Using LinkedIn to build up a decent email outreach campaign is what a lot of people have been doing lately. Several elements need to be covered in order for that campaign to be a successful one and not a hit-and-miss. Some of those key elements include coming up with a great outreach strategy, killer sales copy, and a decent cold emailing tactic. However, the first thing you'll need to do is gather emails from different people that you are targeting.
While this may seem like an easy task, it might prove to be a tad harder than expected. However, there's more than enough info out there to ensure that you have everything you need to successfully find emails on LinkedIn.
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Lead generation is present to some extent in virtually any company out there. It's a necessary process not just for email marketing campaigns, but also for newsletters, sales pipelines and many other processes of a company. While this is not something new, with AI and software development, you now have the chance to reach a fantastic amount of different audiences. All of this opens new pathways for marketing our businesses.
With the possibility of automating the process of getting the emails, which you previously targeted for lead generation, you would have more time to focus on the later stages of a sales pipeline. Using LinkedIn for lead generation to automate the whole process is bound to yield some serious results with a little help of some pretty neat tools. Automation can increase the effectivity of your entire sales process, but also saving you a ton of time.
In the remainder of this article, you will find all the info you'll need on how to find email addresses on LinkedIn. You will learn a bit more about what you can achieve if you start using LinkedIn as a ground point for your lead generation needs.
Before we delve deeper into the different ways you could use to get somebody's email, let's take a moment to look at how a typical business email is structured. The chances are that if you are reading this article, you've already experienced the thrill of hunting for a specific email.
In addition to that, you probably already noticed that most companies have specific patterns that they use to create email addresses for their employees. Those patterns are almost always using a combination of an employee’s first and last name, before the company's domain. Once you've determined a company's pattern, you can use it to obtain the email of anybody who works there.
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So, to start extracting emails from LinkedIn, you’d need these things:
Name of the person
Name of the company
The email pattern a company uses
Now that you know what you exactly need to get those emails, you should probably start thinking about how you would be able to do that. There are more than just one way to go about getting an email address from LinkedIn, and each method can yield different results. You'll be able to see those ways in the text below.
There are five primary methods you can use to obtain somebody's email:
1. By using an email permutator
2. By using Google search
3. By engaging the company's website
4. By engaging the company's social media
5. By using LinkedIn
As opposed to finding all possible email patterns yourself, you can use email permutator tools to do it for you instead. This tool, such as Anyleads’ Prospecting Tool is quite easy to use. You just need to enter a person's first and last name, as well as the company's domain, and it will provide you with all the possible combinations for that person's email address.
After you've done this, the only remaining thing to do is to check which email is the correct one. While this may sound like a tedious task, there's a simple Gmail trick that makes it possible to do the email audit in just a minute or two. You'll just need to take all the emails generated by the permutator and paste them directly into Gmail. If you hover your mouse over each email, you'll be able to spot the real one without any issue whatsoever.
You might be wondering why not just send the email to all the addresses generated by the permutator, but that would be a terrible idea. The reasons for this statement are:
You'll get blacklisted
Your account will most likely get blocked
Your account might even be banned
Optimizing the email deliverability is another thing you'll need to do to ensure that your email will get to the recipient. But we'll get to that later on.
If you don't want to use a permutator, you can always choose to utilize Google search, instead. Similar to the aforementioned Gmail trick, you put an email with a corresponding pattern into the Google search bar. Google will then try to find something that has the exact keyword, which, in our case, is a person's email.
Although this particular way of receiving emails takes a bit of time, it is usually a sure way of getting what you need. It might even be a bit more ethical way of getting someone's email, although that depends on your specific viewpoint of the issue.
Checking out the company's website sounds too good to be true, as that would be too easy, but you'd be surprised with the results. Many companies, especially if they don't have many employees or are just starting, list their emails on the contact or about us page. By checking these pages, you would be able to obtain the needed emails quickly or find the info you need to try some other way of getting the email.
One of the ways you can engage the company and get their email pattern is subscribing to their newsletter. Companies love newsletters because they are a sure way of obtaining the same thing you are looking for - emails of potential customers. So, if we take that into consideration, it's safe to say that if you subscribe to a company's newsletter, you will get an email from them real soon.
Granted, this way of getting the emails is probably the slowest one, and it has some downsides, such as limited control over efficiency. However, it's the best way to do it, if you want to play it 100% white-hat. At the same time, it is not the best idea if you are looking to build up an email list for a marketing campaign.
To sum up, this way of obtaining an email is best employed if:
You are looking to find just a few emails
You want to be 100% transparent
You don't mind going through all the loops, before getting to the person you want to communicate to
Some people (usually the ones working in HR or sales) list their emails directly on their LinkedIn profile. If you want to discover a company's email pattern, looking at a sales or an HR person's LinkedIn profile would be the first logical step to do. Poking around a persons' email can also lead you straight to the goal sometimes. You'd be amazed at just how many people list their emails straight on their LinkedIn profiles.
However, if looking around a profile doesn’t do the trick, you’ve still obtained info that you can later use to do so. If we go back to that neat Gmail trick, you can use it to check for email validity for the email you obtained through LinkedIn, too. That being said, this is a manual way of getting an email address from LinkedIn, and it’s not the only way, as well.
Today, some tools can help you in the extraction of emails from LinkedIn by reducing the time it takes to do so, as well as confirming the email validity, at the same time. These tools can come in handy, and if you want to learn more about them - read on!
Sometimes, you can be out of luck and strike out when searching for an email for a specific position within a company. The same is valid, even if you manage to figure out what combination the company is using for its employees' emails.
Even if you don't come across an email address while browsing the persons' LinkedIn profile, you could still come across some pretty useful info. You can then use the information you obtained from LinkedIn in combination with a simple browser search to get a specific email that you're after.
This nifty trick comes really handy when you don’t know the name of the person you want to contact. It does sound silly, but hey - it happens. However, if you type in the company name, followed by the name of the position of the person you are after and rounded off with LinkedIn, you will most likely get that persons’ LinkedIn profile in the search results. By using this simple trick, you’d be able to obtain a LinkedIn profile and consequently an email for virtually anybody, regardless of the company they are working for.
This is a rather tedious process, and we would not recommend it for everyday use because it is time-consuming. However, if you are not able to locate a specific email with the help of online tools, this little trick can come in handy.
PROS | CONS |
Can be automated | Takes a lot of time (if not automated) |
Can be used to obtain large volumes of emails | Needs a bit of research |
Can be used for mailing too | Needs manual export |
While all of the aforementioned ways of getting email addresses from LinkedIn work fine, they do have a couple of downsides. The one major downside is that they take a considerable amount of time.
In modern business processes, time is arguably the most important part of the equation. So, in essence, while all of those ways do work, they can't exactly be dubbed as efficient.
However, there's another way, as well. If you don't have the time to manually search for each email you want to find, you might want to try out an automatic way of prospecting emails.
There are numerous advantages to utilizing automated tools. Saving time is just one of them. That being said, the ability to save time on doing mundane tasks, such as scouring for emails, should not be easily overlooked. In addition to that, the person whom you task with obtaining the emails is going to be super-grateful for integrating a vital tool, such as this - especially if that person is yourself.
Another great perk of using an automated tool is that it is most likely easily integrated with all of the popular CRM platforms such as Salesforce, SugarCRM, or HubSpot. If the tool is automated and it can be seamlessly integrated with a CRM, it means that every email you extract would be checked and confirmed as valid. So, there you go - another easy benefit that you can add to your arsenal, without any trouble at all.
Let’s quickly go over all the benefits you will reap if you start doing that:
Less time spent on extracting emails
Every email would be valid
Easy integration with CRM platforms
Easily build-up an email list
You might be wondering why the validity of the emails is important. However, even though you could have some success, even if some of the emails are not valid. Yet, that could prove to be a costly gamble.
If too many emails bounce or are not delivered at all, you would be flagged for spam or worse - blocked. If that happens, you can forget about using that email (or even domain!) for email marketing purposes anytime soon.
In addition to that, if you don't have valid emails in your list, it's going to mess up your email marketing campaign metrics real bad. So, not only would you be risking being blocked, but you'd also not have the campaign metrics that enable you to see if the campaign is profitable or not. To sum up, the validity of email addresses you are extracting is important because:
It protects you from being flagged or blocked
It ensures that you get valid metrics from your campaigns
You are not wasting time and resources sending emails to the wrong addresses
By automating the extraction of emails from LinkedIn, you are automating the vast majority of your whole lead generation process. As you probably already know, lead generation is vital for any sales or marketing process within a company. It is the first step in developing your customer base.
That includes all types of customers - potential, existing, and returning. With this process automated, you can shift your time, focus, and resources to the outreach strategy, which will ultimately lead to converting more visitors into customers.
PROS | CONS |
Time-saving | Customization requires a bit of technical knowledge |
Can be used to obtain large volumes of emails | |
Can be integrated with a CRM |
As you can see, there are no real cons to this method, as it is both effective and efficient. However, if you want to fully customize the process (for example, gather some additional info), you might have to know a thing or two about scripts and coding, which is not something that everyone knows.
One other thing could be considered as a con, although it depends on your viewpoint of using software-assisted research and email prospecting. Some people consider using scripted software to extract email to be a gray-hat way of conducting business. Granted, nobody will think that using a tool to get emails from LinkedIn is a straight-up black-hat practice. So, in the end, it depends on you, as nobody would think that the said practice is unethical.
This is the exact reason why some people decide to use a designated LinkedIn email. They are aware that a considerable number of people are using those tools. So they avoid providing one of their primary email addresses for a LinkedIn account. At the same time, they make them available to be indexed by proactive people with new ideas or offers, such as yourself.
Using LinkedIn to obtain emails is just the beginning. You can use the platform to do a lot more than that. Utilizing a LinkedIn marketing strategy is something that most businesses are doing already because it provides a steady influx of potential leads.
If you are not already doing so, perhaps the first step after obtaining the emails would be to come up with a proper marketing strategy. Granted, if you started collecting emails, the chances are that you already have a strategy set in place.
After you've set a good marketing strategy, you'd have to decide on how you're going to use all the neat data you've managed to compile. While some people choose to use just one approach, it might be better if you have a backup plan. This goes double for those cases where people do not open their emails (if we consider that all the emails are valid, so they will not bounce).
So, the first plan is to kick off an email marketing campaign. If you dabbled in email marketing campaigns before, you know that it’s good to have some backing to the account that you’re using for the campaign. Adding a LinkedIn email signature is a sure way to boost the credibility of your account and also ensure that you are doing everything you can to ease people's minds about your proposition. Of course, this leads to a better rate of emails being both opened and read, which is an advantage that virtually anybody would look to explore.
However, some people will still not open the email you send, which raises a question - what then? Well, although you can always have a backup email marketing strategy set in place, complete with a follow-up email campaign. On the other hand, you can try to do something a bit different that could go a long way in ensuring that you get your point across to the potential customer.
Since you’ve already used LinkedIn to obtain the emails, you can continue using the same platform to contact those persons, too. The first step would be to connect with the person. Although you could do this manually too, it would probably be best if you used a connection request message template. By doing this, you are ensuring that you are reaching out to your potential customer on more than just one platform. This not only boosts your credibility but also shows a bit of tenacity.
An alternative route you can take is to message someone on LinkedIn via InMail. InMail is native to LinkedIn and allows you to direct-message another member, even though you are not connected. Check out our examples of LinkedIn InMail templates for some inspiration.
Now that you have all the needed knowledge about how to get emails from LinkedIn, there's nothing stopping you from starting a killer email marketing campaign. However, it would be best if you prepare well for that particular campaign. Email marketing campaigns can often lead you and your company to new heights, but at the same time, it can announce your downfall, too.
That being said, you still have to decide whether you are going to do that the old-fashioned way - manually, or opt for an automated, time-saving solution. We've laid out the benefits of utilizing the latest technology to extract emails, but the decision is only yours to make.
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