If you’re trying to find leads, specifically when building lists and guessing email addresses, you need the right tools. In a lot of the consulting I do, I’m asked to find specific buyer contact information as a part of larger outbound marketing programs. How I go about that depends on quite a few different variables.
The most notable are what the budget is for finding these people, and what the campaign design will look like. Campaign design determines what contact information we need, for example do we need phone number as well (which we usually do), or will we be using direct mail (which needs physical addresses). If you’re just looking for emails, and you know someone’s first name, last name, and company URL, I’d recommend a couple of different tools.
The two tools I use most often are Find That Lead and Hunter.io. The subscriptions are pretty cheap, around 20 to 30 bucks a month. Both of them let you upload a list of first names, last names, and company URLs. From there, they’ll come up with guesses as to what the email addresses might be. Neither of the tools are completely accurate and do need to be checked, though they’ll get you roughly 50 to 60% of the way there. Find That Lead will point out addresses that it’s pretty sure are right, and Hunter.io will give you a probability (though I haven’t found that probability to be all that accurate).
What I do then is to start googling addresses you’re not sure of on Google. Put the first and last name with the company URL in parenthesis (or just the company URL in parenthesis) and see what comes up. If you have access to something like Zoominfo, you can type in the company name, see the format of the email addresses for that company (first.lastname@company.com, f.lastname@company.com, etc). From there you can make some guesses. If you do this you can bump that 50-60% accuracy up to around 80 or 85%, which is pretty good.
A tool like Zoominfo is way better than the cheaper tools if you have the budget. It is much more accurate, but it should be, the cost is thousands of dollars per year. In addition to Zoominfo there are a lot of other great databases out there such as DiscoverOrg. Having the right contact information is absolutely critical and not something that should be overlooked.
Contact us if you have any questions about finding email addresses or really anything outbound marketing related!
