In my first few months as a freelance content writer, I set out to send a bunch of cold email pitches to the Heads of Content, VPs of Marketing, and editors who worked in companies I wanted to work with. I found these people on LinkedIn, but most of the time, they didn’t reply to LinkedIn DMs. They preferred to talk via email, but I couldn’t figure out how to get their email addresses.
So I did what anyone else would—I went on a guessing spree. I tried different variations of their email addresses until I found the one they used. Sometimes, I found one that I thought they used, but the emails bounced. Other times, I could not find their emails and just called it a day and pursued other opportunities instead.
If you’re a salesperson trying to reach target decision-makers via email, it’s crucial that you send an email to the right address. Reaching the right person significantly improves your chances of getting a response.
Thankfully, there are several ways to find someone’s email address; we’ll be going over 15 of them in this article.
Rather watch the video version?
How to find someone’s email address
Here are 15 methods for finding someone’s email address that I’ve used over the course of my career—the first two being what I use today!
- Use a free email finder tool
- Search a free B2B contact database
- Look through large business directories
- Subscribe to their email list
- Check out the About Us and Contact pages
- Connect with the company’s support chat
- Use Google
- Check the prospect’s personal blog
- Try DuckDuckGo
- Use Twitter’s Advanced Search
- Check LinkedIn
- Perform a WHO.IS search
- Guess the email address
- Use an email permutator tool
- Use HARO
1. Use a free email finder tool
Email finder (or email lookup) tools like Wiza’s Free Email Finder are one of the easiest ways to find someone’s email address. All you have to do is enter the person’s name and/or website (usually the company they work for), and the tool will find the person’s email address.
Even though the email finder has verified the email address, you may still need further confirmation. That’s what Wiza’s Free Email Verifier is for; you can use it to confirm that a mailbox exists and can receive emails. You just have to enter the email address and verify it within seconds.
While Wiza is great for finding and verifying email addresses (with a 97% accuracy, no less), there are times when you won’t get the email address of the person you’re looking for.
In cases like this, some email discovery tools may find the email addresses of other people in the company. You can contact those people and ask them to put you in touch with the person you want to correspond with.
Wiza isn’t the only email discovery tool on the market; there are hundreds of them. Not all of them are great, to be honest, but here are some good ones I’ve tried:
- Hunter Email Finder – 50 free searches and verifications/month. Paid plans start at $49/month for 1,000 searches ($0.049 per result).
- Voila Norbert – 50 free searches for the trial. Paid plans start at $49/month for 1,000 searches ($0.049 per result).
- GetProspect – 50 free searches per month. Paid plans start at $49/month for 1,000 searches ($0.049 per result).
- Findymail – 10 free searches as a trial. Paid plans start at $49/month for 1,000 searches ($0.049 per result).
- GetEmail.io – 10 free searches/month. Paid plans start at $49/month for 300 searches ($0.163 per result).
2. Search a free B2B contact database
The downside of using email discovery tools is that you have to manually enter the name of the individual and the company they work for into the tool, which is an arduous task if you plan to get the email addresses of, say, 1,000 people.
If you’re looking to build a huge list of prospects with accurate contact information, using a B2B contact database tool like Wiza would generate better results.
Wiza gives you access to over 830 million B2B contacts from all over the world. The platform has filters that help you find people/companies most likely to buy your product. When you find the key decision-makers in these companies, Wiza extracts and verifies their contact information, including email addresses and phone numbers, in seconds.
In addition to 99% accurate contact information, you also get extra information about the companies, including their revenue, funding, headcount, and more. This allows you to determine whether or not a company has the budget to become a long-term paying customer.
If you prefer to find prospects (and hire talent) on LinkedIn, Wiza has a Chrome extension that connects with LinkedIn Basic and its products: Sales Navigator and Recruiter. So all you have to do is find a prospect on LinkedIn and click a button to reveal their verified contact information.
Because Wiza integrates with popular customer relationship management (CRM) systems and sales tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Outreach, you can build lists of up to 2,500 prospects and export them to your CRM tool (or as CSV). Wiza also integrates with Zapier, which gives you access to 7,000+ marketing tools.
Pricing: Wiza allows you to verify 20 email addresses and 5 phone numbers every month for free. Paid plans range from $30/month/user to $125/month/user for the Custom plan, which gives you access to all of Wiza’s features. You can save 16% if you subscribe annually.
Just like email discovery tools, Wiza’s not the only B2B contact database tool; there are other decent ones too, including:
- Seamless.ai – 50 free email and phone credits as a trial. You’ll have to contact their sales team to get a paid plan tailored to your business needs.
- Lusha – 5 free credits per month. Paid plans start at $39/user/month.
- UpLead – 7-day free trial plan with 5 credits. Paid plans start at $99/month. There’s also a custom plan for large organizations.
3. Look through large business directories
A company (or business) directory is a web page or portal that displays a long list of companies from various industries. It typically contains the business name, location, contact details, and a brief description of the service/product it provides. The main goal of company directories is to boost the online visibility of the businesses they list and help potential customers discover and reach out to businesses easily.
Wiza’s Company Directory lists thousands of businesses arranged in alphabetical order.
When you find the company you’re looking for and click on it, Wiza brings up a brief rundown of the company including a brief description of the business, the company’s website URL, the business’ location, number of employees, industry, social media accounts, employee information, and some FAQs about the business.
When you click on an employee’s name, you can use Wiza’s free plan (with 20 email credits and 5 phone credits) to reveal and verify their email address and phone number.
Note: If you plan to do this on a large scale, you’d have to subscribe to a paid plan.
4. Subscribe to their email list
If you’re finding it hard to get your prospect’s email address, check if they have a personal website or blog that features a newsletter. If they do, subscribe to their mailing list through the opt-in form on their website.
Most newsletter emails come from the sender’s personal email address, so you can ask a perceptive question or share an opinion with them to boost your chances of getting a response from them. This is an excellent way to build a relationship with your prospects before pitching your product to them.
Pro tip: Some newsletter emails are sent from generic “info@companywebsite.com” or “newsletter@companywebsite.com” but you can still reply to them and hopefully get a response from the sender’s personal email address.
5. Check out their About Us and Contact pages
If you’re unsure of the right person to contact in a company or how to reach out to them, check the company website’s About Us, Meet the Team, or Contact pages.
The first two pages may list the key decision-makers (usually the C-Suite) in the company as well as their valid email addresses and social media profiles. The Contact page, however, may either list a generic email address for inquiries (i.e. contact@companywebsite.com) or have a contact form you can fill out.
Generic emails and contact forms are usually handled by admin staff, customer support teams, or virtual assistants, but you can try asking them to connect you with the person you want to speak with.
Pro tip: If you can’t find the About Us, Meet the Team, or Contact pages on a website, you can do a quick Google search of the following variations:
- companywebsite.com/contact
- companywebsite.com/contact-us
- companywebsite.com/contact-me
- companywebsite.com/about
- companywebsite.com/about-us
- companywebsite.com/about-me
- companywebsite.com/team
- companywebsite.com/meet-the-team
- companywebsite.com/our-team
- companywebsite.com/meet-our-team
6. Connect with the company’s support chat
Just like with the contact form on a company’s website, human customer service reps are usually in charge of a company’s live chat system. So if you’re unable to find the person’s email address on the website, type up a message in the company’s support chat and there’s a chance that an actual person will reply.
When they do, ask them to put you in touch with the person you want to reach out to.
7. Use Google
Speaking of Google searches, you can use Google to find people’s email addresses. But it’s not as straightforward as you might think. Sometimes, all you need to do is type in your prospect’s name and add “email address” and their address may pop up. This may work if your prospect has a unique name; if their name is common, you might not get very far.
That’s where Google search operators come into play. Here are some operators you can use to find a person’s email address:
- [full name] + email/email address
- [full name] + contact/contact information
- [full name] + LinkedIn
- [full name] + [company they work for} + email address
If you don’t get the person’s email address with these operators, use the Google Search Operator Query, “site:companywebsite.com” as your search root and supplement it with modifiers, like this:
- site:companywebsite.com + [full name} + email/email address
- site:companywebsite.com + [full name] + contact/contact information
Or you can use some email structures to make advanced search moderators. For example, many companies use this structure: first name + last name @ companyname.com. However, since all companies are different, you may have to play around with different variations using the root search operator, like this:
- site:companywebsite.com + firstname.lastname [at] companyname.com
- site:companywebsite.com + firstname [at] companyname.com
- site:companywebsite.com + firstname_lastname [at] companyname.com
- site:companywebsite.com + first letter of first name + last name [at] companyname.com
Note: [at] represents the symbol @.
8. Check the prospect’s personal blog
Sometimes, when you Google a person, you may come across their personal website or blog on their social media profiles. In this case, scour through the website to find the contact page; the person’s email address might be listed there.
But if you come off the website with no answers, go back to Google and do some advanced searches, using the person’s website as the root search operator:
- site:personalwebsite.com + [full name] + email/email address
- site:personalwebsite.com + [full name] + contact/contact information
- site:personalwebsite.com + firstname.lastname [at] personalwebsite.com
- site:personalwebsite.com + firstname + lastname [at] personalwebsite.com
- site:personalwebsite.com + first name [at] personalwebsite.com
- site:personalwebsite.com + firstname_lastname [at] personalwebsite.com
9. Try DuckDuckGo
People who want to keep their personal data and contact information private may use DuckDuckGo instead of Google because the former features private search, smart encryption, and web tracking protection, among other things.
To use DuckDuckGo to find someone’s email address, navigate to the DuckDuckGo homepage, type in the prospect’s name as well as any information you have about them, such as their job title and company name, and hit the search icon.
DuckDuckGo will display some results, including any email addresses it finds for the person.
If you don’t get results, you can add the “@” symbol before the company name in this format, “@companyname.com” or enclose the person’s name in quotation marks.
For example, I want to reach Karla Hesterberg who works at HubSpot. When I run her name through DuckDuckGo, here’s what pops up: her HubSpot author profile.
When I click on it, her profile leads me right to her email address.
Note: This trick only works in browsers like DuckDuckGo and Yahoo!, but not Google and Bing because the latter search engines associate the “@” symbol with social media tags.
10. Use Twitter’s advanced search
Notice how there’s a link to Karla Hesterberg’s Twitter (now “X”) profile right next to her email address? Not only is Twitter a great place to reach out to people, but it can also be effective at helping you find your prospect’s email address.
Some people like to put their email address front and center in their Twitter bio, but it’s not very common. Usually, professionals on social media platforms share their email addresses with others in the comments section, but they replace “.” and “@” with “dot” and “at” to hide their emails from bots.
To find these comments, you’ll need to use the Advanced Search feature.
First, navigate to your Twitter (or X) account, enter your prospect’s name in the search bar, and tap “Enter”. On the results page, click on Advanced Search, which you’ll find in the top right corner, under Search filters.
Look for words like “at”, “dot”, “email”, and “reach”, and add the prospect’s username to search for these words in their tweets. If you’re lucky, you’ll get results like this:
These are all different emails, so I’d have to do some more research to figure out which one(s) is valid. But at least, I’ve got somewhere to start.
11. Check LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world right now, so it makes perfect sense that people include their email addresses in their LinkedIn profiles. There are several ways to find someone’s email address on LinkedIn, but the most common one would be in their About section.
Log into your LinkedIn again, go to the person’s profile, and scroll down to their About section, and you may find something like this:
If not, don’t fret. If you’re connected with the person on LinkedIn, scroll back up and click Contact info at the top of the person’s profile to see if they listed their email address there.
You can also try exporting your LinkedIn connections. This will only work if the prospect hasn’t chosen to hide their email address from their LinkedIn connections, but it’s worth a try.
All you need to do is log into LinkedIn, click the drop-down menu attached to your profile, and tap Settings & Privacy.
Then, click on Data privacy, which you’ll find on the left side of the page. Tap Get a copy of your data and select Want something in particular? Select the data files you’re most interested in. Check the Connections box and click Request archive.
The exportation process will take about 10 minutes after which LinkedIn will send you an email to download a .CSV file containing a list of all your connections and their email addresses, if available.
12. Perform a WHO.IS search
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) requires anyone who registers a domain name to provide their personal information, such as their full name, email address, and phone number. The WHO.IS database stores this information.
So if the person you’re looking for has registered a domain name before (or has a website), their information might be in the database.
To find the person’s email address, head to https://who.is, enter the prospect’s name into the search bar, and wait for results.
Note: WHO.IS, however, allows people to hide their personal information, so even if the prospect has a personal website, their contact information might not pop up. There are other database tools you can check, such as Namecheap and GoDaddy.
13. Guess the email address
If all else fails, do what I used to do: guess and test.
If you check your email inbox, you’ll notice that almost all emails follow one of several patterns, but all of those patterns require you to know the first name, last name, and domain name of your prospect.
The most common formats for an email address are:
- [firstname]@domain.com – john@wiza.co
- [firstname][lastname]@domain.com – johndoe@wiza.co
- [firstname].[lastname]@domain.com – john.doe@wiza.co
- [initial].[lastname]@domain.com – j.doe@wiza.co
- [initial][lastname]@domain.com -jdoe@wiza.co
- [firstname initial][lastname initial]@domain.com – jd@wiza.co
- [firstnameinitial].[last name initial]@domain.com – j.d@wiza.co
- [firstname].[lastname initial]@domain.com – john.d@wiza.co
- [firstname][lastname initial]@domain.com – johnd@wiza.co
14. Use an email permutator tool
While the above-listed formats are the most common, the list is not exhaustive. Some people prefer to use different variants, and frankly, manually trying all the possible variants is time-consuming.
Thankfully, email permutator tools like this one from Mailmeteor exist. To use them, enter the first name, last name, and domain name of the prospect and they will automatically generate a massive list of email address suggestions in seconds.
When I put in my first name, last name, and website domain, this tool generated 34 possible email addresses — the first one’s mine, by the way!
Notice the Open in Gmail link at the bottom of the suggestions. When you click on it, the tool will create a new email message with all the permutations added to the “To” field.
Move your cursor over each email address; when you hover over the right one, a pop-up will confirm that the address is linked to a Google profile. You can also use an email verification tool to confirm which one is correct.
Some other email permutator tools you can try include:
15. Use HARO
This is an unconventional method of finding people’s email addresses, but if you’re looking to build a repository containing the personal/work email addresses of experts in your industry (rather than a specific person’s address), it may help to make a HARO request.
When experts see your request, they send their replies to you via email, which allows you to have their email address.
Pro tip: If you’re in the B2B industry, it may be better to use the Help a B2B Writer instead of HARO. This way, you can get more streamlined responses.
Find someone’s email address for free with Wiza
That’s a wrap on all the ways you can find someone’s email address on the internet!
You might’ve noticed that most of the steps on this list require you to dedicate a bit of time to sleuthing around on search engines and social media platforms.
If you’re looking for the email addresses of just a few people, you might not mind doing the work. But if you’re a salesperson looking to reach out to hundreds, if not thousands, of key decision-makers, rummaging through Google, DuckDuckGo, Twitter, and company websites isn’t an ideal way to spend your time.
To get this information in as little time as possible, you’ll need a tool that gives you access to a boatload of potential customers, filters to help you get a bird’s-eye view of your prospects, and powerful email extraction and verification features to ensure that you’re getting accurate information every time.
This pretty much sums up Wiza.If you want to check out Wiza’s capabilities for yourself, sign up for the free plan today.
