How to Find People’s Contact Information

Last week, I shared my thoughts on how to structure effective cold emails.  Today, I figured I’d follow up with how to consistently find the emails of people you want to get in contact with.  The two go hand-in-hand and together, they have opened doors to new opportunities that I previously thought impossible.  When you’re resourceful and looking in the right places, it’s amazing how much information is readily available on the internet. After you read this post, you’ll never have to send an email to a generic address such as info@[domain], jobs@[domain] or sales@[domain] ever again.

NAME SYNTAX @ DOMAIN

Domain – almost 100% of the time, a person’s email address is tied to the domain name of the company they work for.  For example, the CEO of http://www.xyz.com will use the email domain of @xyz.com.  If they’re an international company, watch out for domain discrepancies (i.e. @xyzusa.com, @xyz.co.uk, @xyz.ca, etc.).

Name Syntax –  the second step is to figure out how the company codes names for their emails.  To find this, I typically do a Google search using *@[domain].  The purpose of this search is to pull any information available on the internet that has those given characters together.  Often, you’ll find PR contacts of the target company who make their information publically available.  Record the name code (i.e. firstname.lastname, firstletter.lastname, firstname only, etc.) and apply that code to the person that you’re trying to contact.

Additional Tips

Rapportive (courtesy of Keane Tan) – If your target has their email recorded anywhere online (i.e. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), Rapportive can help verify whether the email address you found was correct.  It’s not really its intended function, but when you enter emails into Gmail, Rapportive will pull information automatically.  If your contact shows up, it means the email is correct.

Who Is (courtesy of Vino Jeyapalan) – When someone registers a domain name online, they need to indicate their email address.  If that person opts out of a privacy protection setting, their listed email address is made available on WhoIs.  This approach works better for smaller companies or personal websites when the individuals who register the site are typically the key people within the company.

BCC – another method that I’ve seen used a lot is the blind carpon copy (or BCC) function.  When you can’t get the exact email address, you can simply list all of the potential combinations under the bcc field when you’re sending your email.  The risk, however, is that you may send an email to the wrong person, or the person you’re contacting becomes suspicious of why you listed them as a BCC contact.  I prefer to test the options listed above first and only use this as a last resort.