Personal E-mail Addresses and Mobile Phone Numbers – How to Get Them

We receive quite a lot of queries regarding the availability of personal e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers. Sometimes these are direct questions of the sort “does your database include mobile phone numbers” or “how many email addresses are in this mailing list”. Sometimes we see these requests in the online search queries.

At the same time there are many websites that claim they have the best, most recent and verified e-mail addresses. But can you trust their claims? This motivated me to write an article about how difficult it is to obtain this kind of data.

Background

Personal e-mail addresses are usually from general public domains like Gmail, Hotmail, AOL or Outlook. Some people go a step further and create their own private domain by purchasing one for, say, their last name (e.g., smith.com). Then, they can create their personalized email address like, say, “john@smith.com”.

As for mobile phone numbers, there is no way of knowing if a phone number is mobile or land-line. The number itself is not giving that away (they are both 10 digits in length). There are some groups of numbers that belong to a particular service that are easily identifiable if you know the special area code they are associated with. Google Voice, for example, provides numbers in the 443 area code, so if a particular number belongs to that set, you could try sending it an SMS message.

Data in Our Lists

Our data comes from a publicly available resource. We only break it down to smaller, usable files that people can download and open in Excel. The email addresses in our database typically consist of professional addresses associated with medical providers, which are often affiliated with their practices, clinics, or hospitals. This means that the majority of the emails are likely to be from affiliated domains rather than general public domains.

Only a small percentage of our records contain email addresses. These are the emails that a doctor or nurse decided to make public (or made so unknowingly). Think about it for a second. If the person made that decision, he or she had one of two things in mind: 1) I want people to contact me because this is my business email, or 2) I just needed to provide this email to register my license so I used an email that I don’t check or will stop using soon when I change jobs.

Phone numbers they have provided are usually work related (the hospital they work for) or business related (their clinic phone number). Very rarely will they use the same phone number for work and personal business. Even small clinics will usually have a dedicated phone number. It could be a cell phone, but in many cases, it’s not the doctor who manages it but the administrator.

Think Logically

Now ask yourself this question: Do I publish my private email online? Of course not, unless you have a business and you’d like people to contact you via email. But usually in those cases you have another email address because your private one is reserved for, of course, your private matters. No body likes to receive unwanted mail in their mailbox just like no body likes to receive unwanted telemarketing phone calls or text messages.

Medical professionals are not dumb. They cherrish their privacy and value their precious time. In the next section let’s explore alternative methods of contacting exactly the right person with the right message.

Effective Reach-out Methods

So you may ask, how in the world can I contact a targeted group of medical professionals if not by email or SMS (text message)? The answer depends on a number of factors.

If it’s a small group of people than you can spend some time online and find the data yourself. Many websites of today (including medical establishments especially) use a contact form to avoid spam. This is a very effective and reasonable approach in that it still allows you (a single person) to reach them. Filling out the online contact form directs your message to their email box. Using this technique you can spend a few minutes per day to contact a handful of highly targetted individuals. This marketing strategy will be way more effective than sending thousands of emails to so called “high quality, verified contacts”. Think about it, these lists are used by many others so what is the guarantee that someone even checks these mailboxes. I can assure you that a neurosurgeon is not sifing through his mailbox and reading messages titled “Best software for managing clinics” or addressed to “Dear email@gmail.com”.

Another approach is to use direct mail. Our databases include not only business addresses (we are talking about physical address here) but also mailing address. In many cases these are the same for small medical organizations. As it turns out , you can use them to send a personalized letter or a postcard. Want to send a larger amount because you want to target all OB/GYN doctors in California? No problem, there are services you can easily find online that will do the mass mailing for you. A bit more expensive than clicking a button and sending 1000 emails at once but way more effective.

Conclusion

Let’s face it. No body likes to receive spam, unsolicited email or phone messages. These days we need to go beyond these techniques and be smarter. Just ask yourself a question before sending out anything: Would I read this with entusiasm?

Also keep in mind that the systems of today are becoming very intelligent and your mass email compains will get blocked at various stages. First, your own internet provided might block you from sending mass emails. Service providers will ban you if the list is not trully your own (like in the case of users that actually sign up for your newsletter). And then the servers on the side of the receiver will also categorized your messages as spam.

Hence, better to resort to a simpler but more robust techniques discussed above.

Happy fishing 😉