How to Find Influencer Emails Using AI? — Complete Walkthrough

With a whopping market value of US$21.1 billion in 2023 alone, the global influencer marketing industry is going to pick up even more steam in the days to come. As a brand or business, it provides an exciting opportunity to amplify your message and reach a wider audience. 

To that end, one of the most crucial tasks for your influencer marketing campaigns is to find the influencers’ email addresses, and then pitching them your offer. 

However, locating these emails can be a challenge, especially if you’re manually scraping data to find the contact information. This is where AI comes in handy, with Clay and other similar tools offering a faster, frills-free way to build your influencer brand email list in just a few clicks. 

Over the course of this article, we’ll cover:

• How you can find influencer emails in Clay?
• How to manually scrape influencer emails inside Google Sheets, and…
• The benefits of using influencer outreach tools to find their contact information.

By the end of the article, you’ll be able to build high-quality influencer prospecting lists with AI in just a few easy steps.

So let’s dive right in! 

How to Find Influencer Emails with AI? (Using Clay.com)? — Step-by-Step Breakdown

Knowing how to find influencer emails is a key differentiator for the success and failure of any influencer marketing campaign. Much like our previous workflows, we’ll be using Clay for its amazing integrations & automations. 

Here’s how you can start scraping influencer information from Twitter, Instagram and even Facebook in just a few clicks: 

Step 1: Prepare the Google search

The first step on learning how to find influencer emails with Clay is to prepare the Google search. You can do this with a simple Google search as well, using it to check out the top databases, listicles & compilations in SERP, but that’ll only allow you to address say the top 100, or 200 influencers in your niche.

When sending cold emails to influencers, you ideally want to cast a wider net so as to see some success on your influencer outreach campaigns. 

Thankfully, Clay can help. Here’s how: 

• Create a new table in Clay, and choose the ‘Google Search’ option to mimic a search and pull data into Clay

• The second step is to construct a specific search query, so for example, if you’re looking to reach beauty & make-up influencers on Instagram, the query could be: “site:instagram.com (“beauty” OR “makeup” OR “skincare” OR “make up artist”) AND (“gmail.com” OR “outlook.com” OR “hotmail.com”)

• Once you add this query to Clay, Google will return results from Instagram alongside the profiles which have ‘beauty’ as a keyword. These results also feature one of the above email domains in their content, especially in the creator’s Instagram bio. 

Now while this is useful, it certainly limits your search for the influencer contacts to the first 10 SERPs. To ensure we have a more robust list, we can simply split our searches and add specific criteria to our search modifier to zero-in on specific types of influencers. 

So for example, we want to see another variation specific to a region or city, we can simply add the following to our search modifier: 

“site:instagram.com (“beauty” OR “makeup” OR “skincare” OR “make up artist”) AND (“gmail.com” OR “outlook.com” OR “hotmail.com”) Los Angeles.

Step 2: Analyze the search results

The next step to find influencer emails is to analyze the search results by setting the number of results to a manageable quantity, say 100 results and then run the search.

Once the data loads onto the sheet, you’ll be able to see the scraped Instagram profiles of influencers alongside their email address. 

Step 3: Extract & map the email addresses 

The next step to find influencer emails with Clay is to map the scraped data to a new table in the tool, followed by using the ‘Extract Values from Data’ option and choosing the ‘Snippet’ field under the ‘Data’ column. 

Now since we want to extract influencer email addresses, we can simply choose the ‘Email addresses’ option under the ‘Extraction Type’ field. 

Once the email addresses have been extracted from the snippet, run the function and map them to your table. 

(Pro-tip: Make sure to always validate the emails using a tool like Debounce or NeverBounce before sending out a campaign). 

Step 4: Refine (or ‘spin’) your search 

To find influencer emails scalably, you’ll need to further refine your search results. The best way to do this is to ‘spin’ your search query, which implies adding extra parameters that can be used to diversify the search results. 

For example, if we want to see another variation specific to a region or city, we can simply add the following to our site search modifier: 

“site:instagram.com (“beauty” OR “makeup” OR “skincare” OR “make up artist”) AND (“gmail.com” OR “outlook.com” OR “hotmail.com”) Los Angeles.

Doing this will return a list of region-specific beauty influencers in locations like Los Angeles, and you can repeat this process with other cities and parameters to find more people for your influencer outreach list. 

Bonus step: Use AI to extract follower count 

Now that you’ve repeated the spinning process, there might be scenarios where you want to extract the follower count as well while diving deeper into trenches on how to find influencer emails. This is especially important if you’re looking to extract influencers who meet certain criteria (like a minimum 1000 followers and so on).

To solve this, you can use Claygent AI, a web scraping tool inside Clay to get the follower count by clicking the ‘Add Enrichment’ option and then choosing the ‘Claygent AI Agent’  tool. Once you’ve done this, simply add the following prompt in the ‘Mission’ section. 

Here’s the prompt: 

“Tell me how many followers this Instagram page has: /link. The output should only be the number of followers that they have. I don’t need any other information.” 

Once you’ve put in the above prompt, simply choose the model you want to run this prompt on, alongside the maximum cost before saving it and running the operation on the first 10 rows. 

Based on the prompt added, you’ll get the follower count for profiles in the first 10 rows. 

So this is everything you need when figuring out how to find influencer emails with AI. The method can be applied to not just Instagram, but also the likes of TikTok, Twitter and Facebook. 

Simply replace the “site: instagram.com” with “site: tiktok.com” or “site:facebook.com” in the search query. Then run the same process as described above in Clay to find influencers and their contact details in a few minutes.

Alternative 1: How to Find Influencer Emails Manually? 

Now while Clay is definitely a helpful tool, there might be situations where you wouldn’t want to spend too much or simply don’t have the resources to automate this process. 

This is where knowing how to find influencer emails manually helps. 

The only difference? – You’re using influencer outreach tools & social media scrapers to do this. 

Given below is a stepwise breakdown of how to do this manually (or in a semi-automated manner): 

Step 1: Create a list of the top hashtags related to your business 

The first step on how to find influencer emails manually involves creating a list of the top hashtags on social media which are relevant to your business. 

What this means is you simply go to the app, say Instagram in this case and search for the hashtag – #makeupandskincare. Doing this will return a list of accounts, posts and other content related to the hashtag. 

Once the search returns the results, click posts under the ‘Top Posts’ section and note down which influencers are posting content on the above hashtag in a fresh spreadsheet. 

In the spreadsheet, make sure to have the following fields/data points:

• Name of the influencer
• Profile link
• Number of followers
• Engagement rate
• Note for personalization
• Keywords in Bio

Step 2: Analyze engagement rate 

Analyzing the engagement rate on posts is a critical aspect that you shouldn’t ignore, since it helps you assess the audience’s interaction level with an influencer. 

Calculate this rate by dividing the average likes and comments by the follower count, then multiplying by 100. You can also use engagement calculator tools like Phlanx, Modash or HypeAuditor for this purpose. 

Step 3: Extract emails from social media profiles

Another useful method when figuring out how to find influencer emails is to use a Chrome extension or free influencer email finder tool that extracts information from the social media profile of a creator. Some of these like the ‘IG Email Extractor – IG Email Scraper’ and ‘Tough Data Free TikTok Profile Scraper’ help you scrape emails from the hashtags you’ve collected, and you can even use them to extract the followers of any profile.

Skim through the list and handpick the relevant influencers you want to reach out to and copy them to the spreadsheet. It must, however, be noted that several of these free scrapers can compromise your social media accounts, so be careful while using them. 

Alternative 2: Finding Influencer Emails with Influencer Outreach Tools

The second alternative for learning how to find influencer emails manually is to leverage various the influencer outreach tools and marketplaces that carry data around these creators and influencers you want to target. 

While influencer outreach tools offer various benefits, they’re usually too costly and non-flexible, especially for smaller, and mid-sized companies.

It is recommended to opt for either the AI-powered method (since it offers better control on what you need, and how you need it) using Clay or the manual/semi-automated method. 

Final Thoughts

Having navigated the intricacies of how to find influencer emails using both manually & using AI tools like Clay, you’re now equipped to scale your influencer outreach efforts. 

Remember, once you’ve gathered these emails, it’s crucial to engage influencers with compelling and personalized outreach. To do this, we recommend checking out our partnership email templates which will help you craft amazing emails for your influencer marketing campaign. 

Or if you’re short on time and resources, and need assistance setting up AI-powered influencer outreach campaigns, feel free to reach out to Cleverviral on [email protected] with your requirements. 

As a trusted outbound growth partner, we’ll take care of everything from finding these emails, crafting the right message and then sending them to your ideal prospects. 

Until then, happy prospecting!

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