Hunter.io finds email addresses to help you connect with people on your business radar. This simple yet potent tool can find contacts just by searching a company’s domain name. For freelancers or sales teams that frequently use email outreach, Hunter.io could be a helpful addition to their marketing toolbox. Learn more about the software’s strengths and weaknesses in our Hunter.io review below.
Hunter.io: The Good and the Bad
Hunter.io offers a straightforward way to find email addresses to use for sales or outreach purposes. Still, it may not be as robust as some entrepreneurs or businesses would like. Let’s outline some pros and cons of Hunter.io to consider as you search for the right lead generation or outreach tools for your business.
What Hunter.io Is Good At
Hunter.io has become a go-to platform for sales teams and solopreneurs who want to find real people they need to contact directly. There are a few reasons it stands out among other similar tools, as detailed below.
Advanced filters: Hunter.io lets you search quickly for any email addresses within a company’s domain. However, this can yield a long list of results to sift through when you’re searching large companies. To narrow results down to the people that matter most, Hunter.io offers advanced filtering. Pinpoint the department you want to search within and set search results to only include emails with full names, phone numbers, or positions attached to them.
Data transparency: Hunter.io is wonderfully transparent in the way it handles email data. First, the company only pulls email addresses listed on the public web. If the address isn’t able to be found somewhere publicly on the internet, it also won’t show in Hunter.io results.
Additionally, anyone can remove their email address from being included in Hunter.io’s results by claiming their email address and editing their profile. While this may make it more difficult for a marketer to find the addresses they need, it’s welcome news for anyone who’d rather keep their email address private from cold outreach efforts.
Easy-to-use interface: No one needs advanced tech experience to operate Hunter.io. This tool is about as simple to learn as it can be. It’s web-based, so you can search and save email addresses using a browser rather than needing to download software to your computer or an app to your mobile device. Tabs at the top of the interface help you navigate quickly between searching and verifying email addresses, completing bulk search tasks, or making and organizing lead lists.
Simple API: If you’d like to build upon Hunter.io or connect it to other tools you use, you can use the Hunter.io API to do so. The code is simple to use and easily found in your Hunter.io account. Plus, API access comes at no additional cost. Hunter.io offers helpful documentation to reference if you have any issues with using the API.
Cold emailing templates: Marketers can begin email outreach campaigns directly from within Hunter.io. Use its message editor to write up an email to send to addresses you’ve compiled using Hunter.io.
To save time, you can use one of several cold email templates. Hunter.io offers sales, networking, follow-up, and other outreach emails written by industry experts that are available to use for free with any Hunter.io plan. Save the ones you like to your templates folder for quick reference when you need them.
Knowledge base and training: Although Hunter.io is rather self-explanatory to use, it will still take a bit of time and experience to use the tool to its full potential. The website’s knowledge base is full of quick videos that can help you get there faster.
Learn how to use the Chrome extension, start campaigns, find email addresses, and more. You can also sign up for an on-demand or live webinar for a more hands-on demonstration of Hunter.io’s features, which can be especially useful if you’d like your sales team to learn straight from the source.
What Hunter.io Is Lacking
While we appreciate the simplicity that Hunter.io provides, it’s that simplicity that might not give some business owners or sales teams enough to enhance their outreach campaigns. Below are a few ways in which Hunter.io could improve.
Free plan features: Some freelancers and very small teams will love the affordability of Hunter.io’s free plan. However, most teams will find that its limit of 25 monthly searches and 50 monthly verifications aren’t nearly enough to get the information they need.
It’s normal for tools to restrict their free plans, but Hunter.io leaves out a few other key features, like custom tracking domains and email images and attachments. Plus, domain search doesn’t display full results on a free plan. It’s likely that the free offering may be best left for trialing as you budget for a paid subscription.
Contacts at smaller orgs: If your marketing team is currently targeting SMEs through its campaigns, it might come up short with Hunter.io. The tool combs information that’s publicly available on the internet, and small and medium businesses do not always have as strong of an online presence as large corporations and enterprises. You might frequently get more generic results, like info@[domain.com] or contact@[domain.com], rather than email addresses for specific people at the company.
Customer support availability: If you need help with anything regarding the software, Hunter.io currently only offers an online contact form and limited live chat hours for support. When the Hunter.io team is not available for live chat, you can leave a message for the team to respond to when they’re available. However, there’s no guarantee that will happen within the next business day or two, which could leave you with unanswered questions for an unpredictable amount of time.
Hunter.io Pricing & Options
Hunter.io has a free plan that works best for individuals or small teams that have extremely low-scale outreach needs. Most teams will likely opt for one of the three paid plans ranging from $49 to $499 per month.
Higher-priced plans offer more monthly searches, verifications, and email campaign accounts and recipients. But all paid plans come fully featured, so you’re not missing out on key tools and benefits just because you don’t have high-volume searching needs.
Starter, the $49 per month plan, allows for up to 500 searches and 1,000 verifications each month. You can also pay for more of either, at a rate of $10 per 100 credits and $5 per 100 credits, respectively. This plan also allows you up to three connected email accounts and up to 2,500 recipients per campaign.
Those monthly search and verification thresholds rise to 5,000 and 10,000, respectively, for the Growth plan ($149 per month). That also increases allotted email accounts to 10 and campaign recipients to 5,000.
Then, there’s the Business plan at $499 per month. You get ten times the number of searches and verifications as the Growth plan, 20 connected email accounts, and 10,000 recipients per campaign. This is also the only plan that offers a dedicated Hunter.io account manager.
Hunter.io is especially useful for freelancers, PR representatives, and sales and marketing teams, all of which can use the tool for outreach purposes to grow their businesses. Let’s look at each of those use cases.
Hunter.io for Freelancers
Freelancers are some of the most frequent users of Hunter.io. Many freelancers reach out to potential clients they’d like to work with using cold outreach and Hunter.io can help freelancers find email addresses for the people they want to establish contact with.
The cold email templates included in Hunter.io’s Campaigns feature can be especially useful for freelancers. The database includes initial sales and marketing emails, networking emails for building connections, and follow-up email templates for quick and easy subsequent outreach.
The ability to create multiple lead lists also allows freelancers to organize their leads into categories like Need to Follow Up or Networking Leads. Or, if a freelancer provides multiple services, they can segment leads for each service they offer.
Hunter.io for PR Representatives and Marketers
Public relations representatives, marketers, and other outreach-focused individuals and teams can use Hunter.io to gather leads for their efforts. For example, use Hunter.io’s domain search feature to find the email addresses of influencers who run a beauty blog in order to ask about a sponsorship opportunity with a brand whose PR efforts your agency is managing.
Marketers typically use Hunter.io to track down the contact information for people who may be interested in their products or services. For instance, a marketing specialist for a company that makes durable medical equipment might search domains of skilled nursing facilities or hospitals to find potential leads and manage them with lists. Or someone selling services to higher education institutions can search through a wide swath of .edu domains.
The Campaign tool in Hunter.io offers in-app outreach using the leads you gather. You can start a new lead nurturing email campaign and track activity without ever having to leave Hunter.io.
Hunter.io for Recruiters
Recruiters typically use Hunter.io to organize the leads they collect from other sources. While managing several job openings at once, they can connect their CRM (like HubSpot or Zoho) to view and manage their leads databases with lists.
Using those lists, recruiters can then email job seekers in bulk. Over 30 of Hunter.io’s built-in email templates are designed for recruiters, too, making it easier to gauge the interest of potential candidates for open positions in no time at all.
Summary
If you’re looking for an email-hunting tool with tons of bells and whistles, Hunter.io isn’t it. Instead, it’s one of the most straightforward tools of its kind, delivering the essentials you need to find and verify email addresses for your campaigns. We believe its lead organization, cold email templates, and campaign creation and tracking tools offer solid benefits for freelancers, marketers, and recruiters, especially if they only need to run 500 or fewer monthly searches.
