How to find an Instagram influencer's email

Instagram accounts are either personal or professional, and professional accounts are set to Business or Creator. Only professional accounts can add a Contact button near the top of the profile. Instagram's help says it can hold an email address, a phone number and directions, and that anyone who taps Contact can see them.

Two things decide whether you see an email there:

• The account type. Personal accounts have no Contact button. A category label under the name, such as a creator category, marks a professional account, though owners can hide the label.
• The creator's choice. Professional accounts decide whether to display their contact information, under Profile display in their public business information. Some add only a phone number, and some show nothing.

When the button is there and offers an email, that's the address the creator chose to show for business. It's usually the best one to use.

If there's no Contact button, or it offers no email, look at what the creator wrote themselves:

The bio

Look for a line starting with a mail emoji, "collabs", "business", "PR" or "bookings". Addresses are often written out as "name at domain dot com" to avoid spam bots, so rebuild them carefully.

The profile links

The links under the bio usually go to a link-in-bio page, a website or a shop. Open each one.

Link-in-bio pages

Look for an email icon, a contact button, or a link labelled work with me, brand enquiries, collaborations or media kit. A media kit usually names the partnerships address, and sometimes a manager.

The creator's website

Check the pages named contact, about, work with me, collaborations or press. A contact form reaches the same inbox when no address is printed.

Highlights and pinned posts

Some creators keep a story highlight called something like "Collabs" or "Work with me", or pin a post about working with brands. These often say how the creator prefers to be contacted.

1. 01

   Open the profile in the Instagram app

   Check the account type first. A Contact button or a category label under the name means a professional account.

2. 02

   Tap Contact, if it's there

   If it offers an email, note it. This is the address the creator chose to show for business.

3. 03

   Read the whole bio

   Expand it if it's cut off. Look for spelled-out addresses and the words collabs, business, PR or management.

4. 04

   Open each link on the profile

   On a link-in-bio page, look for an email or contact button and a media kit. On a website, check the contact, about, work with me and collaborations pages.

5. 05

   Check highlights and pinned posts

   A highlight or pinned post about brand work often repeats the address or names a manager.

6. 06

   Look at their other platforms

   If they link a TikTok or YouTube account, the address may be published there. See finding a TikToker's email and finding a YouTuber's email.

7. 07

   Write to the manager if one is named

   Use the manager's address, put the creator's handle in the subject line and mention one of their posts.

If two places disagree, prefer the one the creator edits most, usually the Contact button or the bio, and check whether the other is built on an old handle.

If there's no address anywhere, a direct message is a channel the creator opened, so it's a fair way to ask. Make it a question, not a pitch.

• Send it from your brand's real account, with a profile that shows what you sell. Creators check who is writing.
• Expect a wait. Professional accounts have an inbox split into Primary, General and Requests folders, so a first message from an account they don't know is easy to miss.
• Ask one thing: where to send a partnership proposal. Mention one recent post so it's clearly not a mass message.
• Follow up once at most, then leave it.

For the email that follows, see outreach emails and DMs for Instagram and TikTok.

• Don't use email extractor or finder tools. Instagram's Terms of Use say you can't collect information in unauthorised ways, including in an automated way without its permission. Tools that pull addresses from profiles in bulk, or guess them from name patterns, give you addresses creators didn't offer you.
• Don't buy lists. The same terms say you can't buy data obtained from Instagram, and nobody on a bought list agreed to hear from you. More in should you buy a creator email list.
• Don't message from fake accounts. Instagram's terms also rule out impersonating someone or creating accounts in unauthorised ways, and a pitch from an empty profile reads as spam.
• Don't put the pitch in a comment. A public comment asking for an email is awkward to answer and easy to ignore.

Nakodo reads Instagram profiles through Meta's official Business Discovery API, which only works for public professional accounts, so personal accounts are never read. For each creator it reads the bio, including spellings such as "name [at] domain", the website field and the captions of the latest 12 posts. If none has an email, it follows up to 3 linked pages, link-in-bio pages first and then websites, and on a website checks up to 2 pages that look like contact, about, work with me or collaborations, respecting robots.txt.

Nakodo doesn't use Instagram's Contact button and doesn't send DMs, so a creator whose only address sits behind the button has no email on Nakodo and isn't contacted through it; the steps above still work by hand. It keeps an address only if it's on the creator's own domain, a personal mail provider or a domain that looks like the creator's name. The address is never shown to you: Nakodo emails the creator on your behalf and, when they say yes, introduces you in the same thread. See how Nakodo works.