3 tips for finding a business email address

When setting up your outbound strategy, your main objective must certainly be to reach your target audience.

For that, no secret. It is necessary Know your prospects well, by identifying their names, their functions and especially their email addresses. A valid email address is the key to running effective cold email campaigns.

Today, only 8.5% of emails from prospecting get a response. Not an incredible stat... even quite discouraging.

So you have no choice but to spend time finding someone's email address, especially since your future customer does not know you yet. We assure you, by doing this you increase your chances of commitment and success.

In this article, we give you tips for finding the right email address, without wasting your time!

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Your objective: to reduce the bounce rate

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Don't you know the KPIs? For each marketing campaign or sales action you must monitor your performance thanks to them.

Well, The bounce rate is a KPI, as are the open rate, click rate, and response rate. This is the percentage of your emails that are never received by your prospects (because their address contains a typo, because they do not work in the company,...)

The better your contact data, the lower the bounce rate.

Logical you might say, but crucial, because for sure: If your email does not reach its destination, it is not ready to generate an appointment for you 🤡

In plain language: Being able to find a correct and verified email address is the basis for selling well.

So let's start the hostilities with 10 tips for having the best possible contact database. 💪

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Tip 1: go to the website, Google or Linkedin (by hand)

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Through the website

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First thing, check the contact details of your contact directly on the company's website. Generally, SMEs tend to display contact information openly.

With a bit of luck, you can find the name of the publishing director in the “Legal Information” section of a website. It often happens that their email address is mentioned there, which can help you deduce the email address of your prospect.

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Through Google

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Try these combinations in the Google search bar:

👉 site:linkedin.com + "@nomentreprise .com” + email

👉 site:twitter.com + "@nomentreprise .com” + email

👉 site:instagram.com + "@nomentreprise .com” + email

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You can also try these:

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👉 [name] + email address

👉 [name] + contact (or) contact details (or) contact me

👉 [name] + company domain name

👉 [name] + email

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Via Linkedin

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LinkedIn is the number 1 B2B network in the world. The majority of active professionals update their profiles regularly to maximize their visibility and promote contact. It is possible (but quite rare) that the contact directly left their professional email address on their profile. This is more often the case with salespeople.

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The limits of these email search methods

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It's true, it costs nothing to search for email addresses on the web for free, but the effectiveness is often limited. You could be wasting valuable time, but your value is certainly elsewhere. Like preparing high-performance email sequences to be sure to get feedback!

Another point: it is to More and more rare to find professional email addresses directly on the web. Like you, businesses are aware of the consequences of making their team's email addresses public online. This opens the door to relentless and, let's not lie to each other, often unwanted communication.

So yes, we presented it to you above, you can try your luck using email address patterns or “patterns”:

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• prenom.nom@entreprise.fr
• p.nom@entreprise.fr
• pnom@entreprise.fr

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So, if you know only one valid email address within a company, you can try to guess the other addresses using the first and last name of your contact.

The catch is that this method does not allow you to check the validity of the email address, or to know if it is a “catch-all” address. You therefore expose yourself to exploding your bounce rate.

It is for these reasons that the search for patterns or the manual search via Google, Linkedin or on company websites has its limits.

So what do we do?

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Tip 2: choose enrichment software

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Numerous on the market (Hunter.io, Lusha, Kaspr, VoilaNorbert, Drop Contact...), they can find you the email address directly either from the Linkedin profile, or when you add the company's domain name, or even the name and surname of the contact in their search bar.

lookout : use these tools ethically and comply with GDPR laws, especially the collection of emails without appropriate consent. Some Email Finders are more ethical than others, like Dropcontact.

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The advantage of these tools is that you can go fast and get a lot of contact back in a short time. Especially since some offer super interesting features to boost your databases. For example:

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👉 CRM integration (Hubspot, Pipedrive, SalesForce...) in the tool, making it possible to find validated and verified nominative email addresses, qualify each email address, verify each of these addresses in the CRM, and sometimes even identify and merge duplicate contacts and companies, add citizenship, LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn profile, contact function, and all the legal information of your company...

👉 A drag and drop of files (Excel, Google Sheet, Numbers, in CSV format) to enrich and clean it up.

👉 Professional address search directly through an API (n8n, Zapier, or Make): for example, you can enrich and find the email address in real time from a LinkedIn profile.

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Tip 3: Offer to get a valid and verified email address

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The old school method, but still very effective: ask for the email address of your audience or prospects by offering them, via a Landing page, quality content (white paper) or an exclusive event.

Through a form, you can collect personal information (first name, last name, email, company website, etc.), according to your offer.

Any advice? The higher the value of what you are offering, the more information you can ask for in return.

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To make sure you only get professional email addresses, our reco is to block registrations from personal email addresses (such as those ending with @gmail .com, @hotmail .com, @icloud .com, etc.).

Creating a landing page and exclusive content takes time and is a real investment. This allows you not only to capture the interest of your potential customers, but also to obtain their nominative B2B email addresses.

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