Despite being the oldest, email marketing is still the most effective digital marketing channel, delivering the highest return on investment for marketers.
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Hence, email remains crucial for lead generation and running successful link-building outreach campaigns.
While finding email addresses used to be a tedious and time-consuming process, this is no longer the case because you can easily use an email finder tool like Hunter.io.
Hunter.io is your best bet for locating professional and personal email addresses without breaking a sweat, but just how does it work?
This Hunter.io review will explore its powerful features and how to leverage them maximally to find any email address you need.
What is Hunter.io?
Hunter.io is an email finder tool that locates and verifies professional email addresses. It works by exploring company websites for emails of businesses and any individual attached to the business. Hence, it is powerful enough to detect emails that may appear hidden.
This software was launched in 2015 by Francoise Grante and offers more than just website scraping for emails. It also performs additional email database management and messaging functions.
Hunter.io is well-known among digital marketers, link-building professionals, and sales and marketing teams for its ease of use, speed, accuracy, and affordable pricing. Simply put, this outreach tool is perfect for anyone building an email list.
Who is Hunter.io For?
Hunter.io is perfect for marketers, salespeople, and link-building professionals who need to quickly build email lists without manually searching the web. It is also great for business owners and startup founders who need to create contact forms quickly or verify their customer’s emails.
Hunter.io Features and How to Use Them
One of the first things you notice with Hunter.io is its minimalist user interface. The design is clutter-free, so you can get around easily using any of the available features.
As stated earlier, you can leverage a couple of useful tools, but you have to set up an account to make that possible.
Setting Up an Account
When you get on the sign-up page, create an account using an email or the ‘Sign Up With Google’ button. Input your name, choose a password, and click Create Account.
An email will be sent to your inbox with a confirmatory link, which will redirect you back to Hunter.io. You will be asked for your phone number later for the verification code.
Once you input the code in the space provided, you’re all set up and ready to find email addresses for free with the free plan. You can also select a paid plan to get more access anytime.
Domain Search
The domain search function is used to detect all email addresses from a domain. This feature is found on the default Hunter.io homepage and saves you from manually searching all the pages on a website.
Enter the domain you want email addresses from, and click search.
Hunter.io will scan the entire website, including hidden pages you cannot see, increasing the chances of locating more than the publicly available email addresses.
Additionally, this tool can also detect the format a company uses for its emails. This makes it easy to guess an individual’s professional email address if the tool does not find it.
Email Finder Tool
The email finder tool is another straightforward feature that helps you find publicly available email addresses. Like the domain search function, the email finder searches through a website for relevant email addresses of an individual or business.
Email guessing through email format detection is even more useful here for finding and verifying email addresses. This feature may also come in handy for locating other contact information like phone numbers or social media contacts.
To use this feature, click on Email Finder from the menu and enter the name and company domain.
Author Finder
The author finder feature does the same thing as the email finder but is used for locating email addresses or articles. Instead of inserting a company, you have to supply an article, and it will identify their email address for you.
Email Verifier
If you’ve collected email addresses from Hunter.io or through any other means, the email verifier tool does what it says on the pack — verify email addresses.
The purpose of verifying email addresses is to help you check whether an email address is valid or not. It checks whether the address currently receives emails as well as reveals other details about it.
This increases the chances of success for your link-building outreach and reduces the bounce rate.
Select ‘Email Verifier’ from the menu, enter the email you want to verify in the space provided, and hit enter.
You’ll get a report telling you if the email is valid, whether it’s currently receiving emails, the email address type, public availability, and the server status.
The only downside is that the email verifier tool can only verify professional email addresses and does not work on regular personal emails like those created with Gmail or Yahoo.
Bulk Tasks
If you run email campaigns or are in charge of a cold email outreach that involves several email addresses, you’ll need to perform multiple email finding and verification tasks at the same time.
Thanks to Hunter.io bulk tasks, you can perform a bulk domain search as well as bulk email and author finding and verification.
Select ‘Bulk Tasks’ from the menu and choose any of the four available bulk task options.
You can input the domains and email addresses manually, paste from a list, or import a CSV, Excel, TXT, or Numbers file.
In case you want to find and verify email addresses simultaneously, you can use the option, which may slow down the process slightly. You can also tell it to include the source URL of each email address.
There’s also the option to specify the number of emails you want from a domain. If there are more, it will filter them and deliver only reliable entries.
Campaigns
Hunter.io allows you to export its data for use with cold email software, but this can slow down your outreach and link-building efforts.
Instead, you can achieve the same results with Campaigns from Hunter.io. Campaigns is Hunter.io’s campaign management tool.
It works with your regular email providers like Gmail and lets you create templates, composes emails and follow-ups, and schedule the entire email campaign.
Leads
Just as Campaigns lets you send and manage email campaigns, you can do basic lead management with Leads from Hunter.io.
This feature lets you manage leads and customer relationships easily. You can add leads manually or integrate Hunter.io with a list management tool or CRM tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, etc.
Through these integrations, you can share leads between different platforms, which will be valuable for accessing email addresses for outreach campaigns.
Browser Extensions
Hunter.io has browser extensions that make it possible to acquire email addresses from any website you visit seamlessly. If you come across a website you need emails from while working on a web browser, the browser extensions allow you to retrieve the emails without opening the Hunter.io dashboard.
Click on the extension when you get on the site, and Hunter.io will scan the database for relevant email addresses. If you find an email address you need, click on the plus button to add a lead. Hunter.io browser extensions are available for popular browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
Google Sheets add-on
Similar to the browser extensions, you can use Hunter.io services from within Google Sheets if it’s where your data is. Simply install the add-on, and you’re ready.
You can perform a domain search to add email addresses to the sheets you’re working on. It also lets you do email finds and verify professional email addresses already in your database.
However, the Google Sheets add-on allows only actions at a time. So, if you need to achieve more, it is better to use the main dashboard and import the data you need.
Customer Support
If you encounter any issue using Hunter.io, you can head to the Help Center or contact customer support for a quick solution. A chatbot will enquire about your challenge before directing you to the next available agent.
Hunter.io claims it responds within a few hours, but experience shows you may not have to wait more than 30 minutes before a knowledgeable customer service agent helps you out.
Hunter.io Pricing
One of my favorite parts of Hunter.io is its pricing, especially the free version. You can use most of the features with the free plan but will be limited to only 25 email searches and 50 email verifications per month.
To enjoy all other features and more email addresses, there are four paid plans starting at $34/month for the Starter plan, which allows 500 searches and 1000 verifications.
Other plans are Growth at $69/month, Pro at $139/month, and Business at $279/month. Bear in mind that a 30% discount has been factored into the stated prices, which is what you enjoy when you pay annually. Check out the detailed pricing below.
Conclusion
Hunter.io is one of the best tools for finding and verifying email addresses. It is effective for retrieving email addresses from websites and databases, as well as providing other email management services.
It is easy to use, with straightforward functions and a clean interface. There are also integrations and add-ons that make using the tools with others seamless.
Finally, Hunter.io has a free plan you can use to see how things work. It’s a great tool for adding new email addresses and verifying the ones you already have, and I totally recommend you try it out.
Good Luck!
Jessica.
