Email is an important communication channel in any business sphere. It is simply irreplaceable when contacting people you do not personally know.
It is still a primary communication tool in marketing and recruiting campaigns and one-on-one business communication.
Even if you do not know someone’s address, there are plenty of tools to do an email search for you. Besides, there are a few tricks that can help you find the email you need without paying any email hunting sites. Let’s look at the available email lookup options – some of them will definitely prove handy for your business.
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Check out corporate websites
This tip will not work when contacting an average white-collar worker within a large corporation. However, when dealing with smaller businesses (and especially when trying to contact one of the management), this is a pretty effective solution that works most of the time.
Just go to the company website and open their ‘Contact Us’ tab. Sometimes, you will be greeted by a standard form, but you will often also see a list of relevant contacts you are looking for. Even if not, a contact form is still a start.
Also, you may want to check out if the company website has a blog. It is possible to directly get contributor’s contact details from their blog posts, especially if this site uses a standard WordPress plugin. Besides, both contact pages and blogs contain links to social media networks, which could be valuable contact information sources.
Browse social media platforms
Speaking of social media, you can head there directly. Often, you will not even have to visit the company website to find people and businesses online. You can try to convey your message across on one of the social media sites. When trying to reach out to a particular person, you can also find their email on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.
Of course, not every email will be public. Still, doing a basic social media search does not take a lot of time and can pay off in the long run. Even if you do not find the person’s email, you can still contact them over a given social media platform.
Use professional contact databases
Of course, not every message or offer can be made over website contact forms and social media sites. That’s where professional contact databases come in. These tools are made for contact search; some deal only with emails, while others can also pull phone numbers, links to social media accounts, etc.
SignalHire is one of the most effective tools to find people by name, industry, keyword, or any other info you have. For example, it can pull a person’s email if you only have their phone number or vice versa. This handy browser extension can also work directly with LinkedIn – open someone’s profile and click on the plugin to get up-to-date contact details.
Try googling it
Google is not the surest way to get someone’s email address, but it can be useful. While not entirely effective, it is at least 100% free. Sometimes, you can find someone’s email address in seconds if you just use the world’s largest search engine.
Alternatively, you can also try to do a WHOIS lookup. This tool will give you information on any domain owner – provided, of course, the person did not choose to keep this info private.
Subscribe to company newsletters
Subscribing to corporate emails is more of a long-term haul, but if nothing from the above worked for you, this could be a solution. Most websites these days will offer you a chance to subscribe to their promotional materials.
When you start receiving letters from them, you may get the additional contact information you are looking for. Of course, this approach is only effective when contacting a particular business and is not useful for large-scale marketing campaigns.
Figure out corporate email pattern
When trying to contact someone in a particular company, you can always try to figure out how their work email should look like. Usually, all corporate emails include a person’s first name, optionally followed by their last name, and a unique company mail client.
So, you can make a few educated guesses and verify your suggestion via http://verify-email.org/, https://tools.verifyemailaddress.io/, or any other similar tool. This solution is a bit time-consuming and not always effective, but it is 100% free, just like Google.
As you can see, there is more than one way to find someone’s email address, even if you do not know this someone in person. If you are not compiling large email lists and are just looking to contact one or two people you do not yet know, you should probably look for contacts manually. However, if your job implies contacting people daily, we believe investing in professional software is a better, more effective solution.
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