Jul 25, 2022 5 min read Email Finder

7 Proven Ways to Find an Email Address for Free

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You need to work quickly and intelligently when you’re spending time on your email outreach strategy. The goal is to reach, intrigue, and get a response from as many prospects as you can, but in a way that maximizes your efforts.

However, you also need to find the correct email addresses, which isn’t always a straightforward process. You might have already tried Googling their email address, which sometimes works, but you’ll need other tactics to find a multitude of professional and personal email addresses.

The Basics of Finding Email Addresses

There are a couple of things you should know before searching for a free email address. This information will be helpful when deciding if you should add it to your email list.

Firstly, you need to know about email address patterns. In most cases, a business will structure an email address in a particular way. Here’s an example:

john.smith@skrapp.com

As you can see, the structure goes as follows: first name, period, last name, @, company name, and then dot com. Knowing the email address pattern should help you confirm that you're sending your emails to the right addresses.

Secondly, always ensure that you’re using a professional email address instead of a free one. You can receive penalties for sending outreach from a free personal email address.

Finding email addresses is just step one in an outreach campaign. Download our free eBook, “The Complete Introduction to Cold Emailing,” to get more tips, templates, and cold email secrets!

For instance, always use an email that contains your company’s domain name instead of something like this: john.smith@gmail.com. Sending cold emails from a free address could also cause email deliverability and verification problems.

Spammers send emails from free email addresses — that’s why you’ll notice how many invalid email addresses come from free domains when you are verifying emails.

How to Find Email Addresses for Free

Some of these methods will be easier than others depending on the prospects you are searching for. Give different methods a try to see which ones work best for you.

#1. Visit The Company’s “Contact” Page

Not everyone you want to contact will have their information published on their company’s website. But if they do, you know the email address is going to be valid, which is the main perk of searching the website.

Another advantage of searching the company’s website for business email addresses is that you can learn the email pattern (as referenced above). If you know the full name of the person you want to email, all you have to do is plug it into the pattern. While this isn’t always a foolproof tactic, you would be surprised how often it works.

#2. Visit The Company’s “Blog” Section

If you don’t have any luck finding your prospect’s email address on the Contact page, it could be worth a shot to check out the blog section. If he/she has authority on a certain subject matter, it’s possible they write about it.

If they do, click the prospect’s (author’s) name on a post of theirs. Oftentimes that takes you to their profile, which would have other posts that they published, along with basic information such as an email address.

#3. Find it on Their LinkedIn Profile

For B2B marketers, LinkedIn is their best friend. It’s got millions of professionals and a large percentage of them include their email addresses in their contact information. If it is available, that means they are open to communication. You can also export these connections and LinkedIn shows you exactly how to do it.

This will allow you to easily create a spreadsheet with all the LinkedIn email addresses you collect from the platform. However, you should avoid spamming these connections often, as this could make you not so popular.

#4. Message Them on LinkedIn

Here’s another reason LinkedIn is a powerful tool for B2B marketers. With the direct message function, you can message your prospects asking them for their email address. However, you want to be careful how you ask for such private information.

You don’t want to come off as too spammy or “sales-ly.” Instead, open up softly by offering advice or a free resource, anything to get the conversation going. Then, when you’ve started a conversation, politely ask to move your messaging over to email.

This is a great way to at least start a conversation with someone within the organization of the person you’re looking for. When you visit a company’s website, you usually get a popup asking you to join their newsletter before leaving the page. Once you receive an email from them, reply to it by asking a question. While the person on the other end most likely isn’t the prospect you’re looking for, they could very well forward your question to a decision-maker.

It’s also worth noting that you can use your own email list — the people who sign up for your newsletter. If you have email marketing software, you could use it to create a list of prospects.

#6. Do an Advanced Google Search

Simply typing in your prospect’s name into Google can come up with an overwhelming amount of search results. While it’s certainly possible to find an email address this way, you’d be much better off performing an Advanced Google Search.

This will allow you to look for the exact words or phrases by putting them in quotes. What shows up in your search result will be the correct email address (if anything shows up at all). If nothing shows up, you might want to try another word, or, another one of these strategies entirely.

#7. Use an Email Finder Tool

If you have a person’s full name, an email finder tool should easily find you their email address. All you have to do is type in the first and last name of your target, their company name or domain, and launch your search.

You will instantly get their business email address as well as other information (industry, company website, company size, etc.). Plus, email lookup tools will also verify that the email is real. You can then save the contact to one of your email lists and access it at any time.

Boost Your Email Outreach Efforts!

There’s only so much time and resources available in one day. Sometimes it can get frustrating if you’re sending emails to a list of incorrect addresses and receiving too many bounce-backs. To make things easier on yourself, try finding email addresses for free by using the above strategies.

If you’re having trouble finding an email address for free, check out our email finder tool to easily find the verified information you need to have a successful email campaign.