Email Prospecting

One of the first problems I encountered while searching was deciding how to find target email addresses. There are a handful of blogs and websites that describe some options but below are the ones I spent the most time trying out and the results thereof.

Amazon Mechanical Turk: Was one of the first services I used and after much trial-and-error it is still my go-to email service. The user-interface is extremely poor unless you are used to html coding (which I am not) but once you get over that hurdle it beats the rest. You set the price and independent ‘Turks’ from around the world take on the jobs. I found that about $0.11/email is a great intersection between getting it done right and getting it done very quickly. After some fine tuning, I average between a 70%-90% success rate on emails.

Upwork:  Big virtual assistant service website. I experimented a couple of times and in general while its user-interface is much, much better than Amazon Turk's, it usually takes longer and costs more to get jobs done with about the same or slightly lower success rates than those of Amazon Turk.

Skrapp: Skrapp is a google chrome plug in that allows you to search for emails right from the prospector’s LinkedIn page. The software is able to find the email used when the LinkedIn page was created. I have found about a 70% success rate of finding a business owner’s email by this method. Skrapp provides 200 email searches for free per google account. Skrapp cost $16/month for 1,000 email searches.

Sellhack: Similar to Skrapp, Sellhack utilizes software to search emails of business owners. However, Sellhack’s search goes beyond looking at only LinkedIn and utilizes other publicly available data to find emails. If the algorithm is unable to find the email it then provides multiple email permutations on the basis of owner’s name, company’s domain, company’s email patterns and other data. Sell hack cost is around 17 cents per email search. I don’t have a statistic for its success rate but it is <70%.

Email Hunter: Is similar to Sellhack, however it provides some additional tools like: the ability to verified emails, download all emails from a specific website by simply inputting the domain and format all your email search data into an cvs file. Cost per email is about 5 cents. I don’t have a statistic for its success rate but it is <70%.

Rapportive plug-in: A gmail plug-in. For full details just google it along with "email permutator" and you'll figure out how it works - short version is that while it tends to work fairly well it is often very time intensive. Usually only worth using for email prospecting (though worth having as a plug-in for quick info anyway) for individual, hard-to-find and high-value email prospects.