We pitch over 5,000 reporters, journalists and bloggers each month for clients.
Our data shows personalized emails have a 3x response and success rate.
“Personalization” isn’t just getting a name. It’s finding the right person in the organization and matching it with the right email. I’m going to give you the process we use to find that contact information.
It doesn’t matter if it’s link building, PR or outbound sales – this post will improve your success rate.
This blog post is a word for word copy of the training we give to new staff, contractors and VAs. It’s a part of our larger link building training process we put them through. Feel free to use it for yourself.
Before I get into the checklist, it’s incredibly important you understand something. When prospecting, there are 2 types of websites you will come across:
1. Website’s with 1 author (bloggers).
We would prefer to find a persons email address, but for these sites it’s ok to find general contact emails (contact@site.com, etc). Generally the same person managing the generic email manages the whole site, including the content.
2. Website’s with multiple authors (media).
For these sites, we can’t find general contact emails. We need to find the personal email address of the journalist covering the content relevant to our pitch.
With that being said, let’s get into the checklist…
We use BuzzStream as a tool to manage outreach targets. They built [what I think] is the best browser plugin out there, the Buzzmarker. The Buzzmarker scans the page you’re on and looks for social profiles, names and contact info. Not only is it an incredible time saver, but it syncs with your Buzzstream database.
This tool generally only finds the right contact info for smaller, single author or blog sites.
There’s a number of browser plugins that help to find email addresses, but this is the one we’ve had most success with. The plugin runs a checks with names and domain to find the right email address. It’s accurate, fast and free.
This works well on larger sites with multiple authors. When you find the post you’re looking for, click through on their name to view their author page. On larger sites, they generally list out social profiles, other websites and email addresses. This generally isn’t the case on smaller websites, who use about and contact pages instead.
Only check the contact page for smaller sites or blogs. Large websites may list an email address, but it’s a generic contact email that rarely makes it to the person you want to contact.
On smaller sites, there’s a much better chance that the generic contact email will reach the right person (i.e. contact@site.com).
Very similar to contact pages, “about” pages are valuable on small sites, not large ones.
One thing to keep an eye out for is when they list their email so crawlers and plugins can’t scrape it (i.e. contact [@] site dot com]. Be sure to scan the “about” and “contact” pages manually to pick up on that.
After you’ve checked their site thoroughly, it’s time to head to Google search. Type FULL NAME LinkedIn into the search bar to try and track down their profile.
Make sure you have the Email Hunter plugin installed in your browser – you’ll see a red button appear by their profile. Click it and let the plugin try and find their email from LinkedIn.
Search Google for FULL NAME YouTube. If you can find their channel, click on their “About” tab and see if they have an email listed.
Search Google for FULL NAME Google+. If you can find their profile, there are two places you can find an email:
Small businesses and bloggers always have a Facebook Page and 9 times out of 10 they list a contact email on their Page.
Do a Google search for BUSINESS NAME Facebook or FULL NAME WEBSITE to try and find it through search. Or, check their “About” or “Contact” page on their site.
Twitter users often link out to their own personal blogs or websites, so it’s a great place to refer to. Search Google for FULL NAME Twitter and see if you can find their profile.
If they list a website in their bio, visit the website and use the BuzzMarker or Email Hunter plugin.
Finally, do a Google search for WHOIS site.com. For this to work, you will need their website. This method generally only works with bloggers or smaller sites.
Das it y’all.
Ryan Stewart Saysfrom time to time…at the end of the day, outreach can be annoying. we try and mitigate that by sending a pitch that has genuine value to the person we’re pitching. in other words, we’re not just sending random emails asking for links or coverage, we’re sending emails to people who NEED to publish content regularly and our pitch will help them achieve their goals. the email pinging tools (voila norbert, find and email, email hunter) are all the same, thats why i only included 1 (email hunter). it’s the one we use and have had the most success rate with.
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Joshua Hardwick SaysYeah, like I said, it’s only happened to me a few times and I think as long as you’re not sending the shitty broken English emails (like most people do) and making sure you’re actually offering some value, most will be fine with it (although there’s always a few that simply just don’t want to be contacted in any way, shape or form EVER).
BTW, don’t know if you use it, but I’ve found URL Profiler is an amazing tool for finding emails at scale; you can scrape a bunch of webpages (ideally blog posts), paste them into URL Profiler, tick the right boxes and it’ll extra the post author names along with any email addresses found on the page. With a bit of quick cross-referencing, it’s usually pretty easy to spot the right email address for that particular author.
Joshua Hardwick SaysThere’s a free trial + Matthew Barby has got a 10{476a1b9825899f7e21f124b8533c8410a6ecd3a860b9841e06adbefeac0656e9} discount code (google it) if you fancy saving a couple $/month. Seriously good tool.
Paul Warren SaysAnother great video Ryan.
I’m curious what that little extension you have running is, that displays cost per click costs, under your Google search bar?
Liam SaysHey Ryan,
Thanks for another great post! I love how you hack these processes for your team and then share them with everyone else. I have a quick question I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while now:
What software do you recommend for making screencast/tutorial videos like this? I need to make some for internal training and not sure what the best option is.
Thanks!
Ryan Stewart Saysthanks liam.
i just use quicktime, i find the quality of audio and visual is the highest (and its free).
Raees SaysHi Rayan Sir,
I’m new in SEO. so I watched a lot of videos but you are the number-1. Thank you so much for these extensions. It’s amazing.Before this post and your video, i spent a huge of my time to find the contact us page of websites and then scroll the full page to find the email.
But now I just get 79 emails and the right person’s emails within 2 hours.
Thanks Again.
Raees
Ozair Akhtar SaysHey Ryan,
I used to do a lot of guest blogging for SEO and I need to find email hidden inside website or on social channels. I use the same method and technique. But I would like to add few things which are if you are not able to find any email ID related to that blogger – You always have a choice to contact him through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin. Bloggers used to reply quickly over social media than on emails. Thanks for letting me know about BuzzStream’s Buzzmarker & Email Hunter Extension.
I am looking to learn more about tools like IFFTT. Please do videos on that and also on social media campaign management.
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Great post (again), Ryan! Just curious, when using tools like Email Hunter/Voila Norbert/etc., do you ever get negative responses along the lines of “where did you get this email address?” – I’ve had that happen a couple of times personally (although it may have been from the ones I simply “guessed” using the whole firstnamelastname@domain.com method). Don’t these tools essentially work the same way though (i.e. pinging the email server for each option to check that it exists)?