Prospecting
How do you find business emails without buying a list?
A bought list arrives as social URLs and a name. What a free crawl can get from that, what a paid lookup is actually for, and the column people throw away.
How MarketWar handles it
A row that arrives with its own domain costs NO search at all, and a row with only a Facebook or LinkedIn page has that page read for the company's own website free — then crawled for a published address, gated by an ownership rule that refuses a domain it cannot tie to the company name. Driven end to end: 1 paid search across 4 rows, and only for the row the network walled. A paid supplier is asked only about the rows the free sources could not answer.
The usual way to get B2B contact data is to pay for a list or a subscription. It works, and for most small businesses it is also the most expensive possible order of operations — because a large share of the rows you are paying for are ones you could have answered for nothing.
The thing almost everybody throws away
A bought or exported list arrives with a website column and, very often, a Facebook or LinkedIn column. Both get discarded by the time the row reaches a finder, and both are worth money:
- A row that already states its domain needs no search at all. Paying to discover a domain the file handed you is pure waste, and it happens on every row of every import that drops the column.
- A row with a Facebook or LinkedIn page states the company's website on that page. Following it is free.
The second is the one that catches people out, because a finder is right to refuse a social URL as "not the company's own site" — and then wrong about what it is worth. The page is not the website; the page tells you the website.
What the free pass can do, and what gates it
Given a domain, the crawl reads the site and extracts a published address. Two refusals do the work:
The ownership gate. An address is only accepted if the domain can be tied to the company. Otherwise you harvest the web designer's mailbox, the booking platform's, or the franchise head office's — and send a stranger a pitch meant for somebody else.
No pattern guessing. A firstname.lastname@ address is a guess, and a guess that resolves belongs to a real person. The engine will not manufacture one.
If a business publishes no address anywhere a crawler can read, the honest output is blank. A contact form and no mailbox is a real state of the world.
Where a paid credit earns its place
On exactly the rows the free pass could not answer: a real company, a real site, no published mailbox. That is what a licensed database is genuinely good at, and it is a fraction of most lists.
The order matters more than the supplier. Measured end to end on a four-row fixture, one paid search was spent — and only on the row the social network refused to show us. Three rows were answered from links they already carried.
A page that refuses to show us is not a company without a website
This distinction is worth more than it sounds. Facebook and LinkedIn serve a sign-in wall to a signed-out reader for a large share of pages. Reporting that as "this company has no website" would have the customer delete a perfectly good lead.
So the two are reported separately: the page names no site is a fact about the company; we were not allowed to read the page is a fact about us.
And lawful basis is a separate question
Finding an address is not permission to use it. Whether you may email a business you have never spoken to depends on what kind of subscriber they are, and the answer differs for a limited company and a sole trader.
The question to ask any contact tool
How many of my rows did you charge me for, and how many of those already had the answer in the file?
A tool that cannot separate those two numbers is not optimising your cost. It is optimising its own.
What this does not do
It cannot find an address a business has never published, and it will not guess one from a pattern. A company with a contact form and no mailbox stays blank — which is the correct answer, because an invented address at a real domain reaches a real stranger.
Common questions
Why is my bought list not working?
Usually because the website column holds a Facebook or LinkedIn page — that is what those networks give a broker. A finder that treats it as the company's own site refuses it as a directory, and the row dies with the answer sitting in the cell.
What does a free lookup actually get?
The company's own site, read for a published address, with the web designer's and the booking platform's addresses refused. For a business that publishes an address, that is the whole job at no cost.
When is a paid credit worth spending?
On the rows the free pass could not answer — a real site with no published mailbox. Spending it on a row that already states its address is paying for something you had.
Will it guess an address from a name pattern?
No. A pattern guess that happens to resolve belongs to a real person at a real company, and sending to it is the most expensive kind of wrong.
Related
Can you email a business you have never spoken to?
In the UK a company’s info@ and a named person at that company are different legal questions. Which you may email, on what basis, and what a sole trader changes.
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