CMC Library Ledger

How to Find Business Emails

We’ve written before about how to find the email address of an alum, but our resources can be used for more than just identifying alumni and their email addresses. The following resources and tips can be used to find anyone’s business email, including alumni, so you can build your professional network.

Nexis Uni

If you’ve already identified a potential contact by name and/or company who you’d like to reach out to, the first place you’ll want to begin is Nexis Uni. This database has a professional contacts directory that includes contact information from Zoom, so there is a high likelihood that you can find the email addresses you need here. Start by searching the person’s full name and the company name in the search field (for example, John Smith and Target):

Next, change the All Content Types dropdown menu on the right side of the search field to People, then select Business Leaders:

Click the magnifying glass to search.

If you don’t find the person you’re looking for on your first try, or your results aren't specific enough, you can also try searching by just the company name or the company URL (target.com for example), or search by the company name and job function/title if it’s a very large company and too many results come up when just searching the company name.

 Librarian Tip: You can also use this method as a supplement to searching LinkedIn for identifying recruiters or specific roles at a company.

If searching by company name alone doesn’t work, or you find the person on Nexis Uni but the information shown is for their previous role, the next thing to try is to see if you can guess what their current email address probably would be.

PitchBook

Company profiles on PitchBook usually have a section titled Team, which gives a non-comprehensive list of employees at the company and usually includes their business email addresses. Hover your cursor over the envelope symbol to the right of the names to see the emails:

From this you can extrapolate what the email convention or pattern of email addresses is for the company. For example, almost all the emails listed on Target’s PitchBook profile follow the convention of firstname.lastname[at]target.com, so you can be fairly confident that John Smith’s email is probably john.smith[at]target.com. Usually if your guess is wrong the worst that will happen is that it will be bounced back to you as undeliverable, so it’s worth a shot to try it.

Preqin and Capital IQ

For financial services contacts, Capital IQ offers a People Screening option, and the search results often will include email address. You can search by a multitude of criteria, including company, colleges/universities, and professional job functions:

Click the criteria you want to filter by, type in your search terms and select your desired options, click Add Criteria, and then when you’re done adding criteria click View Results to see the list of people. Email addresses will display by default if available. You can export the results or save the screening you’ve set up to your Capital IQ profile to run it again later if desired.

Preqin can be used to find general contact information for private equity contacts. Use one of the shared logins provided on the page for your Kellogg program (Full Time, Evening & Weekend, or EMBA) to access the database and go to Preqin Pro under Subscriber Access. From there, click on Search For, then select the type of contact you are looking for from the dropdown list. You can then narrow your results down by clicking the More Filters option:

Click on any of the results below to open it up, then switch to the Contacts tab to see contact info:

Free Online Email Finding Tools

If none of the premium email finding tools above yield results, don’t give up yet! There are many freely available email finding tools that you can try to see if you get any results. The CMC Library’s go-to options include Hunter, Norbert, and RocketReach, but there are many more tools out there and most of them offer a free account option. These tools will usually also give you an estimate of how confident they are in the accuracy of the emails they provide for a particular contact. You can also try using Google to search for email addresses by using special search operators, for example site:target.com + “John Smith” + email, filling in the info you have from looking the person or company up on LinkedIn.

If you’ve tried all these tips and still haven’t found what you need, consider joining a LinkedIn group that your contact is in so you can message them through the LinkedIn group. For example, Kellogg students can join the Kellogg Alumni LinkedIn Group to connect with alumni. This works best if you join groups that you and your contact have a common interest in—i.e., don’t join a group only to reach out to one person. You can also reach out to the CMC Library via chat, Slack, or email at cmclibrary@kellogg.northwestern.edu to double-check that you’ve exhausted all email-finding options. Happy email hunting!