cold emailing

9 ways to find someone’s email address for free

Mihaela Cicvaric
Last Update
Feb 19, 2024
Reading Time
7 min.

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):

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.

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:

advanced google search

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.
search for target keywords on google

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:

search company website with google search operators

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:

find email on the website

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

subscribe to newsletter to get someone's email adress

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”
find email adress on LinkedIn

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
advanced twitter search

And here’s what you’ll get:

advanced twitter search result

Search it on Instagram

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

find email on instagram

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

7. 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:

find emails in marketing newsletter base

8. 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.

9. 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 a simple drag-and-drop interface, Dropcontact, with its free trial, is the tool for you. Simply drop your .csv in there, and they'll email you the enriched file:

DropContact interface

Furthermore, if you wish to explore the most suitable data enrichment tools for yourself, we have prepared a list of our recommendations with plans or trials:

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.

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!

Mihaela Cicvaric
Content Marketing Manager @ lempire | Sharing everything you need to get replies to your cold emails

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