How the Heck Do I Email People I Find on LinkedIn? (for free, of course)

So you want to contact some people from the LinkedIn page below. What do you do?

I will show you how you can email anyone on LinkedIn without paying a dime, and without relying on free searches from Email Finder websites like Hunter.io (except as backups). I have emailed thousands of people this way and you can too!

When I see a LinkedIn profile like the one for Mark Rabey (don't know him but love the pic!), this I what I see in my head:

• [e-mail] (40%)
• [e-mail] (40%)
• [e-mail] (5%)
• [e-mail] (5%)
• Something else (10%)

I open up Gmail and type in the first two emails.

SECOND TRY!

When Gmail shows you a user photo like this, you can be sure that this is a valid email (and that this is the default email pattern for the whole company).

How does this actually work?

There are just two things you have to know to make this process work for (almost) every company.

There are two parts to a work email address like [e-mail]:

1. The name (mark.rabey)
2. The domain name (simpplr.com).

Email Name Patterns

There are only four common email patterns that companies use with employee names nowadays. Yes, I said it, just four! The four I showed above.

You can try all four of them, but the first two are way more common. I gave them an equal chance because Simpplr is a mid-sized company (500 people). Small companies often use just a first name and larger companies usually use two names (for obvious reasons).

Email Domain Names

This one is easy. The email domain is the same as the company website domain.

I like to look in the About tab to confirm the company's domain (or you can Google it).

Just a couple of points to remember here:

• In the US, .com is by far the most common ending, but some startups go with an ending like .io.
• ALSO, if the company website is something like simpplrapp.com, then the emails will end like that too.
• Yes, there are a handful of exceptions, but the vast majority of domains work this way.

Valid emails without a Gmail photo

Okay, we're feeling good about the email pattern at Simpplr now. Let's email the VP, Engineering next!

When I type in the name this time, I only get the default light blue user icon in the To field. Don't panic!

This is another common type of feedback from Gmail for a valid email address. The user icon in the To field is the default light blue, but the user icon in the hover popup has a DIFFERENT COLOR.

Yes, this is subtler than seeing the user photo, but I have never had an email fail after it gets this feedback. This email must be in the company system, but it just doesn’t have a photo associated with it, so Google shows a custom background color instead.

Conclusion

I honestly love email finder websites like Hunter.io - I really do! If I can’t find an email address, the free searches from these sites are lifesavers!

But these companies are not in the business of giving me emails for free. Hunter.io has been particularly aggressive in shutting down common workarounds like using different browsers, Incognito browser windows, and VPNs.

Even if some sites still allow these workarounds, they too are likely to follow Hunter.io’s lead in the future. I can’t blame them for trying to charge money for their service. They scrape a ton of emails from every company in the world, store them in a ginormous database, then allow people to search this data on a public website. This cannot be cheap!

But what is it all for? Why expend this effort and these resources when company emails are so simple?

Email Finder Websites

There will be times when you can't find an email without an Email Finder website. Speed is key when searching for emails, so I don't mess around if I can't find it fast. But what if you use up your free searches on Hunter.io? Here are some things you can still do.

Use a different IP (VPN or cellular) and a different browser or device

Hunter.io shuts me down in ways that I still don't fully understand, but if I switch to my phone (on cellular connection not Wifi) I can always get a new set of free searches.

Use a different Email Finder website

A lot of these sites do not give you free searches, and they often give you the runaround before this becomes clear. At the moment, I use two alternatives to Hunter.io that also give some free searches per month.

• anymailfinder.com
• snov.io

CTA

Okay, now go and try to send some emails. Write a comment to let me know how it goes! Also, share other Email Finder websites that give free searches if you use them.