5 Methods to Finding Emails for B2B Lead Generation

For most B2B companies, email outreach is a top strategy, and for more reasons than one: it’s automation-friendly, scalable, and can deliver one of the highest ROIs across B2B channels.

One struggle in email marketing is efficiently supplying campaigns with enough valid emails for your sales effort.

While there is no perfect solution to finding emails, these 5 tips provide a few ways to help make supporting B2B email lead generation easier for your team.

1) Email Lookup Tool

Certain software can programmatically identify emails using information like the person’s name, company, and website.

Email lookup tools are specifically designed to use existing data and pattern-cracking algorithms to find emails with relatively high accuracy. These solutions also find emails at a scale of thousands while still being cost-effective.

The disadvantage of using these tools involves the time and money that will need to be invested into finding the initial data to use the tool effectively. These tools are also not perfect solutions: bounced emails will still exist and need to be addressed.

For most solutions, your team will need a list of the companies, websites, and the name of prospects handy. Solutions like Norbert offer a flexible way to finding emails individually or in bulk.

2) Hire a Prospecting Team

Some agencies, independent teams, and individual freelancers have the tools, resources, and processes in place to systematically find emails on demand.

Hiring third party services can be a turnkey solution for your campaign. It replaces training and managing an internal team to prospect for emails while saving you a lot of time and money along the way.

Keep in mind that the quality of work can be inconsistent. Depending on the chosen service provider, bad hires can pose the risk of you losing time and money while setting campaign progress back.

It can take time to find the right team, but the diligence is worth the better outcomes. Using a freelancing community like Upwork provides a great starting place to find the right team for the job.

3) Use a Data Provider

A data provider is a seller or reseller of sales intelligence that collects data through internal tools, manual labor, or bulk data arrangements.

For data providers, you simply need to have targeting criteria in mind to get started. This makes them fast, easy, and some can provide enough data coverage to be a scalable solution for campaigns.

Cost is one of the biggest downsides of using a data provider, with some requiring subscriptions, minimum order sizes, or annual upfront contracts to get access. In addition, quality issues can be a problem depending on the source, age, and accuracy of their data.

Make sure data providers are vetted on how they acquire data, how often they update their information, and the accuracy percentage of the emails they provide.

4) Finding Emails via Websites

Emails can often be found in plain sight on a company’s website, whether it be through press releases, contact pages, or content.

With a list of companies in mind, your team can go through each website to extract the emails you need for campaigning.

Finding emails from websites is the most accurate solution because it’s coming directly from the company’s web pages.

Not all websites will contain the specific emails you’re hunting, and extracting data from websites may be a more effective solution for finding email patterns and maximising CRM data coverage.

5) Guess & Verify

By applying the “guess & check” method with email verification software, this approach is designed to crack the puzzle behind a company’s email pattern.

This strategy is a great quick fix to help individual team members find emails for day-to-day outreach. However, this solution does not work at for all email formats and isn’t a reasonable solution at scale.

These attempts will be centered around standard formats like “first.last@company.com” or “flast@company.com”, while verification can be done with a tool like ListJoy.

Conclusion

It’s important to support B2B email campaigns with the right process for finding emails that fuel their success. With the right solution to email data, your team can make the email channel a key path to sales growth.