Tweets, they get lost fast.
Direct messages get ignored all the time.
But the email inbox is a very sacred place and arguably the best way to get someone's attention.
And in this video, you're going to learn how to find someone's email address with supreme accuracy.
Stay tuned.
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What's up marketers, Sam Oh here with Ahrefs,
the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate
your niche.
Now, email outreach is a vital part of growing your search traffic. And in order to be able
to reach out to people, you need to find a way to contact them.
So let's not make this tutorial any longer than it has to be and get into the only email hunting
tactics you'll need to make your next outreach campaign a hit.
Let's get started.
The first tool is called Hunter.
You can sign up for a free account at hunter.io.
There are a couple ways you can find email addresses using this tool.
First is with their Chrome extension.
Just go to the company domain of the person you want to contact, and if the icon is lit
up orange, then it means Hunter has some emails on file.
Click on the icon, and you'll see a list of emails that Hunter has scraped for this domain.
Now, with email outreach, it's best that you contact a specific person so that a.)
you can address them by name, and b.)
someone like Bill Gates isn't going to tweet your article from the Microsoft Twitter account.
So, for single author sites, the extension should do just fine.
But for larger companies, you may want to contact a specific person like the content
marketing manager.
So you can go to Hunter's website and go to the "Finder" tool in the menu bar.
Next, enter in the first and last name of the contact, and their company domain.
And you'll be able to find their email almost instantly.
Hunter is extremely fast and great if you outsource your email finding tasks.
But a lot of their results are based on "best guesses" from patterns they get from scraped
data, which can produce mixed results to say the least.
The next tool is Clearbit. And this is another email finding tool that works as a Chrome
extension and lives inside your Gmail inbox.
And like Hunter, you'll get 100 free credits per month.
After you're all set up, click on Clearbit up here, then find emails.
Next, enter in the company domain
and then the name of the person you want to contact.
And right away, you'll see the email address as well as a blue checkmark, which means that
the email is verified.
The good thing about Clearbit is that the emails they find are almost always bang on.
The bad thing?
By using their service, you're allowing them to view your contacts.
Now while the first two tools are great for finding "@company.com" email addresses, some
people still use "freemail" accounts like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or dare I say it... AOL.
So the next way is to find non-domain.com email addresses.
And there are a few ways that you can do this.
First is to check the website's About or Contact page.
Oftentimes, small websites will leave their contact details there, as you can see in this example.
Another way to find non-domain emails is to search their entire domain using a search
operator like this: site:domain.com and then "gmail.com" as a
phrase match.
And you'll see the email address for this website in the meta description, which
is just an excerpt from their post.
Finally, is to search through people's Twitter feeds.
So rather than filtering through potentially thousands of tweets, you can just google
site:twitter.com/theirusername/status
and then some footprints like gmail.com or yahoo.com or hotmail.com or anything else
that's relevant.
And you can see that this person has tweeted their email address at some point.
The final way you can do this is using Email Permutator paired with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
These tools work perfectly together.
First, start with Email Permutator and enter in the first name, last name, and domain of
the person you want to contact.
The good thing about this tool is that you can click the "More Domains" button and add
in another website like the person's personal blog.
The tool will then bring up all possible combinations of the person's email address based on your input.
Next, make sure that the LinkedIn Sales Navigator extension is installed on Chrome and start
a new message.
Now, paste in all of the different email addresses and hover over each one.
If you see a profile in the Navigator sidebar, then you've found the email address that the
person is using on LinkedIn.
From our own experiences, around 70% of email addresses use one of these patterns.
Alright great.
So after using these different tactics, you should've been able to find someone's email address.
Now the final step of the puzzle is to make sure that the email address you found is actually valid.
There are a ton of email verification tools.
My favorite is called NeverBounce.
Now after you've created an account, click on "Validate Single Email" and enter in the
email address you want to verify.
You should see right away whether the email is valid, invalid, or a catchall domain.
This tool is an awesome extra layer you can add if you want to scale your email outreach.
Just click on Apps and you'll have the option to build your own custom integration, or connect
it with Zapier so you can integrate it with Google Sheets or thousands of other tools
that you might use in your marketing stack.
There are a lot of other email finding tools out there like Voila Norbert, Find That Email,
Any Find Email, and the list goes on.
Now rather than trying every tool out there, give a few of them a shot, see which ones
are producing the best results for you, and spend that extra time focusing on sending
a good outreach email.
Now, make sure to subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials.
And if you want us to build on this video with a complete tutorial on email outreach,
make sure to leave a comment and let us know.
We like creating what you love.
So keep grinding away and I'll see you in the next tutorial.