A look at the evolution of the data landscape, how technology is helping businesses solve for now, and how the data analysis possible today can provide us with a new understanding of how we, as a society, can perform better in the future.
The most dramatic outcome of the digital revolution is the amount of data that is now collected and analyzed.
In this article, we’ll talk about how you can obtain more data from an email address and the different kinds of data you can get from it. Example of data from an email includes getting contact information about a person or company to verify their authenticity, or collating emails to generate leads for marketing purposes and so on.
To start with let’s look at. What is a Reverse Email Lookup?
What is a Reverse Email Lookup?
A reverse email lookup is basically a data enrichment process used to uncover more information relating to an email address. It's used to harvest actionable data about a person or entity that can be found online.
Examples of information you can get from an email address include:
- Finding the owner of the email address
- The country they are based in
- Job information and social media accounts associated with the email
- Phone number, physical address, profile pictures and many more
This can help users figure out who might be contacting them via email and for what purpose, especially if it’s an unknown or suspicious email address.
You can also use it to learn more about the candidates you are hiring or leads (for sales and marketing specialists) you want to convert.
What Is Reverse Email Search Used For?
Considering the type of information you can obtain from performing a reverse email lookup, the only limit to what you can use it for is your imagination. In this section, I'll break down the different use cases where you may require data and information about an individual or entity using their personal or work emails.
1. Scams & Fraud Prevention
Reverse email lookup can be used in order to verify the identity of the email sender, whether or not they are legitimate or if they are scammers. And in today's world where there is a proliferation of scams, it's worth worrying about your own security. But luckily, you can use a reverse email lookup to verify the identity of the emails, to further protect yourself from theft and risks.
2. Know More About A Potential Date
For a more relatable practical day-to-day usage, you can do an email search to find out more about a potential date, learn about their interests and what type of personality they have on social media before actually going on one. ‘Armed’ with enough information, you can quickly determine if it's a date worth going, or you might even identify your one true love even before the date, who knows?
3. Verification of Ecommerce Transactions
Finally, one important use case is to check and verify an online buyer or seller especially when e-commerce shopping is so prominent today. With a simple reverse email lookup, you can mitigate your chances of running into scams and also, be protected from transactors with bad track records.
Reverse Lookup of Work & Professional Emails
Another valuable use case where a reverse lookup can be beneficial is verifying work and professional emails. In the same way that personal emails can tell you a lot about a person, a professional's email contains valuable details about their past and present jobs, skills and capabilities, location and more. These details can be used to determine if the person is a good fit for a particular job.
Many industries benefit from this process of background scrutiny and depend on it heavily in order to find professionals in their field through reverse email searches. Some other scenarios where a reverse email lookup can be applied include:
1. HR Talent Identification
Hiring HR recruitment firms gathering all the information available on the candidates and filter them accurately to fast-track the hiring process. Using a simple email search, they can also retrieve relevant information that is not disclosed by the candidates.
2. Lead Generation
Another great use case is in sales and lead generation. Using a reverse email lookup, sales team can qualify leads accurately, thus cutting down time wasted to work on leads and instead, focus on getting sales quicker and more efficiently.
3. Credit Risks Analysis
Financial firms, especially those that extend credit and loans to their customers, can identify the risk level of a prospective customer before dealing with them based on the data that they are able to obtain from a reverse email lookup.
How Can I Do Reverse Email Lookup? -3 Simple Methods
Let's look at the different ways in which you can perform a reverse email lookup now that you understand what it is and what it involves. There are three main ways to be covered here, ranging from free to paid to a highly-efficient, automated method. Since all three methods are available for use by anyone, it's entirely up to you to pick which one suits your use case the best.
1. FREE Reverse Email Lookup (Google & LinkedIn Search)
The most basic and straightforward way to perform a reverse email lookup is to use Google. As you would do a normal Google search, you can do the same with email addresses. All you have to do is simply input your email in the search bar, and it will return search results with information related to that email.
Look what you get on entering your email address in google search bar.
However, this method is very manual and can be time consuming if you happen to be dealing with a large number of email addresses. Most importantly, it's not guaranteed to return an accurate result as an email might not be crawled successfully by Google.
Another great free alternative to Google is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a de-facto platform to get information about the professional profile of a person. However, you can’t perform a reverse email lookup directly in LinkedIn. But you can derive the person's name and company through its email prefix and domain, which you can then use to perform the search according to these two queries.
2. Paid Reverse Email Lookup Tools
If you want a more efficient and reliable solution to handle large datasets of email addresses then you may want to consider going for a paid reverse email lookup tool. With paid tools you can quickly gather the data you need which are all scattered online and present them in a manner easy to use. In addition, you can do searches more quickly and accurately, with all the information properly presented in a dashboard or sheet, ready for you to use and act upon.
There are a lot of paid reverse email lookup tools and services available, so it's up to you to choose what works best for you. One great tool is Spokeo. Spokeo lets you make reverse lookups involving name, addresses and phone, thereby allowing you more ways to obtain data and more data points to utilize.
3. Automated Reverse Email Lookup Using An API
If you still want something better, something that can integrate seamlessly with your existing business system or application, you can consider going for a reverse email lookup API. With an API, a reverse email lookup process can practically run on its on within your application. The data obtained from the email search can then be fed back automatically into your application, allowing you to utilize the data points immediately for your business without worrying about the lookup process itself.
Proxycurl is an excellent tool for obtaining and enriching data about people and companies. One of its many services include a Reverse Work Email Lookup API which you can use to programmatically pull data into your applications. They excel in data relating to the professional world, a more valuable type of data widely sought after. Another attractive feature of Proxycurl is its agile, lightweight pricing structure, at a cost of as low as $0.03 per search. No bulky monthly subscription that tie you down every month so you only get to pay as you use (or pay as you go if you'd like).
Conclusion
Now you know all about reverse email lookup, what it is used for, its capabilities and the different tools available out there depending your use case. Will you now choose to integrate it into your current business workflow, or start using it personally to protect yourself against certain risks or fraud?
Give Proxycurl’s Reverse Work Email Lookup API a try today.
Check out Proxycurl for more information.
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