Missing Email Addresses in Your CRM? Here's How to Find Them

January 2026 · 8 min read

You have 50,000 contacts in Salesforce. 8,000 of them don't have email addresses. That's 16% of your database that can't be reached, can't be marketed to, can't be included in campaigns.

These aren't worthless records. They have names, companies, titles. They might be at your target accounts. They just happen to be missing the one piece of information you need to reach them.

Here's how to find those missing emails and make those contacts useful again.

Why Emails Go Missing

Before we fix the problem, it helps to understand how it happens:

Event scans and badge swipes. Trade shows and conferences often capture name and company but not email. Or the email field is optional and skipped.

Business card data entry. Physical cards get transcribed incompletely. The email is too small to read or gets cut off.

Phone-sourced contacts. SDRs add contacts they spoke with but didn't get an email for.

LinkedIn imports. LinkedIn connection exports don't include emails (by design).

Merged records. When duplicates are merged, sometimes the email field gets lost if the "winning" record had a blank.

Bounced and removed. Invalid emails get cleared but the contact remains.

Historical data. Old imports from pre-CRM days that were incomplete to begin with.

Prioritizing Which Emails to Find

Not every missing email is worth finding. Prioritize your effort:

Tier 1: Target accounts. Any contact at a named account or high-value prospect is worth the effort. These are your ABM targets.

Tier 2: Active opportunities. Contacts associated with open deals. Multi-threading means you need to reach more than the primary contact.

Tier 3: Recent engagement. Contacts who've engaged recently (website visits, content downloads, event attendance) but don't have emails.

Tier 4: ICP match. Contacts with titles and companies that match your ICP, even without recent engagement.

Low priority: Everything else. Random contacts with no engagement, at non-target accounts, with unclear relevance. These can wait.

Methods for Finding Missing Emails

Method 1: Email Pattern Guessing

Most companies follow predictable email patterns: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc.

If you know the pattern (from other contacts at the same company), you can generate likely emails:

1. Find an existing contact at the same company with a known email
2. Identify the pattern (first.last, f.last, firstlast, etc.)
3. Apply the pattern to the contact with missing email
4. Verify the generated email before adding to the record

Tools like Hunter.io can identify patterns from a domain and suggest likely formats.

Pros: Fast, cheap, works for common patterns
Cons: Doesn't work for companies with unusual patterns or multiple domains. Requires verification.

Method 2: Email Finding Services

Several services specialize in finding B2B email addresses:

Service	Approach	Best For
Hunter.io	Pattern detection + database	SMB contacts, common domains
Apollo.io	Large contact database	Volume lookups, prospecting
Lusha	Verified database + LinkedIn	Enterprise contacts, accuracy
Clearbit	API enrichment	Real-time lookups, integrations
RocketReach	Multiple source aggregation	Hard-to-find contacts
ContactOut	LinkedIn-focused	LinkedIn profiles with emails

These services work by maintaining databases of business contacts, scraping public sources, and using pattern matching. Accuracy varies from 60-85% depending on the service and the contact.

Pros: Scalable, relatively automated
Cons: Per-lookup costs add up. Not all emails are found or accurate.

Method 3: LinkedIn Research

LinkedIn profiles sometimes contain email addresses, especially for salespeople and executives who want to be contacted.

Process:

1. Search for the contact by name and company
2. Check their profile for email in the Contact Info section
3. Check for email in their About or Experience sections
4. Look for personal websites that might list email

Sales Navigator makes this easier at scale, and some tools (like ContactOut) can pull emails directly from LinkedIn profiles.

Pros: Often finds emails that databases miss
Cons: Manual, time-consuming. Doesn't scale well.

Method 4: Company Website Research

Company websites sometimes list email addresses directly:

• Leadership/Team pages
• Press/Media contact sections
• Author bylines on blog posts
• Event speaker listings
• Job postings (contact for the role)

Pros: Free, authoritative source
Cons: Manual, only works for visible contacts

Method 5: Ask Existing Contacts

If you're trying to multi-thread into an account where you already have a relationship:

• Ask your champion for introductions (includes email)
• Request a warm email connecting you to the relevant person
• Ask for the team org chart or directory

This is often more effective than cold email anyway.

Pros: Warm introduction > cold email
Cons: Only works for accounts with existing relationships

The Email Finding Workflow

Here's a systematic approach to finding missing emails:

Step 1: Export and Segment

Pull all contacts with missing emails from Salesforce. Segment by priority tier (target accounts, open opps, etc.).

Step 2: Enrich via Service

Run your high-priority contacts through an email finding service. This will find 40-60% of them automatically.

Step 3: Pattern-Based Lookup

For contacts not found, check if other contacts at the same company have emails. Apply the pattern to generate candidates.

Step 4: Manual Research

For remaining high-priority contacts (target accounts, open opps), do manual LinkedIn and website research.

Step 5: Verify All Found Emails

Before importing any found emails back to Salesforce, run them through an email validation service. This catches:

• Pattern-guessed emails that don't actually exist
• Outdated emails from stale databases
• Typos introduced during research

Step 6: Import to Salesforce

Match on Contact ID and update the Email field. Consider adding a field indicating email source (Appended_Email_Source__c) for tracking.

What to Do With Unfindable Contacts

Some contacts simply can't be found through email lookup. Options:

Try other channels: If you have phone numbers, try calling. LinkedIn InMail is an option for high-value contacts.

Flag for SDR research: Assign to a rep for manual research as part of their prospecting workflow.

Wait for intent signals: If they visit your website or engage with content, you might capture email through a form.

Accept the gap: Not every contact needs to be reachable. If they're not at target accounts and have no engagement history, they may not be worth the effort.

Archive or delete: Contacts without emails and without other value (not at target accounts, no activity, no deal history) are candidates for cleanup.

Preventing Future Email Gaps

Fixing missing emails is good. Preventing them is better:

Make email required on forms. If someone wants your content, they can provide an email.

Require email on Contact creation. Add a Salesforce validation rule that prevents saving a Contact without an email (with exceptions for specific use cases).

Enrich at point of entry. When new contacts come in without emails, try to append immediately rather than waiting for a batch process.

Train on merge rules. When reps merge duplicates, make sure they're keeping the email from the record that has one.

Audit import sources. Which import sources create the most email-less contacts? Fix the source process.

Measuring Success

Track these metrics:

• Email fill rate: Percentage of contacts with valid emails (target: >95%)
• Append success rate: What percentage of missing emails were found?
• Appended email quality: Bounce rate on appended emails (should be <5%)
• New gap rate: How many new contacts are created without emails each month?

When to Outsource Email Finding

DIY email finding works for small volumes or occasional needs. Consider getting help if:

• You have thousands of missing emails: The manual effort becomes significant
• Tool costs are adding up: Multiple service subscriptions get expensive
• You need higher match rates: Services have access to more data sources
• You lack time: RevOps is busy with other priorities

At Verum, email appending is part of our data enrichment services. We use multiple data sources and manual research to find emails that automated tools miss. For target account contacts, we typically achieve 60-75% match rates.