You can’t build your business without your potential clients – it is a fact; however, it is rather hard to accomplish your goal just discovering the results Google offers you. Why so? Because it is too time-consuming and, of course, you must clearly know what clients you need.
Apparently, you might ask yourself:
“How can I find clients I need to promote my product?”
“How to build an effective communication with my target audience?”
I already know the answers to these questions. Furthermore, I will share with you my own experience in finding any person’s private email address you need. Why is it so important? Because there is no better way in promoting your service or product than personal communication with your client.
This guide will reveal you the following lessons that I’ve learnt:
- Need a help in finding relevant people – ask google.
- Personal and impersonal emails – the difference is obvious and why the personal ones are far better to use.
- Two ways of email search.
- Manual search VS Special services’ help.
I am pretty sure – my own experience and lessons I’ve learnt in hunting for emails will help you increase your email outreach campaign for 90%.
1 Google + Ahrefs Site Explorer = Relevant Audience
As you already guessed, Google is your ‘first aid’ if you, of course, if you know what to ask it. This huge database will reveal you TOP 10 articles on its very first page according to your inquiry. Afterwards, your first step is done.
The next step is to make a research with the help of Ahrefs Site Explorer. You should put a competitor’s material into a searching box and explore backlinks to it.
Afterwards, you can use filters to narrow down the results Site Explorer provides you with to get the freshest backlinks you need. For instance, you can filter by date, language, link type etc.
The only disadvantage, in this case, is that you will have to check all backlinks manually. When your spreadsheet will be filled up with relevant people, you may start your hunt for their personal emails.
ADVICE: follow the ‘formula’ I suggested you.
“But why do you need only PRIVATE emails?”
This question is to the point and I’m going to answer it further.
2 Personal and Impersonal Emails
Let’s say you have already found a bunch of people you want to impress with your awesome service. Some of them have posted their personal emails right beneath the article; the others – have not. Why does it happen? Why people prefer to avoid sharing their personal contacts? We can only guess…Anyway, there is a way huge difference in sending the messages using a personal email and impersonal one.
You might ask me: “WHY? Does it really matter what email address to use?”
My response – YES! Let me explain why.
When you send a message using a private email, you will have at least 80-90% that the message will be read. But when you’re dealing with impersonal emails, you will have to build a communication with a third part.
My own practice proved to me that this way is tricky. Usually, a third party suggests you a person’s Twitter account (as like in my case) or ignore you at all. According to this fact, it is far better to make a prospecting for private emails.
ADVICE: set your sights to finding PERSONAL emails.
“How to do a hunt for private emails?”
3 The Ways of Searching Private Emails
Basically, there are only two ways of prospecting personal email addresses – manually by searching for data within social media platforms and by using specialized tools.
The first method is a way time-consuming and less profitable in the case of positive results. I’ve spent hours ‘scanning’ a huge amount of accounts within such services as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+; nevertheless, the result was not as good as gold – only 15% of success rate. Let’s consider this taking me as an example:
Taking into consideration extra tools I must admit – you will increase the success rate of finding personal emails for 85%. Impressive, isn’t it? Furthermore, you will definitely save your time.
ADVICE: try to combine both methods, thus the percentage of success rate will be approximately 90%.
“What additional tools are better to use?”
Actually, this question needs to be highlighted a bit detailed. So, let’s see what I am going to suggest you.
4 Manual Search vs Additional Tools
As I’ve already advised you above, you should combine both methods in hunting for emails. If you prefer to work quickly and efficiently, thus you should take into consideration the following tools:
- Findthat.email. Perhaps the best tool for ‘email hunt’! It helps you find any email address using person’s name and website this person related to. Moreover, it has an option of verifying email addresses + Chrome extension that helps you scan person’s LinkedIn profile in terms of searching email address.
- Voilanorbert.com. Very powerful and resultative tool. If you know person’s full name and his website’s domain, Norbert will do the rest of work for you. Free version provides you with 50 credits; Afterwards, you will have to upgrade your account for 10$ (a standard plan).
- Hunter.io. I like this one as well! The service provides you with all related emails according to the website’s domain you need to find. However, there are cases when it gives you a zero result (then I use findthat.email or Norbert)
- Rocketreach.co. Believe me or not, however there are, even, cases when Norbert suggests nothing back in return. In this case I advise you to use rocketreach.co. This service offers you the whole data on a person you are looking for: social media accounts and, the most important, email addresses.
- Website.informer.com. Actually, I almost never use this service – the average percentage of the positive results it gives is too low. Nevertheless, it provides with the full data on the website you are interested in. In the case when the person you need is the owner of the website, the tool suggests you his personal email as well.
I am pretty sure – opposing both methods is silly enough; only a smart combination of them will do your job.
ADVICE: use these tools only in the case if you can’t find emails manually.
5 Conclusion
The process of searching private emails is very complicated and it takes lots of time. You will spend days in prospecting data you need. My own experience is a good example of it; following my recommendations and keeping in mind my own lessons you will increase your outreach campaign for 90%.
If you have any other ideas on searching private emails then feel free to share your knowledge with me. And, please, don’t forget to ‘like’ and share my article as well :)
Sergey Aliokhin is an Outreach manager at Ahrefs. He spends most of the time discovering and learning SEO and Internet Marketing tendencies. His primal goal is to study and practice new aspects of an outreach strategy. In his spare time, he likes to spend his time with family, visit specialized sports club, study martial arts. If he has nothing to do at all, he prefers reading books on science-fiction and playing the bass guitar.
SIDENOTE: if you need more information about outreach & content promotion, you should check out this post.