How to Find Brand Contact Emails for UGC Pitches (Without Paying for Tools)

The email template gets all the attention, but honestly the thing that made my reply rate jump wasn’t the words. It was who I sent them to. Pitching info@ is like putting a letter in a mailbox that nobody checks. Here’s how I find the actual human, for free, in about five minutes per brand.

First: who are you even looking for?

It depends on the size of the brand, and this is the part beginners get wrong. Here’s my cheat sheet:

When you’re new, spend 80% of your energy on the first two rows. The founder of a 30k-follower body-care brand reads her own email, needs content, and decides in one reply. The influencer manager at a giant brand has 400 unread pitches and a roster.

Step 1: find the name

LinkedIn, no premium needed. Search: [brand name] influencer or [brand name] marketing or [brand name] community. Look at current employees. Titles with influencer, creator, partnerships, community, social or brand marketing are your people. Write down the full name and title.

Instagram. Small brands tag their team in stories and posts. Look at who the brand account follows: there’s often “founder” in a bio. Check the “About this account” and any linked personal accounts.

The website. “About,” “Our story,” “Press,” “Contact” pages. Founder-led brands almost always name the founder, and press pages often list a direct email for media, which reaches a real person.

Podcasts and interviews. Google [founder name] podcast. Show notes frequently include a direct email or the founder’s handle. Bonus: you now have a real thing to mention in your pitch.

Step 2: find the email pattern

Almost every company uses one pattern for everyone. The common ones:

• first@brand.com (most small brands)
• first.last@brand.com (most mid-size)
• firstlast@brand.com
• first initial + last@brand.com (jsmith@)

Find any single real email at the company and you’ve got the pattern. Sources: the press page, a customer-service reply you got once, a job posting, a LinkedIn “contact info” section, an email signature in a newsletter, a podcast show note.

Then apply it to your person’s name.

Step 3: check it before you send

Free email verifier tools (the ones that give you a handful of checks a day) will tell you if an address exists. I check every address before it goes in the spreadsheet. A bounce doesn’t just waste an email, it hurts your sending reputation, and if you get too many, your real pitches start landing in spam.

If the verifier is unsure, I send to the most likely pattern with the second-most-likely in BCC. One will bounce, one won’t, and nobody notices.

Step 4: log it

My spreadsheet columns: brand, website, size, contact name, title, email, source (where I found it), date pitched, follow-up dates, status, notes. It looks like overkill on day one. On day 300 it’s a database of a few hundred beauty brands with real contacts, and it’s how I know which brands actually pay creators. That’s the list I give away the first 50 of at the bottom of this page.

What about DMs?

Instagram DMs work in exactly one case: a tiny brand where the founder personally runs the account and replies to comments within an hour. Then a DM is fine, and you can move to email once she replies.

For everyone else, DMs are where pitches go to die. Requests folder, no notification, mixed in with 200 “collab?” messages. Use Instagram to find the person, then email.

What about contact forms?

Same problem. Contact forms go to customer support. Occasionally a small brand’s form goes to the founder, so if there’s truly no email anywhere, fill it out, but keep looking.

Red flags that a brand won’t pay

While you’re researching, you’ll notice signals. Brands that only ever repost customer content with no visible creator program, brands with an “ambassador” page that’s really an affiliate scheme, brands whose Instagram hasn’t posted in two months. I skip them. The green flags are the opposite: creator-looking ads in the Meta Ad Library, a “creators” or “collabs” link, a marketing hire posted in the last six months. I wrote a whole thing on how to tell which beauty brands actually pay, because this filtering step saves more time than any tool.

My five-minute routine per brand

1. Instagram: is this brand active, are they running creator-style content, roughly how big are they? (1 min)
2. LinkedIn: who’s the influencer/social/founder person? (2 min)
3. Pattern: find one real email, apply the pattern. (1 min)
4. Verify, log, done. (1 min)

Twenty brands is about an hour and a half of research. That’s the block I do on Mondays, then the pitches go out Tuesday through Thursday. Nothing fancy, just consistent.