Google Chrome Extension.

Just install Clearbit in your browser.

Then, enter the name of the company whose email address you want to find out.

One interesting feature of Clearbit Connect is—it also shows the designation of the people. Therefore, you can instantly know whom to connect with for a particular concern.

Then, you can click on the prospective contact to get their email address. Moreover, Clearbit will also show you their LinkedIn profile for more information about the person.

BONUS (only for content marketers)

How to get email addresses at scale for guest blogger outreach?
SEO professionals and content marketers thrive on guest blogging outreach to distribute their content, earn links, and connect with fellow professionals.

Also read: Content Marketing For SaaS: The Definitive Guide (2021)

To find the contact details of the prospect, you must check whether the platform is accepting guest contributions.

They should have one of these pages:

Write for us
Contributor guidelines
Submit a guest post

Or something similar.

Few sites also accept inquiries through a form of "Writer's Application" which is an extensive form that asks for several details from the authors along with topic ideas, pitch, other bylines for reference, and so on.

On these pages, they must have shared either the form or the email address of the editor to get in touch with.

Again, if you have several websites, you can use Hunter.io's bulk checker to pull out email addresses at once.

You can also use other bulk email checkers like:

https://www.webemailextractor.com/
https://www.softtechlab.com/web-email-finder/
https://domaincheckplugin.com/email-extractor/

Reverse image search of editor/person photo in Gravatar (If they have set) and guess the email address.

With Gravatar, you can also verify whether an email address is valid or not.

This step is just to guess the existence of an email address; it won't give you an email address in any way.

To verify email using this method, enter the email address in the search bar and hit enter. If that email address is linked to any Gravatar account, the relevant images will show up. This proves that the email address has a gravatar account, and therefore, it is a valid email address.

Conclusion and Closing Thoughts

I hope you've found this article helpful and got to know a few new techniques to find anybody's email address to initiate genuine business communication.

Do share this blog on your social media channels and if you have any thoughts to share, write to me. I'd love to know your views.

FAQs – How to find anyone's email address

How can you find out someone's email address?

There are multiple ways to find an email address, as shared above. You can check the website, or use tools like Clearbit, Hunter.io, and Free Email address browser extension.

How do you find someone's email address with their name?

If I know the full name of the person and their organization, I use Gmail to find and verify their email address.

First, I use email permutations to generate some standard email variations.

Then, I paste those prospective email addresses inside Gmail's search bar.

If the email address is using Google Workspace, you will see the information box, as discussed above.

Keep in mind though, this method only works if the email is hosted with Google Workspace. But it shares a 100% "Green Signal" that the email is live and has a Gmail inbox.

How do you find hidden email addresses?

By "Hidden email", it means the email addresses which are not available and shared publicly. You have to dig deep in your research and extract the email address.

When that happens, I go to LinkedIn and use a couple of email finder extensions.

Is there a free reverse email lookup?

Yes, there are several organizations that dedicatedly provide reverse email lookups. Some are free and some come with free plans with predefined limits.

How to find someone's email address for free?

Use search operators in Google, advanced search on Twitter, or use Gmail to verify the existence of an email address.

How to find email addresses with paid email finder tools?

For paid tools, I personally use Hunter.io and it does the job perfectly well.

Gaurav Belani is a Senior SEO and Content Marketing Analyst at Growfusely, a SaaS content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO.

linkhumpeatered.blogspot.com

Source: https://growfusely.com/blog/how-to-find-almost-anyones-email-address-in-minutes/