Globally, revenue from email marketing is expected to reach a whopping $18 billion by 2027. There are several reasons why emails have become an important part of nearly every company’s marketing mix.

They are cheap and promise an exceptionally high return on investment. Emails are also impressively flexible—you can keep them short or long, craft them the way you want, brand them with your company name, logo, and design, and use them whenever you feel like reaching out to a customer.

Best of all, they are excellent for nurturing relationships with potential leads without getting too much in their face. You can use emails to provide product information, help clarify concerns, send reminders, and gently nudge prospects through the sales funnel.

To make all this happen, you need to build accurate email lists of high-quality leads. However, finding someone’s email address isn’t always easy, especially if they are yet to buy something from you.

Now, you may have an idea about the type of people you want to target or know exactly who is likely to benefit from your product. How could you get hold of their emails in such instances? Here are eight techniques that are sure to get you results.

Use a People Search Platform

Let’s say you have someone’s name, phone number, or address. If so, the easiest way to find an associated email is by running a name search or a reverse lookup on a people search engine.

These platforms build massive people databases by organizing all sorts of personal data they collect from public sources. This allows them to offer search services to uncover email addresses and more.

So, people search platforms can be a pretty useful tool for discovering or verifying emails, finding secondary email IDs, and also for learning more about prospective clients.

Search on Google

Google’s search bots crawl trillions of web pages to build fairly comprehensive indexes you can explore using its algorithms.

One advantage of this popular search engine is its ability to capture different kinds of online content sources—from personal websites and blogs to news articles, public directories, and forum posts. This helps you widen the net when looking for someone’s email address.

Another benefit is the flexibility of its search tools. You can literally conduct an email search based on text, voice, or image inputs on Google’s search platform.

Check on Social Media

Many people share contact details on networking sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and IG, to promote their products and services, explore opportunities, connect with users off-platform, and for various other reasons.

So, if you check someone’s profile bio or go through their posts, there’s a chance you might find their email address.

If this seems like too much work, you can simply use the platform’s search bar. Just enter a name and the term “email” or “contact” and see what turns up on the results pages.

Run an Online Promo

Promotions can work as an incentive to get potential leads to share their email addresses. For instance, you can offer a gift, discount, or something else of value in exchange for an email.

But a word of caution: You must have some sort of mechanism to ensure you are targeting the right audience (i.e., those who would buy your product).

For this, you can use social media targeting by, say, focusing on platforms that your prospects are likely to spend time on or running customized ads aimed at specific user groups.

Capture Emails on Your Website

Your company website is an important source for lead email generation. Think about it for a moment.

The majority of the people who visit your website already have an interest in your product or service. (For instance, they might be curious about your product solution or want to know how it compares with competitors’).

In other words, these are potential leads you should be pursuing! So why not capture their email addresses straight from your website? One way to do this is with a chatbot or a contact form. Newsletter signups are also pretty effective.

Subscribe to LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator

Since LinkedIn is a professional networking site, many users share their emails and other contact details on it to boost their career and business prospects. This makes it a fantastic platform for lead sourcing, whether you are into B2C or B2B sales.

But there’s one little problem: Often, you can’t just access a user’s profile information unless you are part of their network. However, there’s a way around this—LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

This paid tool can speed up the email discovery process with features like advanced search filters, customer persona builders, relationship explorer, and InMail.

Use an Email Finder Tool

These specialized sales resources usually scrape email-related data from a variety of places on the internet, like company websites, directories, and social media.

In addition to producing actual email databases, some of these tools may also suggest email addresses based on existing ones linked to a particular company and its domain.

Using email finders, you can run bulk searches at once, integrate them with your CRM (to import and export data), and manage lead lists on their platforms.

Buy an Email Database

Database builders can offer thousands of email addresses that match specific prospect profiles. But is it legal to purchase them? Currently, there is no regulation preventing you from taking this route.

But you will need to practice caution and ensure what you buy is ethically sourced and contains accurate data. For this, working with a reliable and reputable company is a must.

Provided you get access to a high-quality email list, this method can be an excellent starting point for cold emailing.

Wrapping Up

When it comes to email marketing, building lead lists with accurate email addresses is only the first step.

Ultimately, how you design the emails and go about communicating with your prospects has a huge say in the success of your efforts. Personalization is key here.

Tracking data is another important factor. Your analytics reports will help you improve the messaging and eventually boost the ROI.

In addition, use automation tools to streamline the campaigns and diligently A/B test the CTAs until you nail them.

And don’t forget to clean up your email lists from time to time. This is critical for maintaining a reliable and up-to-date email list.