Usually these are the steps I'll take -
Firstly, look at the whois of the current domain and look up the registrants name on Linkedin. Sometimes you get lucky and the registrant is the person you're looking for. If not, you still might be able to find the email format for their organisation i.e.
[email protected],
[email protected] etc. If there is privacy, not to worry, we can still find what we need later on.
Then I'll go to Linkedin, look up the company and search until I find the person I want to contact. Once I know their name, I can use the email format I discovered previously to decipher what their email is. For example, if the persons name is Dave Johns, I might now know his email address is
[email protected].
If you weren't lucky enough to find the email format in the whois information, there are a few other options.
- Go to mailtester.com and try different combinations till you get the right email (some mailservers don't allow verification, so if that's the case, I move onto the next option.)
- Try searching for different strings with exact matches on Google e.g "[email protected]" (with the " "). Hopefully you'll get some results from meeting minutes, press releases, articles, interviews etc.
- Sometimes those at the very top are protective giving out their email address, so if step two doesn't work, you'll need to search for someone lower in the organisation to find the email format. You can try lower level people within the business (pr & marketing people are great because they put their contact on everything), so repeat step two with these names.
- Last resort of just searching for "email @business.com" and hoping you get a hit.
Popular email format combinations to try are - JohnSmith@, John@, JohnS@ JSmith@, J.Smith@, John.S@ John.Smith@
In my experience, the smaller organisations tend to have John@, whilst the larger ones are more likely to use something with a dot such as John.S@
I do this all day, everyday with about a 95% success rate.
So who makes the call? CFO, Marketing head or IT Head?
