An email permutator is a small tool that can be surprisingly controversial. It sits somewhere between an email address finder and an email verification tool. For many marketing and sales professionals, it’s an essential tool to help find a CEO’s email, or perhaps contact info for a new prospect they discovered on LinkedIn. To others, […]
An email permutator is a small tool that can be surprisingly controversial.
It sits somewhere between an email address finder and an email verification tool. For many marketing and sales professionals, it’s an essential tool to help find a CEO’s email, or perhaps contact info for a new prospect they discovered on LinkedIn. To others, however, an email permutator is nothing but a waste of time.
What exactly does an email permutator do, and is it worth it? In this quick article, we’ll break down how an email permutator works and discuss whether it’s worth your time to use to find the email addresses of leads, prospects, and customers.
What is an email permutator?
An email permutator is a software tool used to find any email by name for employees at a company. It differs slightly from your usual email finder tools.
Instead of merely finding and verifying an exact address, a permutator tries to generate every possible address a person could have so you find the right one. These tools are used by marketing, sales, recruiters, and other B2B professionals to find the contact information for their campaigns, pitches, and messages.
A permutator may or may not offer email verification features.
How to use an email permutator?
Using an email permutator is super simple. There are usually no more than 3-4 text fields you need to fill out: first name, last name, nickname (optional) and company website domain.
After you fill in this information, the software will deliver email address combinations. For example, let’s say you wanted to find Elon Musk’s contact information at SpaceX.com. An email permutator would suggest things like:
- elonmusk@SpaceX.com
- elon@SpaceX.com
- emusk@SpaceX.com
- elonm@SpaceX.com
- em@SpaceX.com
A typical tool will deliver 30 to 40 address combinations! Once you have a few dozen potential emails, you can copy and paste them into your email verification tool and see which one has the highest probability of being accurate.
You may be asking: are email permutators a waste of time?
To give it to you straight—using an email permutator can sometimes be a waste of time, depending on the specific tool.
If all the tool can do is deliver a list of possible addresses, and not an actual, verified email that you need ASAP, why bother? After all, you can think of email combinations yourself, right?
Here are three good reasons you should still use an email permutator:
- There are an unlimited number of ways to combine a first name, last name, and nickname into an email address; without some memory superpowers, you’re unlikely to get everyone every time.
- Typing out dozens of possible emails takes time. Why not enter your email permutator results into Excel and upload your list directly into your email verification tool?
- Marketing and sales reps have usually already made their best “educated guesses” when they reach this point. If you haven’t found the address yet, let the software do it for you.
Top 4 email permutator tools (from basic to advanced!)
4. Metric Sparrow
Metric Sparrow hosts Email Permutator+, one of the easiest tools on the market to use. No download is required; you can access this tool straight from your browser. The information you need to provide is first, middle, and last name; nickname; and company website. Once you enter the info, the tool will generate email addresses.
One feature that makes Metric Sparrow stand out is that it provides up to 46 email addresses! We’ve seen many tools that give 20-30 suggestions, but we haven’t seen anyone beat these guys for options.
Price: Free | No premium option
3. Voila Norbert
Voila Norbert is one of the most popular email permutator tools. To use this software, you can access it through your web browser or download the Chrome extension. Simply enter in your contact’s first and last name and their company domain.
Voila Norbert does some verification of its own and will put each email address it returns in one of three categories: green means they’re 97% sure it’s accurate, orange means there’s a 50% chance, and red means it’s all they could find on the web and has a low chance of deliverability.
Price: Free for first 50 leads | Premium starts at $49 per month
2. Mail Meteor
Mail Meteor is an email permutator extension for Gmail that helps you find anyone’s address. All they ask is that you plug in your recipient’s full name and website, and the tool will deliver up to 34 address suggestions.
You can then copy and paste into an email verification tool or directly into your Gmail ‘to’ field and see which one comes up with a profile image. In addition to being an email permutator tool, Mail Meteor offers more features to support your overall email marketing campaign management, like scheduling, personalization and tracking!
Price: No free plan available | Premium starts at $9.99 per month
1. Lusha
Lusha is more than an email permutator tool; it’s a full-featured B2B lead enrichment extension for Google Chrome that finds email addresses and phone numbers as well as personal and company data! This tool was created for marketing and sales teams as well as HR recruiters.
Here’s how you use Lusha: Download the Chrome extension to your browser, then when you’re looking for your contact’s name in Gmail, B2B websites or trying to find someone’s email on LinkedIn, click the icon and Lusha will generate an in-depth profile of your lead, prospect or talent!
The profile includes their personal and work email addresses—but these aren’t just stabs in the dark. Lusha has a 98% hit rate, meaning there’s a 98% chance it will get your message to your recipient. Besides email addresses, the email permutator provides up to 37 other data points, including:
- Phone numbers
- Industry and vertical information
- Job title and role
- Company revenue
- Employee headcount
- Geography
Bonus: When you’re prospecting using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can use Lusha Extension to find emails since even with their premium offer LinkedIn doesn’t always provide updated and accurate addresses.
Then, you can export LinkedIn contacts to Excel and import them into your CRM or any B2B database where you store lead information to sell or market to contacts.
Price: 14-day free trial available | Premium starts at $74 per month
Main Takeaways
- An email permutator is a generator for email addresses. The generator formulates every possible combination based on your recipient’s full name and company domain.
- The downside of using an email permutator is that many tools don’t offer verification or accuracy, and it can be time consuming to copy and paste address suggestions into a separate email verification tool.
- A versatile and time-saving email permutator is Lusha extension. Instead of delivering guessed contact info, this B2B email finder will provide accurate email addresses with amazingly high deliverability of 98%. This lowers the chance that you’ll have to use a separate tool for verification and increases your campaign delivery success.
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