Email remains the top method of business communication, especially in the B2B segment. It is true that, in certain industries, making a cold call is still an acceptable way of reaching out to leads, prospects, and potential clients. Still, compared to calls, cold emails are a better sales practice.
However, as it often happens in the B2B industry, you may know your prospect’s name and company of employment, but neither of those gets you any closer to your lead’s business email address. You can, of course, try to reach out over personal channels — social media and the like, but this decision may work against you. There is a reason why people are so protective of their business emails — it helps them avoid spam and compartmentalize their communication channels into personal- and work-related.
At the same time, it is always possible to find corporate email address of any person if you are in no hurry and are willing to dedicate some effort to this search. Below, we will explain how to find a business email address of any prospect.
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Start with a social media connection
The first and the most obvious method after a quick Google search (which will, sadly, prove ineffective in most cases) is to connect with your lead over social media. Here, LinkedIn is the obvious choice, even though there are other platforms that can prove useful in your sales efforts. Still, LinkedIn remains the primary business tool for both B2B and B2C segments, not to mention it helps individuals from multiple industries connect without any difficulty.
Even before your invitation to connect is approved, LinkedIn offers an opportunity to check out your prospect’s profile — and sometimes, you can find a business email you are looking for right away. If not, you can still wait for the connection approval and send your message over LinkedIn messaging.
One of the primary reasons to consider this reaching-out method is that LinkedIn is a perfect example of a purely professional network, so nobody expects DMs from high school friends or barbecue invitations from neighbors here. The disadvantage is that not every professional is active on LinkedIn, so there is a chance your invitation may be pending for weeks.
A backup plan would be to search for the company page and try to connect with other experts — fortunately, LinkedIn offers active employee profiles directly on each company business page.
Sadly, contacting just anyone within a certain company is not the kind of method that would suit everyone. So, other ideas might prove handy in your business email search.
Take a good look at a business website
While searching for executives in large corporations, this method will unlikely bring any results, but if you are looking for a business email in a small company, a contact-us section could give you the information you need. Until very recently, a lot of companies, especially IT startups, made a point of presenting their teams — often with direct contact channels for every executive. Sadly, this ‘giving a distinct face to a business’ trend seems to have gone out of fashion, but some companies still insist on making their employee’s emails public on the official website.
Even if you cannot find your prospect’s email on the official company site, you can still use the contact section to reach any relevant department. Sometimes, there is only one contact form to make use of. But, the larger the company, the more likely it will have different contact sections for different divisions — i.e., sales, vacancies, investment, advertising, etc.
Try subscribing to corporate newsletters
Another idea to get a valid email of any person within a particular company is to subscribe to this company’s email newsletters. Both giant enterprises and small companies still building their customer base offer an opportunity to receive company updates over email.
Often, within a large company, your newsletter emails will be fully automated. But, the smaller a certain business is, the higher the possibility that emails will be sent (even if automated batches) from an email account of a specific employee. This usually means that there is an actual living person behind an automated email, which in turn, implies you can reach out to this person.
Of course, there is never a guarantee that the prospect you need to reach will be the one in charge of newsletters. Still, if you analyze each company’s email marketing efforts for some time, you may notice that different offers come from different people within one company. For example, you can receive notifications about discounts or service updates — and possibly, these will come from different managers.
Plus, even if the prospects you need never email over their company’s official channels, there is still a chance to email someone else and ask for an introduction. It is not the best way, of course, but it may work.
Do not ignore personal sites and accounts
Personal accounts are your last resort if all corporate channels have failed you. Here, you can try to browse personal social sites and accounts to try and establish a connection or even look for the prospect’s personal blog or another website. A word of warning before you make any business offers over personal channels — consider the actual offer first. It all goes down to etiquette — you don’t call people on a Sunday morning unless there is an emergency. Similar to this, some personal channels may simply be inappropriate for the first contact with a lead because such a tactic may make a bad impression on your recipient and end up being counter-productive.
Consider professional tools for regular email lookups
The major benefit of the above methods is that they are 100% free, but they come with several disadvantages of their own. First, they are not always 100% effective — sometimes, not even close to a hundred percent. Second, they simply require too much time, which is not always an option for sales representatives or business developers.
An alternative would be to use professional tools designed for a quick and effective company email address lookup. For example, SignalHire is a vast database of verified contacts across multiple industries that can provide you not only with prospects’ emails but also with their phone numbers, links to social media accounts, etc. If you know someone’s full name, all you need to do is type it in the relevant search graph, and the database will return the result in fractions of a second.
With the help of this database, you can find email addresses of CEOs and other company executives in just a few clicks.
Another useful perk is that SignalHire has a Chrome extension that works directly with LinkedIn, GitHub, and other major social platforms. This means you can extract your lead’s email addresses directly from social media sites, even if account holders did not make their contact information public.
Besides individual search, there is also a possibility to search for relevant experts in bulk — in the same basic search window, you can indicate company, industry, location, and many other useful parameters to compile a carefully targeted cold email list.
But, if one lead’s email is all you need, and the search by name did not bring any results, you can always check the company profile via the same database. It will provide the list of all available employees within a company in a format that goes like this:
Finally, if none of the above tactics have brought any results, there is another solution — check out standard email formats within a company. Technically, you do not necessarily need an extension or a database for that because most corporate email formats are the same, and you can guess them yourself after a quick Google search. But SignalHire saves you a lot of time on guesswork, presenting employee email templates in a neat package that looks like this:
So far, using professional tools to find company email address is the quickest and most effective method. Besides, SignalHire offers five free searches a month, so if you do not need to look up people daily, this method will not cost you a dime.
Just call the company desk and ask!
It is surprising how many people overlook this seemingly obvious step, so we decided to have it listed here, just in case. In fact, business email addresses of employees are not exactly top secret information. So, if you want to reach out to someone with a valid business-related offer, why not just go directly over the official channels? Of course, this approach is not always possible — especially if you are reaching out to passive job candidates already employed in the competitor company. On the other hand, if you are about to make a transparent partnership offer, why not give it a try?
Any of the above methods can prove helpful when you are looking for someone’s work email address, and one of them will certainly give the results you are hoping for. While free methods for occasional lookup, like connecting over social media or browsing the web, can be very effective now and then, anyone searching other people’s emails on a regular basis, should certainly consider in favor of professional tools.
