The first step to landing sales, getting new customers, or securing new clients is finding the right email address. The more email addresses you capture, the more leads go through your pipeline.
To sustain your sales pipeline, you must learn how to find someone’s email address. And the good news is you don’t have to spend much on your prospecting to do so.
There are free methods you can use to find a prospect’s email. When familiar with the process, you can try paid options to really scale. We’re here to show you both. Let’s get started.
- How to find someone’s email address for free
- Paid tools + strategies to automate and streamline prospecting
- Prospecting best practices
How to Find Someone’s Email Address for Free
When you’re new to prospecting or lead generation online, it always helps to understand the fundamental process and strategies before trying out paid tools. Here are five strategies we recommend:
LinkedIn + Free Lead Finder Tools
LinkedIn is one of the best places to find active prospects to sell to. Let’s say you’re selling a revolutionary material that adds 50 years to a roof’s lifespan. You naturally want to sell to roofing contractors. So, type “roofing contractor” in LinkedIn’s search bar and filter by job position.
You’ll see dozens of contractors in your area or your LinkedIn network. Find decision-makers and click on their profiles. If you’re lucky, they’ll have their emails on display.
But in most cases, they’ll just link to their company website. This is where lead finder tools come in. Lead finder tools ask for your prospects’ names and websites.
They’ll then try to find any publicly available email address that matches the info. Here’s what we got using Skrapp.
Lead Finder Tools With Freemium Features
Most lead finder tools have free trials or freemium features to help prospects get a feel for their product. Some even include filters to help you pinpoint your ideal customer.
For example, Snov.io lets you find an email address by company or domain. You can even use it to make a company email list for free.
Then, you can manually verify these emails by visiting LinkedIn and finding the people on this list. This will help you personalize your sales email copy when doing outreach.
Free Email Scraper Tools
The most common free email scraper tools come in the form of a Chrome extension. Most will help you scrape contact info from sites like LinkedIn. Some can even scrape emails in bulk.
Let’s use GetProspect as an example. Once installed, all you need to do is look to LinkedIn for the company or job position you want to sell to. Then, GetProspect can bulk save these leads and find their emails for you.
I looked up marketing directors on LinkedIn with GetProspect. Here are the results.
After saving the leads, you can go to your GetProspect dashboard and view the lead list, which includes company information and your prospects’ email addresses.
Take an Educated Guess + Validate.
Let’s say you found a prospect active on social media platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter but can’t find their email. Take an educated guess.
Most professional emails follow the same syntax: [email protected]. If you found John Doe and know he’s from ABC company, you can try [email protected].
The next step is validation. Use validation tools to prove your hypothesis. These tools will help verify if the email you guessed exists. Some help you find the right emails if you have typos.
But this honestly isn’t a productive and efficient prospecting strategy. If you want to go this route, you’d be better off building a relationship with the prospect online than asking for their email.
Building a Relationship with Prospects
Email outreach strategies like cold email lack trust and relationship building. If you build a relationship before you sell, there’s a higher likelihood of conversions.
The best way to foster or build a relationship with prospects online is to provide value. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit are great platforms for this.
Make content about solving familiar pain points, offer advice, and be helpful in any way possible. When the opportunity comes, ask your prospect for their email. Chances are they’ll give it to you without hesitation.
Paid Tools + Automated Strategies For Finding Someone’s Email
Free options are great if you’re just starting with prospecting. But if you want to scale and streamline growth, you need automation. Here are some of the best options we recommend:
Instantly B2B Lead Finder
Every sales process starts with prospecting, validation, and outreach. Instantly and Instantly B2B Lead Finder gives all three. It’s the fastest, easiest, and most cost-effective way to scale.
You can gain access to over 160 million pre-verified leads. You can find your exact ICP and buyer personas with advanced filter options. There’s even an option to find clones of your previous clients with the Lookalikes feature.
That means every outreach campaign you conduct will be ensured to have the highest possible deliverability. All that’s left for you to do is follow email marketing best practices, personalize email copy, and iterate on winning strategies.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s premium solution for prospecting and lead generation. You get advanced search filters, data-driven insights, and relationship-building tools.
For example, a free LinkedIn account doesn’t allow you to message accounts outside your network. With Sales Nav, you can access LinkedIn Inmail, which lets you contact people outside your network. The only downside is that this strategy isn’t scalable.
Even with the highest tier Sales Nav account, you’re limited to a few InMails daily. But credits get refreshed each time somebody replies to your InMail.
So ensure you’re optimizing subject lines and personalizing each email you send. This won’t be a problem since Sales Nav lets you see prospect data you can use for personalization.
FindEmails
FindEmails is a prospecting and validation tool with a highly scalable API. It’s best for small businesses, content marketing teams, recruitment agencies, and PR firms.
You can search by domain, name, job position, or role. However, not every email they provide is validated. That’s why they also include an email validation tool.
The API can also be integrated into your website, chatbots, or lead capture pages. That way, email validation can be done in parallel with your inbound marketing efforts.
ContactOut
If you want your sales process to be omnichannel with a complete sales cadence, try Contact Out. It can find the email and phone numbers of over 300 million professionals on LinkedIn.
You can also integrate ContactOut with CRMs and Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Salesforce, Hubspot, and Bullhorn are among the CRMs you can integrate with. There’s even an option for trigger-based automation when integrated with Zapier.
Free users get 40 free email searches monthly. The paid version starts at $948 yearly, which provides 6,000 monthly searches, which equates to about $0.158 per result.
Finder Expert
Finder Expert leverages LinkedIn and Twitter data to help you find leads. It's suited for people in recruitment, sales, or marketing. Free users get 300 free emails per month.
Like most email finder tools, it lets you search by name or domain and provides you with an API integration key.
The search feature comes in three flavors. One is Google Finder, which finds lead data from Google.
LinkedIn Finder, which captures LinkedIn lead information in bulk. And a Twitter finder to get in-depth information that won’t necessarily be found on platforms like LinkedIn.
Hunter.io
Hunter.io is one of the biggest names in the lead generation scene. It offers a comprehensive set of tools perfect for power users relying on email marketing as their primary prospecting vehicle.
Think of it as the Swiss Army Knife of email marketing. It can verify lead lists, find email addresses, and even be used for outreach campaigns.
Outreach campaigns can further be streamlined and personalized using intent data and buying signals. However, these powerful features come at a steep price tag.
For $408/year, you get 6,000 email searches. After that, you’d need to pay an additional $10 for 100 credits.
You must also pay a monthly fee to scale sending volume by adding domains. Instantly lets you add unlimited email domains to your account, helping you scale sustainably.
Kaspr
Kaspr is another LinkedIn lead-generation tool that provides accurate lead information, including phone numbers and emails. It also comes with its own CRM and lead management tool.
Since it gathers data from LinkedIn, it has access to a database of over 500 million+ emails and phone numbers. You can even use it to automate LinkedIn outreach.
The free version also offers five phone credits, five InMail credits, and ten lead export credits. Kaspr’s paid version starts at $49 monthly, providing more credits, collaboration features, and better support.
Clearbit
Clearbit offers comprehensive sales enablement tools for streamlining the entire sales process. You get an email finder tool, enrichment tools, buying intent signals, and filters for finding the perfect customer.
Clearbit claims to have over 100 data points on any company and can integrate with Salesforce, Marketo, and Hubspot. It also offers a weekly visitor report if you’re running inbound campaigns on your site.
More importantly, Clearbit can de-anonymize site traffic. That means you can get the contact info of prospects who visited your site even if they didn’t provide contact info on your lead capture pages.
Clearbit also pits you against the competition and analyzes your total addressable market, making It a powerful tool for any go-to-market strategy. But these tools come at a hefty cost.
If you want to learn more about pricing, you’ll need to talk with a sales rep as they tailor their offering and features to your specific needs.
Prospecting Best Practices
Prospecting is an essential part of every sales process. It needs to be done right. To ensure you’re making the most out of your prospecting, follow these best practices:
Always Validate Lead Lists
Validating lead lists helps protect your sender's reputation and ensures high deliverability during outreach. Most email checkers have an email validation tool.
If you want to skip the validation process, try prospecting tools like Instantly B2B Lead Finder. Every lead in the database is pre-verified and active. All you need to do is reach out to them.
Segment Your Leads
Lead segmentation helps you personalize your email copy during outreach campaigns. You can segment leads by demographic, job titles, company size, or revenue.
Segmenting ensures that each email you send resonates with its intended audience. For example, email copy should differ when sending to an end-user vs a decision-maker.
Get Leads From Quality Lead Sources
If you get leads from third-party sources, ensure they are vetted and provide quality lead lists. As a rule of thumb, lead quality is probably low if it's extra cheap. That’s why you must first validate if you’re getting leads from a third-party seller.
However, buying leads is the fastest way to fill your pipeline. You need to find a quality lead source like Instantly B2B Lead Finder.
Key Takeaways
Finding someone’s email is the first step toward closing a sale. You can find an email manually or with the help of a lead finder, email scraper, or email checker tool. If you're still learning to prospect, we recommend trying the free strategies
Once you understand how it works, you can start scaling with automated, paid tools. To recap, here are the email address finder tools you should consider:
- Instantly B2B Lead Finder and Sales Navigator: Best for finding quality, verified leads
- Finder Expert and Contact Out: Best for integrations with other sales tools
- Hunter.io and Kaspr: Provides a comprehensive set of outreach tools
- Clearbit: Offers powerful customization options for prospecting
Instantly, you're covered if you’re looking for an all-in-one tool for prospecting, enrichment, outreach, and automation. Try out our B2B Lead Finder today and start scaling!
T
