Whether you’re prospecting or just trying to get a business email address of a friend, the days of being able to find a business email address directory on a website are long gone. Times have changed and anyone tasked with agency new business outreach — or working as a sales development rep — can tell you business email addresses are precious, and carefully guarded by webmasters and executive gatekeepers. But they’re not impossible to get.
Your Best Guess
If you know the website domain where your target works, the chances of you being able to find their email address are pretty good. For one thing, the majority of domains tend to observe one of a few patterns for email addresses:
{firstname}.{lastname}@domain.com
{firstinitial}.{lastname}@domain.com
{firstinitial}{lastname}@domain.com (often truncated to a specific number of characters)
{firstname}{lastinitial}@domain.com
{firstname}@domain.com
Try emailing those and you’ll be able to eliminate the formats that bounce while confirming the format that doesn’t generate an error email message.
LinkedIn and Social Media
If you don’t know the domain, you can always try searching for your target on LinkedIn by the name of your contact, and if you’re not sure who the exact person is, try searching by company name.
If you find the person you’re looking for, their email address will be to the right of their profile screen. Like this:
I know, I know… It’s either personal branding or ego, depending on who you ask.
But what if your target has included a personal, not business email address? That’s when you can switch to hunter.io
Hunter.io Chrome Extension
Hunter’s Google Chrome extension is a powerful and lightweight tool for finding email addresses, based on any website URL. You just navigate to the site and run the extension. Hunter returns a list of employees, their job title and their email address. Hunter provides 100 free searches per month, and includes an email verifier tool so you can have confidence in your data.
Just check out the email addresses, or go deeper and find job titles and more.
It also gives links to LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, and all the contacts you find can be added to prospecting lists for later.
Winmo
If you’re really serious about reaching a decision maker and developing a relationship with them, not just finding an email address, you’re going to need more firepower. Winmo is the ideal platform for committed sales professionals in media or agency new business.
It provides direct dial phone numbers, job titles, and a whole lot more. For instance, if you wanted to find the current strategy director at the media agency used by Chevy in 2014, you’re going to find that – along with Chevy’s planning periods and media expenditures by channel. Like this:
First find the brand, then find the agencies it works with:
And then find the people inside the agency (or brand) you want to work with.
So you could settle for an email address, or you can find out who, when and how to reach out to. All you need to ask is what’s taking you so long and why you haven’t dialed up your free trial of Winmo yet?