11 ways to find someone’s email address for free

By reaching out to the right people, you can open new business opportunities and generate more revenue. But, before sending out your campaigns, you have to find your prospect’s email addresses and ensure they are correct.

So, how can you find someone’s email address for free? ⬇️

1. lemlist's free email finder

2. lemlist’s Lead Database

Let’s start with the best option!

Online databases are essentially similar to LinkedIn, except they include more data like email addresses.

lemlist offers its broad B2B lead database, where you can connect with 450+ million people.

The best part?

You don’t have to invest in a separate email verifier as all contact have already been verified for you.

Use its advanced search filters to narrow down your search to the truly relevant leads and add them to your list.

And get this!

You don’t even have to change platforms once you’ve added your new leads to you list, you can connect with them easily on the same platform!

Learn more about lemlist’s lead database with this video! ⬇️

Although it doesn’t really get any better, here are other online email databases  we recommend testing out (with free trials or plans):

• ZoomInfo
• Lead411
• Adapt
• Clearbit
• UpLead (which is also natively integrated into lemlist, so you can send leads directly into your campaign from UpLead)

3. Email Permutator

Email Permutator is a tool that automates email address guessing, as you can insert anyone's name and company domain. It’s a quick and easy way to find someone’s email without spending hours listing all possible email address variations.

After you get your list, simply go to Gmail’s new message and paste all the results.

If one of the addresses is right, Gmail will usually show you the person's information (e.g., profile image).

Pro tip: Keep in mind that, in most cases, only one of the combinations is the real one. Sending a message to all results is a bad practice as it leads to a high bounce rate, and your domain could be blacklisted by the internet service provider.

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4. Advanced Google options

If you didn’t find your prospect’s emails using the ”company’s email pattern” tactic or with the Email Permutator tool, you can always try searching for it on Google.

Here are 3 methods you can use to find anyone’s email address on Google:

Try advanced Google search

You can use advanced search operators to get precise contact information when you doubt which prospect's email is correct.

Using quotation marks in your search query tells Google to search for results that contain that exact keyword.

You just have to enter the possible email address, and if that email can be found online, it will appear like this:

Insert target keywords

Another method you can use to search for an email address on Google is to:

1. put a person's name between brackets
2. add queries such as "+ email" or "+ email + contact", etc.

You can also try other combinations, like the person's name and the company name or title, as it increases your chances of getting the correct contact info.

Search company website with Google search operators

Another way to find someone's email address is to use the search operator query “site:companywebsite.com” as your root and add modifiers, such as:

• site:companywebsite.com + [name] + email
• site:companywebsite.com + [name] + contact

As a result, you’ll get all potential email addresses related to your prospect on a specific web page:

5. Subscribe to your prospect's newsletter

Many entrepreneurs use their email addresses to send newsletters because it creates a much more personal connection with their audience.

E.g. SparkToro's website:

There's a signup form to receive Rand's tricks. After signing up, you get his email address. 🎉

6. Social media profiles

Many social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram can often lead to someone's email address.

Find emails on the prospect’s LinkedIn profile

You'll notice that many people, especially those working in Growth, Partnerships, or Sales, put their email addresses directly on their LinkedIn profile as they want people to get in touch with them easily.

To access your prospect’s email address:

1. Go to their profile
2. Click on “See contact info”

If they put them as "visible", you'll have access to 2 important things:

• email address (and the pattern of their company)
• phone number

Pro tip: Check out the About section of your prospect’s LinkedIn profile, as people often share their contact info for networking.

Leverage Twitter’s advanced search

Many people leave their email addresses in Twitter's bio and, sometimes, even tweets. To find these tweets, you can use Twitter Advanced Search.

Here's an example of finding the email address of Yoni Yampolsky from the website builder, Elementor.

All you need to do is:

1. Identify a Twitter username
2. Add a keyword

And here’s what you’ll get:

Search it on Instagram

Depending on your industry, some companies or influencers will list their email address directly on their Instagram profile:

If you want to do this on a bigger scale, you can use an Instagram email scraper like Influencers Club.

7. Download Your LinkedIn Archive

Planning on reaching out to a lot of your  LinkedIn connections?

Instead of finding individual emails, you can download your LinkedIn archive and extract your prospects’ emails.

Here’s how you can download your LinkedIn connections data:

1. Click your profile icon and go to Settings & Privacy.

2. Click on Data privacy.

3. From the How LinkedIn uses your data list, click on Get a copy of your data.

4. Check the Connections option (and any other info that interests you).

5. Click Request archive.
LinkedIn will make your data available to download in about 10 minutes. Once it’s ready, LinkedIn will inform you through email.

6. Click the Download archive button.

Note: You will only see email addresses for connections who have allowed their connections to see or download their email address.

8. Your newsletter base

If you send a newsletter to your audience, you might want to check if your prospect has already subscribed to get your content. Or, there might be an email address of your lead’s coworker to help you identify the pattern.

You can check that by going to your email marketing tool, opening the entire list, and starting searching.

At lemlist, we use customer.io to send newsletters and lead nurturing campaigns. So anybody from the team can search for a lead through personal or company names:

9. Email lookup tools

If you decide to go with an email lookup tool, all you need to do is add the prospect’s name/website and get all relevant addresses listed.

There are many lookup tools on the market, but you don’t have to test them all. We did it for you, and here’s our list of top recommendations for email lookup tools with free plans or trials.

• lemlist
• RocketReach
• Skrapp
• Find That Email
• Email Finder Expert
• Voila Norbert

10. Data enrichment tools

Sometimes, you might have a list of conference attendees or LinkedIn search results, but none of them will contain the email addresses you want.

This is where data enrichment tools come into play.

Let's imagine the following scenario:

1. You've narrowed down your audience with a LinkedIn search. For example, everybody with the "Marketing Manager" title works in early-stage startups in the USA.
2. Next, you can copy/paste the Search URL into the data scraping tool (such as Phantombuster, which has a free trial) and download their available information.
3. Now, you can upload lead information into a data enrichment tool to find their exact email addresses.

If you want an efficient tool to get your leads’ valid email addresses, try lemlist’s free email finder.

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To clean your leads list, find companies’ domains, or get their social media profiles so you can connect through multiple channels, try lemlist’s free lead enrichment add-on.

11. Get an Introduction

Not only do you get a valid email address, but you increase your chances to convert your lead into a customer if someone introduces you. 

On LinkedIn, you can easily see if you have mutual connections with the person you want to reach out to. 

Use this template to ask for an introduction:

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“Hello, [name]
I noticed you’re connected to [prospect’s name]. I’d like to [relevant reason why you want to reach out to the prospect]. Could you introduce me?”

Can’t find someone to introduce you? No need to worry. There are more ways to get your lead’s email on LinkedIn.

What’s the typical email address structure?

Before diving into tools to find someone's email, it’s important to understand how email addresses are structured. Once you see a company's email pattern, you can quickly get the email addresses of almost anyone who works there.

In most cases, business email addresses use various combinations of an employee's first and last name in front of the company's domain.

This combination is called a "pattern," and in most cases, it looks like this: name@company.com.

Pro tip: Always use professional email addresses to send your cold emails and reach out to professional email addresses. Sending outreach to personal addresses can get you into GDPR troubles and often results in verification and email deliverability issues.

Once you get the right email address, you should focus on your email copy structure.

Key takeaways

Finding out your prospect’s email addresses is essential for your outreach strategy.

For quick results, we recommend:

• lemlist's email finder
• Online email databases
• Email Permutator
• Google advanced search
• Social media accounts
• Newsletter base
• Email lookup tools
• Data enrichment tools

Once you find your prospect’s email address, you’ll be able to reach out and book meetings. 🚀

P.S. Whatever method you decide to choose, don’t forget to verify your email address to strengthen your sender's reputation!