Finding Email Addresses

Email cold calling is rapidly becoming an accepted way to crack into corporate accounts. I recently did a teleseminar on this topic and had this biggest crowd ever.

As sellers, one of the biggest issues we face is finding people's email addresses. Brett Owens decided to tackle that challenge head on. He's created an Email Pattern Wiki that lists the various email protocols for most of the Fortune 500 companies.

When you go there, just enter the corporation's name in the search box on the left side and you'll see several patterns the companies uses. For example, I typed in General Mills and this is what it showed me.

• first.last@genmills.com
• first.last@generalmills.com

Here's the deal about a Wiki though: You're supposed to help create the resource. If you know other patterns used by a company - add them to the Wiki. That's how it becomes infinitely usable. The more people who chip in their knowledge, the better it is for all of us.

Comments

[Christoph Dollis]

Hi Jill,

This was a really great post on something I have little experience with.

Phone calls, yes. Reactive emails, yes. Even web copy and direct mail. But direct email... well, as Ryan Sasaki points out, that's controversial...

I’m putting a link to you on my blog’s sidebar.

[John Vinch]

I don't see how contacting a prospect by email defaults you to being a spammer. If the subject is highly relevant to the recipient and provided you don't add the prospect to a mailing or autoresponder list without his or her explicit consent, how is this any different from looking up someone's business phone number and making a call?

Jill, we wrote about this post on our site a few days ago. Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed it until just recently.

[Jill Konrath]

If you think I'm talking about spamming, you've totally misunderstood what I'm advocating. I do NOT believe in sending out mass mailings to prospects. Not only is it illegal, it's also grossly ineffective.

However, I do support emailing a targeted individual with a totally personalized message based on in-depth analysis of his/her business challenges, strategic direction and more. This email would likely read something like this:

Bob,

In researching your company's strategic direction for 2007, it's clear that improving sales productivity is a prime objectives.

I thought you might be interested in our white paper on "How to Create More Leads at 1/2 the Cost. Here's the link:...

Quick question: Is your firm leveraging triggering events to shorten the sales cycle?

Regards,

Jill Konrath

[Joel C.]

Jill, you should be embarrassed that you would even consider cold call emailing as an effective tactic. You just lowered yourself from the major to the minor leagues.

[Ryan Sasaki]

I worry that resources like this will get abused.

It's another resource that will help marketers spam people. As a marketer, just because I know a person's name, it doesn't give me the right to market to them.

I guess this has become an "accepted way" but that doesn't make it right.

I wonder what Seth Godin would say about this?

[Patrick Ahern]

I will also use Google and type "@company.com" and it will return all instances where @company.com is used which always contains an employee email address and then you can derive the pattern from there.

[Silvia Quintanilla]

This is good to know about. What I do also is use Spoke (www.spoke.com). They will give you the email patterns (and sometimes a company will have more than one). But Spoke charges a monthly subscription.

[COD]

I use google. If I am trying to email john smith at general motors, I'll google john + "gm.com" which will return pages where John's at GM have left their email address. That gives me the pattern.