Email is one of the best ways to establish first contact within a professional context. For example, it is often the first choice when pitching a business idea or a novel product to attract potential clients or stakeholders.

Email addresses are, however, not always readily accessible. Fortunately, if you know a person’s name, there’s a good chance you can find their contact details. Here are some proven ways to do just that.

1. Use People Search Websites

One of the easiest ways to find anyone’s email address is by using people search websites. These platforms work similarly to old-school phone number books, except that they provide more than just a phone number. One useful people search engine is Nuwber, where you can search a person’s name, phone number, and address to find their email. In addition, you will also find plenty of other information, such as the person’s professional details, social media profiles, financial records, and much more.

2. Visit a Company Website or Social Media Profile

If you are trying to find the email address of a person who works in a certain company, you may be able to get that information directly on the company’s webpage. Companies typically provide contact details of some of the staff in a particular section, such as the About Us page. If you are lucky, you will get the email of the person you want to contact directly from that page.

If you can’t find anything useful on the company’s page, try its social media profiles. LinkedIn can be especially beneficial. Plus, many of the enterprise’s employees might have profiles on the platform and can be contacted directly through it.

3. Subscribe to the Contact’s Newsletter

In some situations, such as when you are trying to contact an individual who owns a business, subscribing to the company’s newsletter can be the easiest way to find the person’s digital address. While such newsletters will often be sent from a business email, there’s a good chance that the replies go directly to a personal one.

4. Check Your Own Email List

If you have a newsletter, it might be the case that some of your prospects are already subscribed to it. A search through your contact list could reveal some useful information about your subscribers, and email marketing software can help you streamline this process. More specifically, such platforms typically provide advanced search and segmentation features, which allows you to categorize subscribers based on their industry, location, or engagement level.

5. Search on Personal Websites and Blogs

Many people in business are interested in collaborating with other entrepreneurs, which might help them boost their sales. For this reason, they make some of their contact information, especially email addresses, publicly available.

One thing to note is that businesspeople get a lot of spam and may have a hard time separating useful messages from non-useful ones. As such, if you contact a business person through a public address, make sure your message looks as different as possible from an average spam one.

6. Google It

OK, you have probably thought of this already. However, the chances of finding an email address on Google will increase if you use the right search query method. The most common search query used for this purpose is Name+ email/contact / [Name] + company + email/contact. Other search queries you may want to try include site: domain + name + contact/email or name@company.com.

These formulas may look slightly complicated, but you just need to understand what each element represents. The plus sign (+), for instance, acts as a directive, telling the search engine to display results containing both the name and the term mail. The slash (/) acts as an “or” operator, telling the search engine to provide results that contain either term. The squares ([]) help you distinguish between search terms.

By pairing a site with a domain, such as in “Site: domain”, you can filter results from specific websites. For example “site: domain + name contact/email” will help you find digital addresses linked to a particular website or company. Finally, if you put a keyword between quotation marks, you are telling Google to search exactly for the keyword between them.

7. Leverage an Email Permutator

Sometimes there’s simply no way of finding an address, and the only thing you can do is to start guessing. Since many digital addresses contain a person’s first and last name, one guessing strategy is to combine their names in multiple ways and hope for the best.

You can make this guessing process simpler and more exact by using an email permutator, a tool that requires some terms as input and provides a list of all possible combinations of these terms as output. For example, you can use a first name, last name, and company name as input terms, and you will get a list of possible email addresses based on multiple combinations of these terms.

However, guessing comes with some risks that you should be aware of. In some cases, you will end up with email addresses that are not owned by the person of your interest. Unavoidably, much of the output will consist of results that do not exist at all.

Before sending a message to any of these addresses, you must find out which ones are correct. To find out if an address exists and avoid bounces, you can use an email verifier. If several addresses given by the permutator are real, you will need to find out which ones belong to the person of interest before sending the message.

Bottom Line

Some email addresses can be found in a matter of minutes, especially the ones belonging to companies or high-profile employees. If one strategy doesn’t work, there’s always a good chance that another will.

Sometimes it’s necessary to combine multiple strategies to get positive results. For instance, you can use a permutator to get a list of addresses, then use an email validator to determine which ones are correct, and, finally, do a Google search to determine which address belongs to the person that interests you.

The best way, however, to start searching for an address is by testing the strategies that require the least of your time. For instance, you could start by going on people search websites and entering the available information. If that doesn’t work, then do a more extensive search on a company’s website. If that doesn’t work either, start engaging in more time-consuming strategies that may or may not provide the necessary results.