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How to Find Someone’s Email Address and Send the Perfect Pitch

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In episode 25, I’m going to show you how to find someone’s email address and what to do with this privileged information.

In the words of Google:

Do no evil.

Let’s go.

If you’re looking to spam people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, or Sam Oh (that’s me), then you’re in the wrong place.

But I’m guessing you’re one of the good people, and you want to find email addresses with good intention.

Whether you want to contact new leads about your products, start a conversation with influencers or pitch an investor your start-up idea, then you will love the systematic and free process I use to find email addresses in under a minute.

Today, we’re going to cover two things.

The first is how to find an email address from something as simple as a name, Twitter ID, LinkedIn Profile or Facebook page.

Second are the best practices on what to do with contact information when doing email outreach.

Let’s jump right in.

How do you find a person’s email address?

There are two free tools I want to introduce to you.

The first is Hunter and the second is Rapportive.

Hunter is one of the best email guessing tools I’ve come across. You’ll need to go to hunter.io and create a free account.

With free accounts, you get 150 free email lookups each month.

After you’ve created your account, there are a few ways you can use it.

If you want the email addresses from a specific company, then you can search a domain. Here, I’ll search for apple.com.

It’ll load near instantly, and you can see a list of email addresses that have been verified for accuracy. In total, our good friend Hunter has found over 6,000 email addresses from Apple employees.

If you want to find a specific person’s email address, then that’s where Hunter’s Google Chrome extension comes into play.

To install it, open up Google Chrome and go to hunter.io.

Then scroll to the bottom of the page and click the “Add to Chrome” button.

Confirm adding the extension, and then you’ll see a new icon in your Chrome toolbar.

This is used in two ways.

If you go to a website, then Hunter will instantly tell you if they have any emails in their database.

So let’s go to apple.com.

Click on the icon, and you’ll see a list of emails come up.

The second function and most practical function for most of us is to find an individual’s email address.

The Chrome extension works with LinkedIn data to pull out individual’s email addresses.

So ideally, we need to find them on LinkedIn.

Let’s run a random example. Let’s say I want to email someone who just followed me on twitter. I’ll look through my list of followers and pick someone.

In this case, I’ll choose this gentleman here.

Instead of searching on LinkedIn, you can use a Google search operator like this:

Site:linkedin.com “Andre Piazza” (in quotation marks).

You can add a company name if it’s a common name like John Smith to filter through the noise.

I’ll click on the first one and then verify that the profile picture is the same person in the Twitter profile.

Once you click it, you’ll notice a new button here that says, Hunter. If you don’t see it, then no worries, you can use the icon at the top.

All you do is click that hunter button and let them do the rest of the work.

And in seconds, you have the email address of the person you were looking for.

You’ll notice here that there is a confidence score. This email address has one of 74%. Not the best. Just to be sure, you need to use a second tool called Rapportive.

Rapportive is the email verifier, and LinkedIn created it. It takes the uncertainty out of email guessers and gives you more confidence on whether the email is accurate or not.

Rapportive is a browser extension for Gmail. First, you’ll need to download the tool. Just search for “download Rapportive” and it should be the first result.

After it’s installed, open up your Gmail account and compose a new message.

Copy and paste that email address you found from Hunter, and if it’s correct, you’ll notice that the LinkedIn profile image shows in the right sidebar.

Rapportive doesn’t have every single email to profile combination out there, so don’t worry too much if you don’t see their picture.

You can do this as many times as you want and you’ll find that email hunter’s success rate is out of this world.

Okay. So finding email addresses isn’t so hard. Now, what do you do after you get these emails?

You email them.

Best practices when sending outreach emails

Before you do that, there are two things I want you to acknowledge.

  1. No matter how great you think your ideas, products or services are, they won’t think the same at first impression.
  2. If you can’t get their attention in the first two sentences, then consider the time you spend writing the email a waste.

Harsh words, but an even truer reality.

The people you’re emailing probably already get a ton of emails. They get pitches all day from automated spam bots that say crap like:

“Your search engine presence is real low. Pay me, and I’ll make you rank on page one of Google overnight.”

That’s the world we live in.

Last but not least, you are a complete stranger and in their eyes, possibly one of the shady spammers.

No matter what your intention is to email them, there are a few principles and best practices to follow when doing email outreach.

Keep your emails short

The first is to keep it short.

If you write an essay with your life story, then you’re that person on the bus that people don’t want to sit beside.

Busy people get a lot of emails. If you can’t get their attention from the subject line and the first two sentences of the email, then they probably won’t read it.

On top of that, the instant visualization of length will be a determining factor if they’ll read the email at all.

Take a look at this picture.

pitch-1

Now look at this.

pitch-2

In the first email, you’d likely read the first sentence and evaluate if it’s worth reading the rest. The second email, you’d probably be overwhelmed by the length, move on and never return.

Don’t include links in your first email

Second is to avoid spam goggles.

When you get emails from unknown people, the last thing you want to do is click on a link because of the malware and email viruses going around.

Instead, you want to start a conversation. When you start that conversation, you try and peak their interest in what you have to offer rather than going straight in for the hard sell.

Don’t use links in your first email, and you’ll see email response rates increase like crazy.

Personalize your email

Next, you should personalize your email. Rather than starting off with “Hi friend,” or “Hey there,” start off with Hi [Name].

At the very least, it shows that you’re not sending a mass email and that you’ve at least done enough research to know their name.

You should also go the extra mile to personalize it based on the context of your conversation. For example, if you’re looking to do outreach for a guest post, you might want to mention something about other guest posts you’ve enjoyed or how you were able to get results from it.

Here’s an example:

Hey Mark,

I really enjoyed reading Sarah’s guest post “How to find email addresses and sell to complete strangers.” I followed her guide-step-by-step for the past 6 months and increased revenue by 387%.

I’d love to write up a case-study for your blog using Sarah’s exact strategy and a few tweaks that I made to do it. Is this something you and your readers would be interested in?

Cheers,

Sam

This example email is short and sweet. Personalization is done by addressing the editor by name, showing that you’ve read another person’s guest post, and how you were able to get results.

The pitch is short and is obviously going to add value to their community. Worst case scenario, he says no.

Build trust in your first sentence

The last and final point is this. If possible, build confidence in the first sentence of your email.

There is no better way to open up a conversation with some trust. You can start off with:

Hi Mark, I’m Sam, founder of Money Journal. Money Journal is a blog where I provide actionable online marketing strategies…

The thing is, Mark probably knows other blogs with great marketing strategies and he’s probably thinking:

I don’t care.

Let’s go through a few ways to build an instant connection.

First is the referral. If you can get an introduction from a mutual friend or acquaintance than you’re in a great spot. Your first email might look like this:

Hi Sally,

I was talking with our mutual friend James McDonald of [Company Name] and he mentioned the start-up you’re working on. It sounds like an amazing project and I’d love to help out in anyway.

Can we jump on a call for a quick 5 minute chat? I have a few ideas that will kick-start your business. If I can’t personally help, then I know a lot of people in the start-up space that would love to connect with you.

Let me know.

Cheers,

Sam

The truth is you probably don’t have a referral. And the person you’re contacting might be someone of influential status.

The easiest way to grab their attention in the first sentence is to buy something of theirs. You might say something like:

Hi Sally,

I bought your book “Productivity without sacrificing hours” and finished reading it for the second time. I have to say, Chapter 3 on 21st Century Thinking completely changed the way I approach my day-to-day tasks.

I know you’re busy, but would love to have you on my podcast (2 million downloads to date). Recordings generally run about 20 minutes and I will adjust my calendar to a time that fits your schedule.

Let me know.

Your biggest fan,

Sam

There are a lot of ways to contact people. What you need to remember is to respect their inbox, time and status.

Add these to your email outreach game, and you will be untouchable.

Conclusion

That’s it for episode 25. I hope you found the outreach process and examples helpful and you’re able to put them into action today.

If you liked this video, then give me a thumbs up. It makes me want to create even better videos for you and gives me an idea on what resonates with you best.

Also, make sure to subscribe here on YouTube, or if you want email updates, then you can subscribe at www.moneyjournal.com/episode25.

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In the next episode, I’m going to break down an extremely detailed and actionable process to do SEO for your blog.

So until the next episode, remember to take action because every minute counts.

Author: Sam Oh
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