How To Find Emails For Cold Emailing (2024)

There are many places to find emails for cold emailing.

However, not all options are equal.

For example, if you try to buy pre-existing email lists, then your emails will most likely go to spam, since most email list providers contain “spam traps”.

In this article, I will show you how to safely get verified emails for your next cold email campaign:

Step 1: Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)
Step 2: Find relevant leads with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Step 3: Export these leads with their emails
Step 4: Send your cold emails

Step 1: Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)

You cannot find relevant email addresses if you don’t even know what your ideal customer looks like.

The term “ideal customer profile” (ICP) is commonly used in sales to describe the type of customer that is most likely to buy your product or service.

For example, if I was going to launch a cold email campaign for a software company that sells reservation software for tour operators, then my ICP would be owners of tour companies.

I could narrow this down further by filtering by location and company size.

Cold email only works if you build a highly relevant lead list. Sending thousands of emails to random email addresses is never a good idea.

You can learn how to build a lead list in my article How To Build A Lead List For Sales.

Step 2: Find relevant leads with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Now that you understand what your ideal customer profile (ICP) is, it’s time to make a list of potential leads, and find their email addresses.

There are many ways to do this, but I recommend that most people use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find leads and their email addresses.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to search for leads with over 25 filters. You can filter by location, industry, job title and more.

The only problem with LinkedIn Sales Navigator is that it doesn’t give you the email address of each lead.

The reason why they don’t give emails is because they want you to message leads directly through their “InMail” platform. The problem is that they only give you 50 InMail credits per month.

Fortunately, there is a way around this.

You can use Emailchaser’s LinkedIn Email Finder extension, which allows you to export all of your leads from LinkedIn Sales Navigator with their email addresses.

You can export your leads with their emails as a .csv file, and then upload them into your sales CRM or cold email sending software.

You may be wondering how this works, since I just told you that LinkedIn Sales Navigator doesn’t give you the email address of each lead.

Emailchaser’s LinkedIn Email Finder extension uses a proprietary email finding software to automatically find the email address of each lead. Even if LinkedIn doesn’t show the email address, Emailchaser’s extension will take publicly available information (name, domain etc), and then use this to find the correct verified email address.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is not the only way to find leads and email addresses for cold email campaigns. If you want to see other methods, then check out my article How To Find Leads For Sales: 7 Strategies.

Step 3: Export these leads with their emails

As mentioned above, once you’ve found your leads in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can export them with their email addresses using Emailchaser’s LinkedIn Email Finder extension.

You can export your leads as a .csv file, and then upload them to your sales CRM.

Emailchaser’s LinkedIn Email Finder extension uses a proprietary email finding software to find the email address of each lead that you export from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Step 4: Send your cold emails

If you are serious about outbound sales and cold email, then you need to use a professional cold email software.

Using a specialized cold email software allows you to scale your outreach, while still landing in the primary inbox (not spam).

If you try to send a high volume of cold emails manually with the regular Gmail or Outlook inbox, then your emails will go to spam.

Even if you are sending a lower volume of emails, using a specialized software is beneficial, as they can help you manage the status of your leads.

I recommend that you use Emailchaser to send your cold emails, since Emailchaser was specifically designed to help your emails go to the primary inbox (not spam). Emailchaser also includes a sales CRM and other helpful features.

You can also see other options in my article Best Cold Email Software: 40 Top Tools Compared.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

I recommend that you follow my four step process to find emails for your next cold email campaign:

Step 1: Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)
Step 2: Find relevant leads with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Step 3: Export these leads with their emails
Step 4: Send your cold emails

It is important to understand that volume isn’t everything when it comes to having success with cold email. There are sales teams that become market leaders by targeting less than a thousand companies. You can learn how to build a highly targeted lead list in my article How To Build A Lead List.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great place to find leads (and their emails). However, certain sales campaigns require different lead sources. I recommend that you check out my other article 10 Best B2B Lead Sources For Outbound Sales.

Finally, you may be interested in my article Can You Automate Cold Email Outreach? (& Should You?).