8 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.

In this article, you’ll discover:

• How to recognize email address pattern
• Easy ways to find anyone’s email address for free
• Best free & paid tools to find someone’s email address

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.

Even though it's a very common case, some email addresses don’t follow this specific pattern. In this situation, you can use one of the tactics below. 👇

How to find someone's email address for free?

#1 Automate guessing with 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.

All you need to do is:

1. enter your prospect’s
   - first name
   - last name
   - domain name

…and you will get a list of email address suggestions:

 2. 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 blacklisted by the internet service provider.

#2 Use 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 how 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 way 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:

#3 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. 🎉

#4 Check out their 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 quickly in touch with them.

To access your prospect’s email address:

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

If they put it visible, you can have access to three 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.

#5 Take a look at 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:

#6 Use 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.

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

#7 Try online email databases

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

UpLead is a great option with its free trial:

It’s also natively integrated into lemlist, an email automation tool, so you can send leads directly into your campaign from UpLead:

Since the market is quite competitive, here are other online email databases  we recommend testing out (with free trials or plans):

• ZoomInfo
• Lead411
• Adapt
• Clearbit

#8 Leverage 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. You can next 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 info 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 a tool for you. Simply drop your .csv in there, and they'll email you the enriched file:

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

• Clearbit
• Datanyze
• Pipl
• DiscoverOrg

Key takeaways

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

For quick results, we recommend you:

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

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

P.S. No matter your chosen method, don’t forget to verify your email address to strengthen your sender's reputation!