When you work in B2B sales, it can be common to know a prospect’s name and the company they work for but not have their email address. If this is a situation that you find yourself in, don’t worry, as there is a fairly simple process to figure out what their email address is, and we explain that in this short video.

Common Email Naming Conventions
The reason why this is possible is that when it comes to corporate email addresses, most companies use some sort of naming convention for the format of their email addresses, and this will be a combination of the person’s first name, last name, and the domain name for the company’s website.

Here are some examples of the most common naming conventions that companies use.

  • [First Name]_[Last Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [First Name].[Last Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [First Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [Last Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [First letter on first name][Last Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [First Name][First letter of Last Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [First Name][Last Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [Last Name][First Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [Last Name].[First Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [Last Name]_[First Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [First Name]-[Last Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [First letter on first name]-[Last Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [First Name]-[First letter of Last Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [First letter on first name].[Last Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [First Name].[First letter of Last Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [First letter on first name]_[Last Name]@websiteaddress.com
  • [First Name]_[First letter of Last Name]@websiteaddress.com

If you have the prospect’s name and website address, there is probably a 90% chance that one of these different combinations is going to work for guessing your prospect’s email address.

Figuring Out Which Email Address is Correct
Even though we can look at that list and know that we have a 90% chance that our prospect’s email address is one of those, we still have to go through some sort of process to get to the right email address. Here are a few options:

Trial and Error
The crudest but most effective way to use this knowledge on how to guess an email address is to simply plug your prospect’s details into a format that you think might work, send off an email, and see if it bounces or not. If the email comes back as “Undeliverable,” you can then use the process of trial and error and try another format until you send an email that does not bounce back.

While this process will work if you have no other options, it is a bit clunky and time-consuming.

Use an Email Verifier
There are some tools out there that allow you to enter an email address and run a test to validate if the email is correct or not. The way this works is that the software will communicate out to MX record databases on the internet (or something like that) and verify whether the email address is valid or not and do this without sending anything to the contact.

Use an Email Guesser
One way that we try to help you with how to guess a corporate email address is that we provide something that we call an Email Guesser, and you can access it free here. This tool will allow you to enter a contact’s name and company website address, and the software will test all of the combinations that we outlined with email verification software.

Our tool helps to take some of the thought process and manual effort off your plate and get you to a valid email address quicker and easier.

TRY OUR EMAIL GUESSER FOR FREE HERE