There are many ways to contact people in business, including:
What works best depends on:
A1WebStats customers often want to find emails for people in companies that have been to their website and looked at pages that indicate a level of interest. For example, this company:
Email is not necessarily the best way to reach out to someone (after identifying a person within the company that visited a website – typically via LinkedIn), but it could be used as part of a combination of outreach attempts, such as this sequence, which adds an extra method to each engagement step:
That’s just one suggested sequence that includes email – there are many more that you can experiment with.
There are numerous suppliers of services that will provide business email addresses for the types of people you’re interested in, so why bother with free methods to find those emails?
Budget (or lack of) is the answer.
If you had a list of companies that you wanted to contact but didn’t have email addresses then you could buy data that gives you the email addresses.
But data costs money and is also sometimes difficult to buy in small amounts.
This makes free methods attractive, even though they can take more time to build up the data required.
There are two main methods to find business email addresses for free, starting with the easiest and then covering the not-so-easy but still viable.
There are many of these available and most of them give you something for free in the hopes that you’ll sign up for their paid services.
Unfortunately, most of them are not very generous and there’s a clear winner.
To be really clear here: our focus is purely on finding business email addresses for free and some of the tools covered here may have lots of extra features that make their paid levels worth buying.
But for totally free, Apollo.io is the clear winner (and no, we’re not affiliated with them or incentivised to promote them – they just provide the best level of free).
While there are other email finding tools on the market, these were the ones that consistently appeared in our research so please do comment if you think we’ve missed any others that have generous levels of free and should be considered for us to update this page.
Apollo.io – https://www.apollo.io/
If you have a verified corporate domain (i.e. not gmail, Hotmail etc.) then you can have 10,000 free email credits per month.
Without a verified corporate domain, the limit is 100 free email credits per month.
Apollo works best as an extension and you just need to create a free account with them and then add their extension to your browser.
When you’re on LinkedIn looking at the profile of someone within a business, you can click on the Apollo extension and have the option to ‘View email address’, which you can then either copy or add to your Apollo account for further use.
Apollo is so far ahead of the others when it comes to sourcing free business email addresses and they’re clever because that level of free gives them opportunity to upsell what else they offer.
This short video shows you how that works:
Snov.io – https://snov.io/
More generous than those in last place – 50 free email credits per month.
Their paid model is also reasonable at $30 per month for up to 1,000 credits.
Voila Norbert – https://www.voilanorbert.com/
Same as Snov.io – 50 free email credits per month.
But their paid model is costlier than Snov.io at $49 per month for up to 1,000 credits per month.
Hunter.io
Slightly better than the two below but have lost their way vs the competition over the years – 25 free email searches per month.
Their paid model is a bit friendlier as it has reasonable pricing (£28 per month) for 500 emails, which would be enough for most but still not attractive vs the higher free emails provided by Apollo.
Clearbit Connect
A mere 10 free credits per month.
You’d think Hubspot (Clearbit owner) would understand that if you give people more for free then you may migrate them to your paid services.
But no – not even worth installing the extension.
FindThatLead
Like Clearbit Connect, a mere 10 free credits per month.
We can’t understand why anyone would bother, nor why you’d pay for their ‘Growth’ paid model, which gives less email credits than Apollo gives for free.
Another method you could use (although this is more time-consuming than the free business email address lookup tools covered above) is guessing email address formats, which works like this:
Focusing purely on the ability to access free email addresses of business people, do you think we’re being fair here?
Please do comment below – we’re open to enhancing this page to ensure it continues to provide the best resource for people looking for free email addresses.
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