Pros
- Webhooks support for web integrations
- Attributes allow to add custom fields for each prospect
- Confidence score tells you how likely the email is valid
- Permanently free plan available
- Domain search finds prospect emails in any company
- Find a particular person's email address
Cons
- Limited to 5 follow-ups per campaign
- No built-in A/B testing feature
- No multi-channel outreach
Best or unique feature
- Best for prospecting and lead generation
Deliverability
Email Sequences & Follow-ups
Pricing & Trial
Prospecting & Email Verification
Multichannel Outreach
Personalization & Customizability
Analytics & Metrics
Are you tired of cold-calling and getting nothing but radio silence?
Are you ready to up your sales game and find more leads than you know what to do with?
Well, let me introduce you to Hunter.io – the ultimate sales prospecting tool.
Hunter.io helps you find and verify email addresses of your target audience, so you can stop wasting your time guessing and start making real connections.
But is it really worth your hard-earned money?
In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into the features, pricing, and downsides of Hunter.io, so you can decide for yourself if it’s the right fit for your business.
Evaluation Criteria for a Cold Email Outreach Software
When selecting a cold email outreach tool, there are several factors to consider. Here are some essential aspects to keep in mind:
- Email Deliverability - To ensure successful cold email outreach, it is important to choose software that provides high email deliverability rates. This can be achieved by looking for tools that offer email warmup options, human-like sending, email throttling, and spam risk assessment.
- Prospecting and Email Verification - The success of email outreach campaigns heavily relies on the quality of leads. Therefore, it is important to choose software that offers lead generation tools, email verification, and a LinkedIn email finder to reach genuine and relevant contacts.
- Personalization and Customizability - Customization options play a crucial role in the effectiveness of cold emails. Look for software that provides dynamic images, videos, and email templates that can be personalized for each recipient.
- Email Sequences and Follow-ups - A single email may not be enough to receive a response. Choose software with an email sequence builder and the ability to pause the sequence when a recipient responds.
- Multichannel Outreach - Expand outreach beyond email by choosing software that provides additional options such as cold calling, SMS capabilities, and LinkedIn outreach.
- Analytics and Metrics - To evaluate the effectiveness of outreach efforts, it is important to track and analyze results. Look for software that provides dashboards, open rate and click-through rate tracking, A/B testing options, and sales team metrics reporting.
- Pricing - When comparing pricing options, choose software that offers a trial period to test the features before committing to a long-term subscription.
1. Deliverability
Rating for Deliverability
When it comes to cold emailing, the most difficult problem is ensuring that your emails reach your prospects’ inboxes. What’s the sense of sending an email if it ends up in the spam folder, after all? That is why it is critical to use a cold email tool that prioritizes email deliverability.
With Hunter.io, you don’t have to worry about your emails ending up in the wrong place. They provide a wide range of deliverability tools to ensure that your emails are delivered to your prospects’ primary inboxes.
So if you want to increase your chances of getting a response from your email outreach campaigns, choose a tool that provides deliverability features like Hunter.io.
Confidence Score
When using Hunter.io to find email addresses, it’s important to have confidence in the accuracy of the emails you’re finding. This is where the confidence score comes into play.
All emails discovered in Hunter have a confidence score, which gives you an idea of how likely the email is to be legitimate. The score is shown just below the email address.
Email addresses with a confidence score of 90-95% or above have a good probability that this email address is valid and active, although a high score does not ensure delivery. This tool can help you save time and boost the likelihood of reaching your target recipient.
This confidence score feature can help you quickly identify which email addresses are worth pursuing and which ones you should avoid.
Custom Tracking Domain
Tracking your cold outreach emails is an important aspect of determining your success and adjusting your strategy as necessary. Hunter.io has a custom tracking domain feature that may assist you in doing just that.
Hunter by default employs tracking URLs that are shared by all users. These domains enable you to embed a tracking pixel in your emails to track when recipients open them and click on the links within them. You may, however, utilize a custom tracking domain to take your tracking to the next level.
With this feature, you can use your own domain to track your emails. This allows you to control and monitor the integrity of your domain to ensure that your emails are not rejected or marked as spam by the email clients that receive them.
Overall, you can improve deliverability and guarantee that your emails reach the proper recipients by utilizing a custom tracking domain.
2. Prospecting & Email Verification
Rating for Prospecting
Having a list of high-quality prospects is one of the most crucial aspects of any cold email marketing campaign. Hunter’s prospecting tools make it simple to compile a list of active and relevant prospects.
You may utilize the tool to look for prospects based on their company or position. Hunter also provides email verification to confirm that the emails you locate are valid and deliverable. This saves you time because you won’t have to manually check each email address.
You can be certain that you’re reaching out to the appropriate individuals who have real email addresses by using Hunter’s prospecting and email verification tools, making your cold outreach campaign much more productive.
Domain Search
When it comes to locating prospects for your cold outreach initiatives, domain search is an essential factor to take into account. You may simply find the emails of different individuals inside a domain using Hunter’s domain search tool.
For example, if you want to contact employees at a certain company, you can just search for the company’s domain on Hunter.io. The software will then search for all employees who use that domain for email and provide you with a list of contacts.
This feature is very handy when you need to identify a big number of potential prospects quickly and want to target certain companies or industries. You may save time and target your outreach efforts on the appropriate individuals by employing domain search, resulting in increased response rates and better outcomes.
Chrome Extension
Hunter’s Chrome extension is an incredible tool for anybody looking to improve the efficiency of their prospecting efforts. When you have the extension installed, you can view all available emails for a specific domain by visiting their website.
This means you can get the email addresses of important decision-makers at firms you’re interested in fast and effortlessly, without the necessity of manually looking for them. The extension is easy to use and integrates perfectly with Chrome, allowing you to use it anytime you need to without switching between applications.
The Hunter Chrome extension is a must-have tool for anybody who wants to generate high-quality prospect lists and enhance their outreach efforts, whether you’re a salesman, marketer, or recruiter.
Email Finder
If you need to contact someone but don’t know their email address, Hunter’s Email Finder is the solution for you. With a few mouse clicks, you may enter the person’s name and company domain, and Hunter will search its massive database to look for their email address.
This makes it simple to reach out to key decision-makers and other important contacts at companies of interest. The Email Finder is a useful tool that avoids the need to manually search for email addresses or rely on out-of-date contact information.
You can be certain that you’re reaching out to the appropriate people at the right time using Hunter’s Email Finder.
Email Verifier
Email verifier is a useful tool for determining whether the email addresses in your list are valid and active. This tool assists you in removing invalid and inactive email addresses, lowering bounce rates and boosting overall email deliverability.
You may verify a huge number of email addresses at once using Hunter’s email verifier, guaranteeing that your list contains only validated email addresses that belong to actual individuals. By not sending emails to incorrect or inactive email addresses, you save time and resources.
In my experience while doing this Hunter.io review, it was able to verify two valid emails and one invalid. Unfortunately, it was unable to verify one email from my custom domain. This might be small but I would consider this as a drawback.
Lead Management
You can conveniently keep track of all your leads in one place using Hunter’s lead management feature. With a few clicks, you can add new leads, update old ones, and delete irrelevant ones. This allows you to stay organized and maintain an up-to-date lead list.
After all, you can guarantee that you are targeting the proper prospects and boost the success rate of your outreach activities if you can successfully manage your leads.
3. Personalization & Customizability
Rating for Personalization
Personalization and customizability are key factors for effective cold email outreach. Hunter.io provides customization features that enable you to tailor your emails to each individual recipient. To make your approach more focused and engaging, you can add their name, company, and other important information.
This increases the likelihood that your email will be read and responded to. Personalization of emails is a great tool for building relationships with prospects, which may lead to improved engagement and conversion rates.
Custom Attributes
You may add custom fields to each lead in Hunter.io that you believe would be valuable for your campaign. You may include whatever you choose, from hobbies to preferences to any information you think will make your email more interesting and personalized.
Custom attributes enable you to personalize your emails to your leads, increasing the likelihood of a response. By adding information that is relevant to your leads, you show that you’ve taken the time to get to know them, which can help build trust and rapport.
Webhooks
Webhooks are a handy tool for automating email campaigns and integrating them with other services. You may receive alerts from Hunter’s webhooks whenever specific actions occur, such as an email being sent, opened, clicked, or replied to.
Each email can have up to four webhooks, one for each event. When an event occurs, Hunter will make a POST request to your specified URL, which may then initiate an action in another service, such as adding a lead to your CRM or sending a message to your team.
Webhooks are an excellent approach to improve the efficiency of your email campaigns by streamlining your process.
4. Email Sequences & Follow-ups
Rating for Sequences
It’s not just about the first contact when it comes to creating a great email campaign. Hunter.io provides a number of tools to assist you in creating an effective campaign that includes multiple follow-ups to achieve maximum engagement.
You may send a series of emails to your prospects using email sequences, with each email building on the previous one. This may be an excellent technique to connect with prospects and drive them closer to a sale.
You may also ensure that you’re staying in touch with your prospects and keeping them interested over time by scheduling follow-ups.
Campaign Builder
Hunter.io’s campaign builder is simple and straightforward. You can begin creating email campaigns in minutes. You may create your initial email, select a template, and add follow-up emails to your campaign.
You may also add several email senders and select which one to use for each campaign. The builder has an easy-to-use interface that allows you to easily add personalized text, links, and attachments to your emails.
To enhance their impact, the campaigns may be set up quickly and scheduled to be distributed at certain times.
Templates
Hunter provides over 250 email templates written and contributed by experts. These templates might help you get started fast and easily with your email marketing. You may select from a variety of categories, such as outreach, follow-ups, and even job applications.
If you discover a template you like, you may customize it to fit your company’s branding and add your own unique touch. You may also save your own email templates to use in future campaigns. This makes it easy to keep your branding and messaging consistent across all of your emails.
Follow-Ups
Follow-ups are an important aspect of any email campaign since they boost your chances of obtaining a response from your prospect. You can quickly build up and schedule up to five follow-up emails for each campaign using Hunter’s campaign builder.
This implies that if a prospect does not reply to your original email, you may schedule a series of follow-up messages to be sent at the intervals you define. You may choose the time between each follow-up email, and you can customize the content of each email to ensure it’s tailored and relevant to your prospect.
You can keep your prospects engaged and interested in your message by employing follow-ups, while also creating a better relationship with them over time.
Unified Inbox
The Unified Inbox is a new feature in Hunter.io that will make it easier to manage your email conversations. You may now see all of your email conversations with prospects in one place, including those from your team.
The Unified Inbox allows you to filter your inbox by email account, team member, campaign, or status, making it easy to find the conversations you need. What’s even more, you can mark a conversation as successful when your prospect performs the desired action, providing you with a comprehensive view of your progress.
Furthermore, you can reply to any message immediately from the Unified Inbox, saving you time spent searching for particular conversations within your campaigns. This powerful feature centralizes all of your email communications, improving your workflow and increasing your productivity.
5. Multichannel Outreach
Rating for Multichannel
Multichannel Outreach is a marketing strategy that reaches out to potential customers through multiple communication channels. While Hunter.io offers many useful tools for email outreach and prospecting, it does not support multichannel outreach.
This implies that Hunter.io users can only communicate via email. However, there are numerous other tools and platforms available to assist you in broadening your reach and diversifying your outreach strategy.
You may boost your chances of reaching your target audience and meeting your marketing objectives by combining email, social media, phone, and other channels.
6. Analytics & Metrics
Rating for Analytics
Analytics and metrics are critical components of any successful email campaign, and Hunter.io provides several handy capabilities to assist you in tracking your progress. You can see how many people opened and clicked on each email and follow-up, as well as which links were clicked.
You can also discover which email addresses were invalid or bounced. You can also track the overall performance of your campaign over time, including the number of emails sent, open rates, and replies.
Campaign Statistics
When it comes to analyzing the performance of your email campaigns, Hunter.io provides you with comprehensive campaign statistics. You can easily view statistics such as the number of emails sent from your scheduled emails, as well as key metrics such as the open rate, click rate, reply rate, and success rate.
The success rate is an exciting new metric that allows you to mark a prospect as successful based on their interaction, allowing you to analyze the effectiveness of your efforts and prevent sending repeated emails to those who are already marked successful.
Hunter.io provides you the necessary information whether you want to evaluate the whole campaign performance or dig into the details of each individual email. You can also track bounced emails and the number of leads who have opted out of future communications.
Overall, these statistics enable you to improve your campaigns by optimizing them and making data-driven decisions.
Prospect Engagement
With the new Prospect Engagement feature from Hunter.io, you now have the power to track and understand how each of your prospects is engaging with your emails.
You can easily sort and evaluate their activity based on metrics like opens, clicks, the email account you used to contact them, the campaigns they are a part of, and even the number of emails you have sent them.
You may also stay up to date on their latest activity and know exactly what and when their last interaction with your campaigns was. Prospect Engagement gives you valuable insights into the performance of your email outreach efforts and allows you to make data-driven decisions to improve your communication strategy.
A/B Testing
If you want to test different email content or subject lines, you may run an A/B test to discover which one works better. Although Hunter.io does not have an A/B testing feature, there is a potential workaround.
To do an A/B test, build two distinct campaigns and divide your list in half. This manner, you may send one version of the email to half your list and the other half to the other half. You may evaluate which version is more effective by comparing the open and response rates of both variants.
Furthermore, Hunter.io allows you to easily duplicate a campaign, which can reduce your workload when creating multiple campaigns.
7. Pricing & Trial
Pricing
Hunter.io provides a variety of price options to meet the demands of various businesses. The price is determined by the number of searches, verifications, and email campaigns needed. Among the plans are:
- Free - This plan is free of cost and offers 25 monthly searches, 50 email verification credits, and 500 recipients per campaign.
- Starter - For $49/month, you can get 500 monthly searches, 1000 email verification credits, 2500 recipients per campaign, domain search features, priority customer support, and more.
- Growth - For $149/month, you can get 5000 monthly searches, 10000 email verification credits, 5000 recipients per campaign, custom tracking domain, and more.
- Business - This plan is priced at $499/month and offers 50000 monthly searches, 100000 email verification credits, 10000 recipients per campaign, account manager, and more.
- Enterprise - If your business needs exceed these plans, you can contact Hunter.io for a custom quote based on your specific needs.
Overall, Hunter.io offers a range of plans to fit different business sizes and budgets.
Permanent free plan with this link
Pros
- Built-in HTML code support
- They offer a permanent free plan
- Hundreds of built-in customizable templates
- Unlimited number of follow-ups
- Powerful email finder
- Gmail tracker that tracks real-time email activities
Cons
- Lacks image personalization
- No multi-channel outreach
- A/B testing is an extra feature you need to purchase
Best or unique feature
- Best for prospecting and lead generation
Deliverability
Email Sequences & Follow-ups
Pricing & Trial
Prospecting & Email Verification
Multichannel Outreach
Personalization & Customizability
Analytics & Metrics
If you’re looking for an alternative to Hunter.io, Snov.io is a great option. It offers a free plan that gives you 150 credits and 100 email recipients per month.
You can also set an unlimited number of follow-ups. One of the standout features of Snov.io is its drag and drop sequence builder, which makes it easy to create personalized and automated email campaigns.
Overall, if you’re looking for a more cost-effective solution to prospecting and outreach, Snov.io is definitely worth checking out.
Pros
- Unlimited A/B testing variants
- Multi-channel support
- Advanced variables or conditions
- HTML code editor in emails
- Unlimited number of follow-ups
- Built-in Jason AI integration
Cons
- No image personalization
- Email validition takes very long
- Chrome extension is not working
Best or unique feature
- Free Data Search feature
Deliverability
Email Sequences & Follow-ups
Pricing & Trial
Prospecting & Email Verification
Multichannel Outreach
Personalization & Customizability
Analytics & Metrics
Reply.io offers unlimited follow-ups, multi-channel support, and unlimited A/B testing variants, making it an excellent choice for those who want to take their email outreach to the next level.
With a drag and drop email builder, it’s easy to create and send personalized messages to your target audience.
Plus, you can track your campaign’s progress and measure your results with detailed analytics. While it’s not free, Reply.io’s features and capabilities make it well worth the investment.
Pros
- Image personalization
- Built-in ChatGPT integration
- Integrated meeting scheduler
- Powerful email finder tool
- Automatic email verification
- Integrated warm-up tool
Cons
- Email verification is not accurate
- Customer service is inactive
- No updated software documentation
Best or unique feature
- AI-powered template generator with ChatGPT
Deliverability
Email Sequences & Follow-ups
Pricing & Trial
Prospecting & Email Verification
Multichannel Outreach
Personalization & Customizability
Analytics & Metrics
SalesBlink stands out with its image personalization feature, which can help improve email engagement rates. Additionally, SalesBlink has a built-in integration with ChatGPT, making it easier to write personalized email templates.
Another useful feature is the integrated meeting scheduler, which streamlines the process of scheduling appointments. While SalesBlink doesn’t have a free plan, its paid plans offer a range of features that can help you streamline your outreach efforts.
Is Hunter.io Customer Service Any Good?
When it comes to Hunter.io customer service, I have to say it’s pretty impressive. They have a really responsive live chat support.
During my own Hunter.io review, I reached out to them with a question, and I received a response in less than 5 minutes. Not only did they respond immediately, but the agent went above and beyond by offering me with useful tips on how to make the most of the platform’s features.
It’s great to see Hunter.io is dedicated to providing exceptional customer service and making sure you get the most out of their service.
Key Takeaways from the Hunter.io Review
Hunter.io is a powerful tool for finding and verifying email addresses that can help your outreach efforts. The software is easy to use and offers several helpful features, such as email templates, follow-ups, and campaign analytics.
However, it has some downsides, including the lack of multi-channel outreach options and live chat support. Additionally, the follow-up feature is limited to only 5 messages per campaign. The pricing structure is reasonable and provides flexibility to fit your budget and business needs.
Overall, Hunter.io is a great option for anyone looking to improve their email outreach efforts and increase their chances of success. Key takeaways include the importance of utilizing email verification and the benefits of having a streamlined and efficient outreach process.
