Instagram Email Finder | How to find someone's Instagram email for targeted cold outreach

Let’s cover how to search and find only one OR thousands of email addresses on Instagram with one simple Instagram email finder tool.

So, there are two parts to this story.

1. How to find the Instagram email address of any user or account
2. How businesses use this same principle to get huge email lists and do super-targeted email marketing

How to Find and See Someone’s Email Address on Instagram

1. Put down your laptop and get your phone
2. Go to any Instagram account
3. Click the “Email Address” button and you’ll see their email!
4. *If there’s no button then the user isn’t sharing his email publicly.

Instagram on Mobile VS Desktop

Ok, now that we covered how can you see people’s emails on Instagram, let me share how this little trick led me to become the only data provider of targeted customer emails from Instagram users.

How can B2C catch up with B2B? Instagram email finder tools!

I’ve been working in two SaaS companies so far and have met with many marketers. We are all stuck in this same loop of how you do outbound:

1. Crawl LinkedIn using any of the thousand extensions out there (Dux-Soup is the best one though)
2. Verify the emails
3. Segment based on industry, title, etc
4. Ruin your prospects' lives next 3 weeks by running a five email sequence all the while you cold call them as well

If you are lucky (and by that I mean your company has money to spend), you skip steps 1 and 2 by paying for services like DiscoverOrg, and they provide you with everything you need (email address, phone number, etc). Pretty easy if you are a b2b marketer.

Shouldn’t this process be easy for b2c marketers as well? We are stuck with advertising on Facebook, Twitter, running retargeting for every step of the buying process, making Youtube videos, SEO... But email is the least expensive channel in the world that you can sell on. We have to find a way to (ab)use it. Well, that’s the reason I decided to try to build my own Instagram email finder tool.

From Instagram email finder to cold emails — why all the hassle?

Some companies find that cold emails don’t work for their business, some are using it right. There isn’t a company that won’t benefit from outbound emails. The best example for this would be Hired. They have a whooping 130+M in investment, yet they are cold emailing on a daily basis for years now. Whenever there is a new job ad on Angellist, LinkedIn, or indeed.com they always email the company within days.

So there is no doubt that this strategy works. However, you have to be very detailed when you are testing and keep improving with every single batch. The three main things I focus on are:

1. Timing — don’t look up google for this, please. Anything that marketers figured out so far and published, is already ruined by other marketers abusing the finding. (We keep going in circles, don’t we? 😂)
2. Open rates — Test as many subject lines as you can.
3. CTR — A single most important tip here is to make it short and personalized. Seems easy but it’s not.

Cost comparison for marketing channels

I know companies that have closed deals worth millions from a cold email. Here is a great case study of how sumo.com grew to 5 million in revenue using outbound emails.

Today, we are going to go over how to create an effective cold email campaign for selling your product or service with email addresses sourced from Instagram + a little tip that has tripled our ROI from Facebook ads.

So keep reading.

How to find someone's Instagram email (The targeted approach)

It’s always crucial to get the targeting right. For me, it’s easier to learn from an example so let’s do that. For this section, we’ll take two:

1. I was working for a beauty startup trying to sell lipstick
2. Helping out a friend that is a fitness coach in selling custom meal plans and online fitness coaching.

For both ventures, our primary audience is on Instagram. That’s why we’ve spent so much money testing our targeting and ads. I’m pleased to say that they work pretty well until they don’t. We’ve all been there. The ads get “fatigue” and then we are back to the drawing board again trying to figure out a new creative, shooting a video, designing an image…

We’ve also used Instagram influencers to promote our product. I remember back in 2015 when influencer marketing was still new. We could get a post for next to nothing from an influencer that has more than 300K followers! Ah, those were the days… ☀️ Now the price has gone way up, and not only that but automation tools have become so good that someone can fake their own popularity/engagement pretty easily if you don’t do thorough research. But the money was worth it. The posts always had good CTR and engagement as well.

It seems like targeting an audience from an influencer was better than Facebook’s own ads platform. If only we could get those users and engage them on some other channel.

Good idea meme 1

How to get email addresses from Instagram followers

When trying to poke around the followers that a given influencer has on Instagram I found something pretty interesting: many Instagram accounts had their email address listed in the bio (besides the one in the “email” button). Few python scripts later, we were able to build an Instagram email finder to crawl and get those email addresses.

The problem was that our crawlers would get blocked by Instagram after a while. But the data we got was pretty amazing since it included the full bio, followers, followings, number of posts, and the username. That’s pretty much all you need to have to personalize the email.

Oh, we were onto something here! If only we could fix the problem with Instagram blocking us….

I called a friend to see if we can figure something out together. As an android developer, he gave us a great idea: what if we try getting the users’ contact details from a mobile device? Can that fix the problem?

The crawling was a bit harder to do since we had to spin up an android project, simulate a device, log in to an Instagram account and then find the accounts we want to target, but it worked!!

good idea meme 2 — !@#$ yes, Victor, !@#$ yes.

We had a beer that night and decided that we should do a hackathon to try and figure this thing out. To make a long story short here is what we learned:

Problem number 1: We have to use Instagram accounts to do the crawling. The Instagram API has a very, very limited API calls limit. The crawling took ages.

Solution number 1: Create 10 Instagram accounts and try to split the work between them.

Problem number 2: There were email addresses in the comments, description of pictures, on the users' profile as a button, link to a website that has an email of the person there. We wanted to get that all of that.

Solution number 2: Create 1000 Instagram accounts and crawl the entire activity of a particular Instagram account. Hunter.io has a great API for finding emails and we also integrated that.

We were able to find thousands of targeted emails from Instagram with our Instagram email scraper tool

For an Instagram account that had let’s say, 100k followers, we were able to successfully extract almost 20K emails. Now that’s huge!!

In the beginning, we used NeverBounce as a way to verify the emails but now we are using our own script for Gmail and GSuite + NeverBounce for company and Yahoo emails and that gets the job done. We have about a 0.5% bounce rate on the emails we get now. Which is incredible.

The negatives:

1. The crawling takes 3–4 days depending on the size of the audience.
2. We had to buy/make thousands of Instagram profiles and warm them up so we can do the actions.

The huge positives of an Instagram email finder:

1. Targeted, personalized B2C email addresses with up to 60% open rate on the first email of a sequence!!

Our first campaign, targeting Maxx Chewning’s followers (fitness influencer) Look at that open rate!

2. Now for the huge plus: we could move channels! 95% of the emails are personal email addresses and that gets a tremendous match rate if you upload them to Facebook as a custom audience. Whaaaat?? Now you are able to make your targeting super specific! We achieved 3 times better ROI than before. Huge, huge win.

3. Other than Facebook you can do the same thing for Twitter, Quora, AdRoll, and all other platforms that you can use to make a custom audience.

Final words

I am so glad we got to do this. As I said in the beginning, I am not counting on it lasting too much since Instagram usually takes care of these things pretty fast but we are sure of using it on a daily basis for now.

Important note: Please be advised that automatically accessing Instagram is against their terms of service.

This is just an educational resource and for those of you who don’t have the time, resources, and want to be 100% on the legal side of things, get in touch with us and just buy email addresses from Instagram.

How to Search and Find People on Instagram by Email

Happy to say that in fact there is a way to search and find people on Instagram by email and we built it. It just isn’t successful 100% of the time. Let me explain.

Like we previously mentioned, there are emails in Instagram bio or on their profile (email button — only available via mobile device).

So to be able to find users on Instagram by email, they need to be in either the first or the second category. Luckily, about 20% of all profiles do have that, so chances are, you’ll be able to find 1 out of 5 people using this method.

1. Finding an Instagram account if they have their email in the bio

This one is done by using a few advanced search operators on Google. Let’s say that we need to find Instagram by the email id “themusclemarys@gmail.com”.
Just go on google and type “themusclemarys@gmail.com site:instagram.com”
Here are the results you’ll see:

and there we go! We have the Instagram account of the user associated.

2. Finding profiles that do not have their email in the bio

Well, the answer here is just a question of scale. With the help of an Instagram data company like Influencers Club you can do a reverse lookup in their database and check for matches.

Use this link to find an Instagram profile from an email address (you get 1500 free check-ups just for signing up).

The tool can also be used for finding Instagram users based on usernames, keywords in bio, or name.

Instagram Email Finder Tool (2021 Update)

Happy to share that Influencers.club is still going strong! Today, they’ve been hired by more than 300 e-commerce and marketing agencies to make their email marketing more profitable. And, they can definitely help you do the same!

Fill in the form below if you need help finding the email addresses of your niche audience with the help of their research team (not Instagram email scraper tool).