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13 Ways to Find an Email Address

What’s the best way to find an email address?

Any way you can.

You’ll find plenty of email finder tools promising all kinds of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s difficult to sort through. So we have 9 tips that utilize your craftiness above all else and 3 tools to get a jump on your email sleuthing.

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If you want to know how to find an email address, it’s most likely for 1 of 2 reasons:

You have a specific decision maker or thought leader in mind, or
You have a target audience and you’d like to reach them in their inbox.

The majority of these tips on how to find an email work for #1. Only a handful work for #2 (emailing promising prospects at scale).

What’s the ‘best’ way to do anything? Is it what’s fastest? Easiest? Organic? Most scalable? Most accurate?

We won’t answer that for you. Instead, take a look through these 9 methods for finding email addresses and decide for yourself. Then check out the tools to get started.

13 Ways to Find Email Addresses

#1: Check the Website

It’s the easiest place to start.

Start with the Contact Us page, then check out blog posts or the Team/About Us page.

This step is especially important if you have a request (i.e. a guest post or partnership opportunity). Some companies will have explicit instructions for those processes — so be sure to follow them.

The Good: Checking a company’s website is great for specific questions or if you’re trying to get in touch with a team instead of a particular person.

The Bad: 90% of the time it only works 10% of the time. Companies typically include a contact form or generic email address instead of employee-specific email addresses.

It’s worth having a look, though.

#2: Add a Personal Touch to a Generic Email Address

If you’re not entirely sure of the person you want to get in contact with, it may be better to send a message to the company or department email. Try for emails like:

info@hooli.com
marketing@hooli.com
partnerships@hooli.com

These email addresses most likely receive dozens (or hundreds) of emails each day, so it’s critical that your email message stands out. Follow this short checklist to make sure you get a reply:

Include the company name in the subject line and first line.
Make the email just as much about them as about you.
Get your point across quickly and make a specific request (“can you get me in touch with who I should be talking to?”)

This email template for a guest post request got me a response the next day.

add personal touch to generic email address

The Good: It’s a simple step when you’re not sure (or unable to find) who you need to contact. Personalizing otherwise generic emails is a good practice to get into, too.

The Bad: There’s no guarantee your email will be read — more so than with your typical cold email. Use this one as a last resort.

#3: Just Guess (and Test)

Most company emails are a variation of name and domain. For example:

But just sending your email to all the most common email addresses is a good way to get marked as spam. Most of them won’t be deliverable, and you’ll risk your most important emails ending up in the junk folder (or even account deactivation).

Instead, test out the email using Gmail. If the person has a G Suite/Gmail account, a little profile will pop up when you type the email address into the ‘To’ field. Check it out.

The Good: The ‘Gmail check’ is a free and easy way to check your best-guess emails.

The Bad: Manually checking emails can be time consuming for a whole list — and hard to scale.

#4: Turn to Search Engines

Sometimes you can use advanced search to find an email address. DuckDuckGo works particularly well for this.

Just put the domain (i.e. “@wiza.co”) in quotes to make it an exact match search. Then enter the name or department afterward. If there’s a match on a page or blog, it will show up.

The Good: Once you hit gold, you’ll know it. The email address will show up in the search results snippet and you can just copy it from there.

The Bad: Again, this is a very manual and slow process — and will typically only work for the public faces of the company. Try it as a quick search if you just need one, high-profile email.

#5: Connect on Social Media First

Email is tried and true, but people are on Twitter and LinkedIn throughout the day too. Instead of digging for an email, try dropping them a DM on Twitter or Connection request on LinkedIn.

If email is a better medium for what you’re doing, just ask for an email intro in your follow up. This works particularly well to find an email address of someone you have mutual connections with.

Make sure you do some work first: follow them, like a handful of posts and comment on one or two.

looking for email address on social media

The Good: Reaching out on social media can be an organic, conversational alternative to just sending an email. But typically it makes sense to go with a both/and (or first/then) approach.

The Bad: There are very specific uses where this makes the most sense. If you’re trying to find dozens or hundreds of emails, social media outreach may not be a good alternative.

#6: Start with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Instead of casting a wide net and trying to play detective, start with where you know your leads will be: LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Email finders often find technically correct email addresses for someone who has since switched companies. Annoying, right?

With Sales Nav, you can start by identifying the person you need to contact at a specific company or entire lists of people based on position, industry, geographic location and more.

Either way, Wiza lets you export their email(s) into a .csv file, ready for outreach. See how it works for a specific person (our very own CEO) below.

The Good: You can easily ensure you’re sending to the right emails, whether it’s for one person or hundreds of leads.

The Bad: You’ll have to need to have a Sales Navigator account already — or set one up. See how much Sales Nav costs.

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#7: Export Your LinkedIn Connections

Another social media related idea: export your LinkedIn Connections to identify who has an email address associated with their account.

The Good: It’s a straightforward process and focuses on those who already make their email addresses public.

The Bad: It’s dependent on you having a lot of LinkedIn Connections — and not many include their email address on the platform.

#8: Get Topical for Outreach at Scale

If your goal in finding an email address is link building or content outreach, you may want to start with the content itself. Armed with a list of relevant posts, you can pitch your own content more effectively.

Ahrefs has some powerful tools for finding relevant content along with author names. From there, you can use the names and domains to find emails using Sales Nav (with Idea #6 from above) or your favorite email finder tool.

The Good: Combining Ahrefs with an email finder tool makes it easy to send personalized content outreach email at scale. It works well for something organic (blogger outreach, sales thought leadership, link building, etc.).

The Bad: You’ll still need to combine your content topic list with an email finder, sometimes with irrelevant results (i.e. the author is a guest post author as well).

#9: Use Email Finder Tools

Using an email finder tool is, by far, one of the easiest and most practical ways to search email addresses. All you need to do is to type in a name for individual searches and a target audience for bulk ones. They’ll take care of the rest.

Wiza, for instance, is an email finder tool that scrapes the web for your LinkedIn leads and returns emails with valid (99% accurate) and risky (70% accurate) labels.

Built as a Chrome extension, Wiza allows you to effortlessly find email addresses directly from your LinkedIn Sales Navigator searches and saved lead lists.

Once you run your search with Wiza, you can easily download email results as a .csv or integrate with tools like Outreach.io and Salesforce.

Curious to see how it works? Click on this link and export 20 emails for free!

#10: Use an Alternative Search Engine

Many of us use Google or Bing to browse the internet.

However, more alternative search engines such as DuckDuckGo will help you find email addresses for any email attached to a publicly available domain.

All you need to do is to run a search on DuckDuckGo using this formula “@domainname.com”, and you’ll get all publicly available email addresses.

#11: Use Twitter and Facebook

Another great way to find an email address is to use the power of social media.

For instance, people frequently use their email addresses in their tweets and Twitter bios, however, they hide them well by using “dot” instead of “.” or by using “at” instead of “@”.

To search email addresses via Twitter, you’ll just have to go to Twitter’s advanced search through your target’s tweets for “at” and “dot”.

Similarly, people tend to leave out plenty of information as they create their Facebook page and forget about it. If you have your target’s Facebook page, you can look for their email on their About page.

#12: Subscribe to Your Prospect’s Email List

Many businesses run newsletters to share news or promotions with their clients and customers.

Once you get a newsletter, you can reply to it and ask a meaningful question that might get you a response and help you build a relationship with prospects.

#13: Subscribe to ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo, a plugin for Outlook, allows its users to get 10 contacts from their database each month if they allow them access to their contacts.

Given that millions of people are already a part of their email lists, it’s a method worth trying.

Plus, you don’t even have to search email addresses–they will be sent to you directly!