How to Find Email Addresses for Link Building Outreach

A successful link building campaign is dependent on many factors. These include prospecting, inspecting opportunities, and finding the correct email addresses of the individuals to whom outreach should be sent. In a previous article, we addressed one of those key steps, content promotion prospecting. In this article, we will examine another critical area in link building; finding contact email addresses.

Finding the email address of the correct contact is an integral part of the outreach process.

The success of your campaign is heavily based on your email reaching the correct contact person, in most cases, the Content Marketing Manager, the Managing Editor or the Webmaster.

So how do you go about finding the right contact information?

There are four methods I will examine in this article.

These include:

Researching the website of the company or publisher you are sending outreach to
Checking the publisher or company’s Facebook page
Using email scrape software such as Hunter and Snov.io
Using Pitchbox or other outreach software

We’ll take a step by step approach to each method to show you how to increase your chances for success.

The tools to be used include Hunter, Snov.io, Facebook, and Pitchbox

Keep reading or take a look at this tutorial before continuing.

Research The Company/Publisher website

One of the first methods I use is to research the website. This may seem a bit obvious, but it’s the perfect place to find a legitimate email address. Usually, there are a few locations where you may find contact information.

The About Us/ Team Page

On occasions, you may find the team profile with names, job titles, and contact information such as displayed on this website.

The Contact US Page

“Contact Us” pages like the one below list all of the email addresses for your particular query. In this example, we see that editorial@fatherly.com would be the contact to pitch a blog post request.

Some websites may have a contact page that requires you to submit information via a form. This is an option if no email address can be found (using the other methods to be discussed further down) or if the publisher specifically requests that you contact them this way to pitch your idea.

Generic email address on the home page or contact page

On other occasions, you may find a generic email address on the home page or contact page. While this may not always be ideal it’s useful if no other contact information is available. Some publishers may have an employee receive all emails and subsequently, forward them to the correct department or team member. Quite often when I have had to send an email to a generic contact, I have received responses stating that my email was forwarded to the correct contact person and in some cases, it was the sole email address used by the publisher.

Check the company/publisher’s Facebook page

Another useful way of finding an email address is by checking the company’s Facebook page. Usually, the website will have a link to their Facebook page on their homepage. Click on the Facebook logo and navigate to the “About” section of the page.

(Facebook)

These emails are often generic but again may be useful if no other email address can be found.

Use Email Finder software

Email scrapers are great tools for finding email addresses. Two that I use regularly are Hunter. and Snov.io. They both offer free accounts giving you around 50 searches per month but that obviously would not be enough for a large amount of outreach so I suggest taking a look at their plans and selecting the pricing plan that fits your budget.

Here’s a look at how Hunter is used to find emails.

A quick and easy way is to download the Hunter toolbar for Google Chrome. After you have installed the toolbar, simply open the website, click on the Hunter toolbar and a list of email addresses will be generated. Once the Hunter toolbar icon lights up orange , that is an indication that it has found email addresses for the website. If no email addresses have been found, the icon is grey.

As long as the information is available, Hunter provides the email address as well as the individual’s role within the company.

A green checkmark like this will appear next to some of the email addresses. This indicates that the email address has been verified. If Hunter has not verified an email, there is usually either a green or amber circle next to the email address with a confidence score. In my experience using the tool, the email addresses are usually correct, even on occasions with confidence scores in the 40s, so it’s always worth a try to reach out.

You may also go to Hunter.io and conduct a domain search for the list of emails.

Go to https://hunter.io/search
Enter the domain name and click search

The list of emails found will then be displayed.

If you have the name of the contact but no email address has been found, Hunter’s email finder tool is useful in this case.

Here’s what this would look like if you wanted to find the email address of the CEO of Bananas Marketing Agency. A quick check of the Bananas Marketing website or a simple Google search lets you know that Andrew Peluso is the CEO. If you simply used the toolbar, with the Bananas Marketing Agency website open, you would see the generic email, hello@bananas.agency.

However, having gotten the name of the CEO from the website, simply follow the steps below to find the email address.

Go to hunter.io
Click on Email Finder
Enter the name of the individual (in this case, Andrew Peluso)
Enter the domain name
Hunter generates an email and lets you know if the email has been verified

This video tutorial demonstrates how this is done.

Hunter also allows you to find email addresses in bulk.

Here’s a step by step guide on how to do this:

Go to https://hunter.io/bulk-searches
Enter a title for the domains
Choose type of input; domain names or company names (I recommend domain names)
Manually enter the list of domains or choose to load the list from a file
Select the column containing the domain names
Set your required filters
Click upload
Before downloading, check the email deliverability. You may choose to download the file with the highest confidence score or download all the results. Hunter states how many credits will be used for each file

This video demonstrates how this is done.

Next, let’s take a look at how to use Snov.io to find emails

Snov.io works similarly to Hunter. To find emails, download the Snov.io Google toolbar.

With the toolbar installed, open the website and click on the toolbar. A list of email addresses will appear with a green circle next to those that have a high confidence score.

Similarly to Hunter, if individual names and job titles are available, a few of them will be displayed at the top. To generate the entire list, click on “Show all” under Prospects in the results generated from the toolbar. This will take you to the Snov.io website which will display a list of names and job titles. To see the email address of the relevant individual, you will need to click “add to list”.

Similarly to Hunter, you may also perform a domain search

Go to https://app.snov.io/domain-search
Enter the domain name and click search

Snov.io also allows you to perform a bulk domain search.

To do this:

Go to https://app.snov.io/
Navigate to Find emails
Select “Bulk Domain Search” from the drop-down list
Click Upload from file or Choose from companies list
Set Search options:
- Choose “Prospects” if you want to include the name and job title or choose “Emails only”
- Select the number of contacts per email
- If necessary you may filter by position or country
Click” Start Search”
Click “Add to list” to retrieve your results

This video takes you step by step through the process.

Find emails using Pitchbox or other Outreach software

I use Pitchbox to send email outreach. At the personalization stage, Pitchbox generates emails relevant to the domain name.

All of the above methods used in combination, significantly increase my chances of finding the correct email for my content promotion or guest blogging campaigns.

Comment below and let me know if there are any other methods that you find helpful for finding emails.

Videos list

How to Find Email Addresses

Hunter Email Finder Tutorial

Hunter Bulk Email Finder

Snovio Bulk Domain Search Tutorial