Finding someone’s email address can sometimes be a challenging task, but if you have the right tools, and know what to do with them, it shouldn’t take more than two minutes to find it. That’s very reasonable if you are searching for an influential contact, right?
Nowadays, if you want to promote your startup, business or product, you have to talk with the right people that might be interested in using your services. One of the best ways to do that is by doing email outreach.
Whether you are trying to search for a founder’s email address or simply want to reach out to the editor of an online magazine, in this post, I’ll show you the exact methods that I use to find email addresses and invite people to our SaaS cross-promotion tool. My email finding techniques and tools work in 95% of the cases. For the rest, I simply use social media to reach out.
A common mistake I see many marketers do is to use the contact form of the websites, and not to do any research at all. They have no idea who of charge in the department they are reaching out nor do they know or care about what the company does. Sending thousands of spammy emails is surely not the secret to success. That’s a lazy technique, and such email messages are usually thrown in the SPAM folder by the customer support representatives.
If you want a good open and response rate for your email outreach campaigns, your message must reach the right person in the company. For example, at my campaigns for Cross.Promo, I’m always reaching out to founders, co-founders, sales managers, CMO’s, CEO’s, Growth Hackers and any other executives that are interested in generating more leads for their business. In case I want to become a contributor to a popular magazine such as Entrepreneur.com, HuffingtonPost.com, etc, I can search for the Chief Editor, Content Managers or a different person that’s in charge of the content on the site.
I always do my research so I can know who’s the best person to contact because that will have a significant impact on my results. My campaigns will have a much higher response rate, and ultimately the conversions and sales will be much better.
Putting in perspective reaching out to the right person against reaching out through the contact form, the differences are mind blowing. You can send 1000 emails through the contact form faster, but you’ll never be close to the results you get when you do proper research and by emailing the right person.
The majority of the tools I’ll share with you are free to try, but almost all have PREMIUM features that will enhance the email searching options.
Finding the right person to contact and their email address
As mentioned above, for Cross.Promo, we are mostly interested in promoting our SaaS product to Founders, Co-Founders, and executives that want to get more sales. That’s because we need to send our message to people that have decision power in the company.
Below I’ll show several examples and the tools that I use to find email addresses.
My cold email outreach process is simple and always follows these steps:
1. Check for “About us” pages
I first look if the business (website) has an “Our Team” or “About us” page where they mention the name of the co-founders or other executives.
For example, on HelpScout, on their “About” page, they have the name of every team member, making my job so much easier. Out of all their “customer champions”, the name of the co-founder is what I was searching.
Hi Nick! 🙂
2. Find the right person on LinkedIn
While most businesses have an about us page where everyone can see the name of all team members, it’s not always the case with all sites. If I can’t find the name of the person I should reach out on their site, I always use LinkedIn search.
Sometimes if the company I want to contact is too big and they have over 1000 employees, reaching out to the founders might not be the best solution. That’s because they probably get hundreds of unsolicited emails every day, and it’s very likely that they’ll miss my message. In such cases, I try to reach out to the sales or marketing managers.
On LinkedIn, you can do different types of searches. The ones I use most often are:
- Company name + Founder
- Company name + Co-Founder
- Company name + CMO
- Company name + Sales Manager
- Company name + Marketing Manager
- Company name + Growth Hacker
Note that if you only input the company name in LinkedIn, you can see how many employees it has.
On the business page, you have a module on the right side and a link that will list all employees that are on LinkedIn.
After finding the name of the person I want to contact, I just need to go to their LinkedIn profile and from there my tools will do the magic for me. Luckily, almost everyone is on LinkedIn, especially people that are in the tech world.
Because sometimes there might be several individuals with the same name, when doing a LinkedIn search, I also include the company name. For example, if I want to find Steve Smith’s LinkedIn profile, I include the name of the business where he works.
3. Find email addresses
Now that I know the name of the person I want to contact, and found his LinkedIn Profile, I have to search for his email address. LinkedIn has a “contact info” button, but that rarely has the email address of the user.
Instead, I can use the tool called Email Hunter which also has an excellent Chrome extension. It’s the best tool you can use to find email addresses and from my experience, it works accurately in at least 80% of the cases. After installing the Chrome extension, next to “Connect”, I’ll have a trigger button on all LinkedIn profiles that I visit. It will look and work like shown below.
That’s so easy, right? 🙂
But there will be cases when the tool will not able to find the email that you want. For example, on Nick’s profile, the tool can’t extract his email address.
There’s no reason to worry though, because I have another tool that can do the job when Email Hunter fails.
The other tool that I use is called LeadIQ, and it can extract even more data. It also comes with a Chrome Extension.
The tool works a bit differently. There will be no button on the LinkedIn page. Instead, you have to click on the extension button from your Chrome browser, and then a new window will pop up. There, you’ll find a list of all LinkedIn profiles that are opened in your browser. First, you have to create a list and make sure to connect it with your Google Spreadsheet profile and then click the plus button from the new window. Here’s a screenshot.
After adding the prospect to your Google Spreadsheet, the tool will automatically detect the company email address and also search for a personal email. Besides the email addresses, LeadIQ also extracts the name of the company, full name, job position, social profile, website, etc.
And that’s how I managed to get Nick’s business email but also his personal email. Whenever I have two emails from the same person, I tend to send my message to the business email, but also CC the personal email address. Sometimes I CC other colleagues or co-founders as well, just to make sure that more people see my message. If one of them is not interested in my proposal, the other might be.
But that’s not the only way I use LeadIQ. Here’s another technique that might be even more exciting for you.
If you are interested in promoting your startup or SaaS business, do a search on LinkedIn for the job position you want to contact. For example, LinkedIn can show me a list of all Co-Founders that are located in the United States, and they work in the Computer Software Industry.
The result?! 35.607 potential leads for Cross.Promo.
LeadIq can extract the email address of all profiles that are listed on my Chrome browser page. You don’t have to go on each profile page manually and then use the extension.
Just click on the extension button and then click on +All, as shown in the screenshot below.
Then I repeat the process on the 2nd page of LinkedIn Search and that’s how I find thousands of potential leads to promote our startup and also get their contact information.
By using LeadIQ, Email Hunter and LinkedIn, you’ll find anyone’s email address.
If you are using Gmail, there’s another good alternative from HubSpot. The tool is called SideKick and it helps you find email addresses and also know when someone opens your emails.
After installing the Gmail extension, you’ll have a button at the top, named “Connect”. Click on that, and then on “find an email”.
All you have to do then is enter the name of the company from where you want to find contacts and the tool will do the rest for you. Here’s a GIF showing how easy it is to find an email address with SideKick.
How to contact potential leads and promote your startup
After having the email addresses of the persons I want to contact, I usually prefer to reach out to everyone manually so that I can personalize my email message. By personalizing I don’t refer to just adding the person or business name, but also include one or two sentences that will make my email not look like spam. It’s also important to use some great email subject lines to get more attention to my message and increase the open rate.
If you are looking for a solution to automatically contact all your prospects, NinjaOutreach is the best choice. You can manually import the list you have generated from LeadIQ and even personalize your messages by selecting where each parameter is located in the spreadsheet. Here’s how to use NinjaOutreach.
1. First, you have to download the spreadsheet in a CSV format. Click on File – Download As – Comma-separated values.
2. In NinjaOutreach, create a list and then choose to “import a list”.
On the following page upload the file you have downloaded from Google Spreadsheets and at “provider format”, select Custom CSV file.
3. Match columns for each parameter, that you want to use or personalize. Leave it blank when that data is not relevant for you. These are the columns/parameters that are the most useful to use: Email, First Name, Last Name, Company Name, Company website and Position.
Here’s how I usually match them:
- Email – Email 1
- First Name – First Name
- Last Name – Last Name
- Full Name – Full Name
- Position – Notes
- Company name – Website title
- Company website – URL
4. Create an email template and personalize it.
After importing the list, whenever I want to include the company name in my email message or subject, I can refer to it using this parameter [Website Title] or for the job position I can use [Notes].
5. Send emails using NinjaOutreach or schedule them to be sent automatically.
If you go to “Outreach mode”, you can send each email one by one by clicking the “send email” button. Alternately, you can select to automate emails and send a bunch of them every day. All your messages will use the template and parameters you have selected in your email template, making each email have a personal feeling.
That’s it guys. That’s how I find anyone’s email address, and this is how I promote Cross.Promo by email outreach. Email Hunter, LeadIQ, and NinjaOutreach are my tools of choice.
If you have any questions or want to share the outreach methods that you use, feel free to write a comment. What’s your favorite tool for finding email addresses?
Don’t forget to follow our startup journey. We are building the first cross promotion tool for SaaS and online businesses and we decided to make everything transparent. I’ll share tips and strategies that you can apply at your own startup.