Finding a prospect’s direct email address can be the difference between landing a big sale or never making contact. Nowadays, companies safeguard employee emails to protect their staff from spam and pushy salespeople, but that shouldn’t stop you! In this article, we will explore 6 effective ways to find an email address by name. Our tips work for both business and personal emails, so no matter who you are looking for or why these simple tricks will deliver!

1. Try Your Luck on Google

Sometimes simply Googling the prospect’s name + company + email address will reveal their direct contact details. Here are some different search queries you can try:

  • [Target’s full name] + email 
  • [Target’s full name] + “email address” 
  • [Target’s full name] + company + email 
  • Site:companywebsite.com + [Target’s full name] + email 
  • Site:companywebsite.com + [Target’s full name] + position + Email 
  • Site:companywebsite.com + [Target’s full name] + contact
Source: Google

Sometimes the most obvious method can do wonders! This tactic is 100% free, but the downside is that it can be time-consuming. 

2. Do Some Light Social Media Stalking

Another way to email search by name is to pull up the prospect’s social media profiles, such as their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter pages. Many people have their email addresses on LinkedIn and Twitter in their bio. While on Facebook, you can simply click About and then Contact and Basic Info, and if the user has their contact details set to public will have access to their email address.

Soirce: LinkedIn

However, it’s worth mentioning that many people don’t list their email addresses on their social media accounts since there are too many spammers and scammers. Nobody wants to be bombarded with junk. If the prospect’s email address isn’t visible, you can always message them on social media. If you have a premium LinkedIn account, you can send direct messages known as InMail without being connected or in the same network. If you want to send DMs on Twitter, the person you’d like to contact will have to follow you unless they have altered their settings to accept messages from all accounts.

Remember, don’t come across as too pushy when sending direct messages on social media. Don’t launch right into your sales pitch. Instead, start by trying to form common ground with the prospect by introducing yourself and your company and then seeing where the conversation goes!

3. Use an Email Permutator

An email permutator is a tool that will spit out many different email combinations in every format you can imagine. To use this tool, enter the company’s website and the prospect’s name. Then the tool will give you up to 40 different possible email addresses using a variety of formats. So, for example, if you are trying to find the email for Michael Jones, who works at Nike, an email permutator might reveal these combinations:

  • m.jones@nike.com
  • michael.jones@nike.com
  • michaeljones@nike.com
  • mjones@nike.com

Or, if you are looking for a personal email, enter the target’s name and email provider if you know it. For example, Sally Roberts and Gmail. The results will look like this:

Moreover, you can also find email templates that are often used by different companies using SignalHire. For example, you’d like to contact someone from the company SpaceX. On this web page, you can find possible emails that employees of SpaceX might use. In addition, there is a probable percentage of using every email template. For instance:

This method can work, but it can also be time-consuming. For example, you could try up to 40 different email combinations without success! Or you can succeed and reach out to the targeted person on the first try. But you can try your luck!

4. Perform a Domain Whois Search!

Did you know that according to the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Act, everyone registering a domain name must provide contact information, including their email address? As this is public information, you can use a Whois domain lookup tool to instantly find out who owns a particular website and retrieve their contact information!

To perform a domain whois search simply:

  1. Head to https://lookup.icann.org/en
  2. Enter the domain into the search bar
  3. Hit Lookup

Just like that, you find the owner’s name and their email. This tactic is more likely to work for small blogs and websites which have a single owner and are not run by a corporation. However, this method is unlikely to work for more prominent companies as, in most cases, you will retrieve an administrator’s email and contact details.

The other major drawback is website owners can pay money to have their contact details removed from the public domain. If a person has blocked their details, then a domain whois search won’t reveal the name or email of the owner. 

5. Search on SignalHire

SignalHire has the email finder by name tool, in addition, our 500 million-strong international B2B database contains prospects’ contact details. We have email addresses for all types of employees ranging from junior positions to CEOs and senior management. Our data is 97% accurate and is constantly being updated and expanded.

To use SignalHire’s email lookup tool, enter the prospect’s name and hit search. You can use additional filters such as company name, location, and position to get more relevant searches. Moreover, SignalHire will show you the prospect’s direct email address, phone number, and social media profile.

6. Use SignalHire’s Chrome/Firefox Extension

It’s worth mentioning that SignalHire has a browser extension that can pull any prospect’s email address from around the world directly from their LinkedIn profile. It doesn’t matter if you are trying to find the email address of a local marketing manager or the CEO of an international company; this browser extension can help you to get the desirable result. 

SignalHire’s Chrome/Firefox extension is easy to use. Open the prospect’s LinkedIn profile, click on your extension, and then Reveal Contacts. Instantly you will have access to the prospect’s direct phone number, email address, and social media profiles.

Even if you don’t change anything about your sales approach, just communicating directly with prospects can lead to a massive uptick in sales and revenue. Not to mention the amount of time you can save, think how many extra deals you could land if you boosted your email reply rates by 10% and your number of sales calls per day by 20%.

Conclusion

In conclusion, finding someone’s email address by name can greatly impact your ability to establish contact and secure important deals. While companies take measures to protect their employees’ emails from spam and unwanted solicitations, there are several effective methods you can employ. These methods range from using specialized tools and browser extensions to leveraging search engines and social media platforms. Employing these approaches you can increase your chances of successfully getting the email address you were looking for and initiating connections. For more tips on how to find business and CEO emails check out our article.

Author

As SignalHire product manager, Daniel Kim knows every little feature behind our service. That is why Daniel is also the best expert at explaining how it all works. His vision and desire to keep improving are why we have managed to create such a polished-up product. On occasion, Daniel is also happy to share his expertise and insight on project promotion in his witty, carefully structured blog posts.