In this Hunter io review, you’ll learn about Hunter’s:
- bulk email finding tool
- lead management CRM
- powerful but easy-to-use email outreach platform
I used to think that if you create outstanding content, it will naturally attract backlinks.
And it does. To some extent.
But the problem is this. In a world where everyone else is actively building backlinks, you’ll get left behind if you aren’t doing the same.
And that’s why I started looking at outreach platforms and email lookup services.
Which brings me to Hunter.
Email Finder Plus Outreach Platform
Hunter is an email finder with a built-in outreach platform.
It finds email addresses from domain names, in bulk. And it allows you to create campaigns where you can contact hundreds of people with personalized emails.
Let’s look at these two main functions within Hunter: email finding and email outreach.
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1. What Features Does Hunter Offer?
Email Finder
The email finder part of Hunter consists of 5 tools:
- Search
- Finder
- Verifier
- Bulks
- Leads
Search – use this tab to search email addresses from a single domain. One thing I like about Hunter is that you can see exactly what sources an email address is based on.
Another cool feature is that Hunter lets you zoom in on a particular department:
Let’s say, for example, you have HR software that you want to pitch. This feature lets you find exactly the people you need to be talking to.
Finder – lets you find an email address for a particular person working at a given company. You can also use it to find the author of a particular blog post.
Verifier – the email verifier checks the deliverability of an email address.
Bulks – this tab does in bulk what the previous three tabs do:
- Domain searching
- Email / author finding
- Email verifying
If you’re using Hunter for link building, you’ll most likely be using the bulk domain search. Just upload your CSV file containing the domains that you need email addresses for:
Leads – the leads tab is basically a miniature CRM where you can organize your lists of email addresses. It has an array of filters you can use to sort your contacts.
How good is Hunter at finding email addresses?
I used domain search in ‘Bulks’ to find email addresses for various lists of websites. These were domains that I wanted to reach out to for link building.
I had three different lists. Hunter’s success rate across those three lists was quite variable, as you can see:
The average success rate across all three searches was 32% – not too bad at all.
But I’m guessing the success rate very much depends on the quality of the target URLs. In other words, you can get much higher ‘hit rates’ with a list of good quality URLs.
Hunter Chrome Extension
Hunter has a free chrome extension that helps you find email addresses from anywhere on the web.
Just click on the Hunter io chrome extension while browsing a website and you’ll see the most common email pattern used by that domain plus any verified email addresss (marked with a green shield):
It also shows you the sources that the email address is based on.
If you’re looking a particular person or a particular role, the Hunter chrome extension helps you with that as well.
The chrome extension is free and you get 25 free email searches per month, so sign up for a free account and start using it today.
Email Outreach
What makes Hunter stand out from other email finder services is the outreach platform or CRM.
It’s beautifully designed, easy to use, and completely free – it’s included with your monthly quota of email lookups.
In my mind that makes Hunter a bargain. Especially when you consider that outreach platforms usually cost $100 to $200 per month.
Email Campaigns
The CRM part of Hunter is located under the ‘Campaigns’ tab.
Here you can send out emails to a list of email addresses, using mail merge fields to pull in data such as first name, URL to a blog post, and so forth.
In Hunter, there are three steps to creating a campaign:
- Content
- Audience
- Review
Content – is where you compose your email message. You can start with a new email message or you can select a template. Hunter has an impressive collection of pre-written templates for cold email outreach:
You can also set follow up emails and choose the interval between follow ups.
In the settings for each campaign you can choose which days of the week you want your emails to be sent:
Audience – this is where you add the recipients for your email campaign. You can do this by uploading a CSV or manually (one-by-one):
Review – in this tab you can click into each individual email and check that it’s correctly formatted etc.
Campaign Stats
Once your campaign is active, you’ll see basic stats, such as ‘sent’, ‘opened’, ‘clicked’, and ‘replied’:
Importing a ‘Research URL’ into Hunter
So far, I’ve loved everything about Hunter. But this review wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t address this one fly in the ointment.
And it’s a big deal for me.
When you’re doing link building outreach, you usually have an article URL for each domain that you want to contact.
These URLs will be in a column of the CSV that you upload to Hunter.
Unfortunately, Hunter will strip out the column with your article URLs. And that means you then have to go back, adding in the article URLs to each result where Hunter found an email address.
But this is time consuming, as you can imagine.
It would be great if Hunter could keep the article URL with each record or row. Hopefully that’s something they can look at in a future iteration of the software.
Google Sheets Add-on
If you do a lot of your work in Google Sheets, you’ll be pleased to know that Hunter has a Google Sheets add-on.
Just select the column with the URLs that you want email addresses for and then choose ‘bulk’ in the Hunter add-on panel.
2. Pros and Cons of Hunter
Pros
The first big pro with Hunter is its ability to find email addresses. With a success rate of up to 65%, Hunter is very good at finding emails.
Another tick for Hunter is that you get an outreach platform for free. Considering that email outreach platforms can cost over $100 per month, this makes Hunter a very good deal indeed.
Admittedly, the Hunter outreach platform is not as advanced as some of the others. But if you don’t want to get caught up in endless learning curves, that could even be an advantage.
Another big plus for Hunter is the beautiful and intuitive user interface (UI).
Working out how to use Hunter is a breeze because everything is exactly where you would expect it to be. You’ll get the hang of Hunter’s outreach platform in less than 15 minutes.
By comparison, I spent nearly a week trying to understand another outreach platform (whose name I won’t mention).
Cons
The only real negative with Hunter is the problem I mentioned earlier: Hunter strips out the article URLs associated with each domain you upload. And that means you have to go back and add them in later.
Hunter is a little bit more expensive than some of its competitors. You can get more email lookups for the same or less money with other services. But they don’t include an email outreach platform. You would still need to pay for that as a separate service.
When you look at it like that, Hunter is quite good value.
3. Is Hunter Safe To Use?
Hunter.io is fully compliant with GDPR and applies GDPR requirements even outside the EU.
Hunter complies with GDPR by processing only publicly available online data and by pseudonymising or truncating any private data.
Hunter also gives websites the right to erase their data from Hunter’s database.
You can read more about Hunter’s GDPR compliance here: GDPR Compliance.
4. Hunter Integrations
Hunter integrates with the following CRMs:
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- Pipedrive
- Zoho
- Zapier
5. Hunter API
Thousands of businesses have integrated their software with Hunter’s API to find and verify professional email addresses.
Hunter’s API has four applications: domain search, email finder, author finder, and email verifier.
6. Hunter Pricing
Hunter’s paid plans start at $49 per month for 500 email lookups and 1000 email verifications:
- Free: $0 /mo (25 email searches, 50 email verifications)
- Starter: $49 /mo (500 email searches, 1000 email verifications)
- Growth: $99 /mo (2,500 email searches, 5,000 email verifications)
- Enterprise: $399 /mo (30,000 email searches, 60,000 email verifications)
The only variables in the different plans are the number of searches and email validations per month. That makes choosing the plan that’s right for you very simple.
7. Summary
Hunter is an email finder that has a high success rate in finding and validating email addresses based on domain names. It comes with an easy-to-use email outreach platform which is included free with your email search quota.
If you want to get started with link building at an affordable price, Hunter gives you the two things you need at an affordable price: bulk email searches and an easy-to-use email outreach platform.
But don’t take my word for it – try Hunter for free.
With the free plan you get 25 email lookups a month and 50 email verifications per month. You also get to use the email outreach platform at no extra charge.