Can You Really Find a Phone Number Free?
Incomplete or incorrect contact information is one of the biggest time and money wasters for businesses. If a lead is missing a phone number, a salesperson might spend 30 minutes or more trying to find a phone number free on the internet.
That’s paid time that could be spent talking to customers, closing sales. And, if this happens a couple times a day, to just a few team members, that’s hours of wasted time.
But, incomplete contacts make their way into business databases all the time.
Maybe you’ve got a mailing list that you built back before you started text and phone outreach.
Or maybe you mistakenly collected a whole bunch of leads without requiring customers to enter their phone number in the lead form.
Or—one of the most common issues—the phone number is incorrect because of a typo or data entry error.
There’s a long list of things that can go wrong when getting personal information. In any case, the end result is that you have a contact without a usable telephone number.
If you need to find a phone number using an address, that’s where a reverse address lookup comes in. But, let’s start by answering the main question first.
Can you find a phone number for free?
The most honest answer is no.
To find a phone number using mailing address information (like name, city, and state), you need access to a lot of data. That data is held in multiple databases, owned by both government and private organizations.
Accessing and searching all that data requires agreements and network connections, among other things. And, whoever is searching for the phone number would likely need to build a system for searching the data and matching phone numbers with the other information.
In short, it’s very difficult—probably impossible—for anyone to find phone numbers for free.
Some companies offer free reverse address lookup services. And, they will return a name and phone number if you do a reverse address search on their site.
But, these services usually get their data from a static database that they built by paying for one-time access to various databases or scraping the the internet for publicly available data.
Since these services don’t have real-time access to the databases where up-to-date phone number information is stored, the results are often out-of-date. An out-of-date phone number is an incorrect phone number.
So, a free reverse address lookup will get you a phone number. But, there’s a good chance that it will be just as unusable as if you had no phone number at all.
It’s more realistic to say that you can get a reverse address lookup for free, but you can’t get dependable data for free.
How to find phone numbers (that are accurate)
Needless to say, using a free reverse address lookup service or trying to find phone numbers on the internet will likely be fruitless. But, don’t despair. There are ways to get phone numbers at a very low cost.
If you have a single phone number, or maybe a few phone numbers, to lookup, head over and plug a name, city, and state into our reverse address lookup tool. It’s simple and quick for personal use and finding phone numbers in ones and twos. And, you can bet that the phone numbers are accurate. If we don’t find a phone number, the search is free.
That said, we’re going to focus mostly on finding phone numbers in bulk.
It’s totally possible to do a bulk reverse address lookup if you need phone numbers for a list of names and addresses. It’s also simple and cost efficient. So, you can get the information you need without driving up your cost-per-lead or overhead costs.
Most importantly, you need to export your contact lists to a .csv, .txt, or Excel file. This way you can upload the list to have phone numbers appended to it.
Once the list is exported, make sure that each piece of contact information is in its own column. There should be a separate column for:
- First name.
- Last name.
- Address.
- City.
- State.
- Zip code.
- Phone number.
- Any additional information gets its own column.
Once your list is organized, all you need to do is upload it to our batch append service. You can upload your list right in your browser. And you’ll typically get your results in minutes, unless your list is really large.
You list will be emailed to you—with up-to-date phone numbers added—in a comma-separated .csv file.
The cost per phone number varies, based on how many contacts you have. But, the cost-per-phone-number is lower if you have a larger list. So, our batch append service gets more cost efficient the more phone numbers you have to find.
Finding phone numbers in bulk is ideal if you work with a lot of contacts that you store in a database. But, there is another way.
Data integration
If you’ve developed an app or if you use CRM software, you can use a reverse address lookup API to automate the process of uploading contacts and retrieving the results.
The API integrates using a unique URL and requires very little development to implement. There’s no need to add a regex or run a script to check information.
In some cases, data integration with the Searchbug API requires no development at all, because the software has an interface for adding a data validation API.
The API is ideal if you have very high volumes of contacts to check or if you need to find phone numbers in real time, as customers enter their information in form fields or submit lead generation forms.
And, the cost of finding phone numbers with the API is almost exactly the same as finding phone numbers with our batch append service, but far more convenient.
Whether you use our batch append service or our data append API, the data will more than pay for itself. The time you or your teams waste dealing with missing or incorrect phone numbers, and trying to find a phone number free on the internet costs any business more than the price of a single reverse address lookup.
And, that value just gets better the more phone numbers you find with Searchbug.
What to do now
If you need to find a phone number, find a name and phone number using an address.
Need to find phone numbers for a whole list? Create a free account and find phone numbers in bulk.
Or automate the process of getting phone numbers with our find phone number API.
