What is Hunter.io?
Hunter.io, A.K.A Email Hunter, is an email hunter tool that helps marketers find the contact information associated with any domain.
This is ideal for companies that use cold emailing as a way to fill their pipeline.
Furthermore, Email Hunter can be used to verify emails and do bulk tasks.
They’ve also recently integrated campaigns which allow you to perform outreach directly through the tool versus uploading the contacts to aother CRM.
It’s a convenient and affordable lead generation tool that every business should have in their arsenal.
I use this tool on a daily basis and highly recommend it to anyone looking for a lead generation CRM.
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Hunter.io features
You have all of your tools on the top navigation and the search function right in the middle.
There’s lots of white space and it’s really easy on the eyes.
Here’s a run-down of the main features you’ll gain access to when using this email hunting tool.
Hunter.io search tool
I find myself almost exclusively using the search tool, but I’ll dive into the other features in a second.
The search function is amazing for finding the decision makers in a business to start a conversation and get your foot in the door.
You’re not getting details out of the call; just make sure you include some information about your experience, what you’ve done and your background.
I’ve used this to get into meetings with companies where I know there isn’t an HR rep and knowing that my industry would be an interested party in their decisions, I included it in the email title, with a link for more info. want to find the VP of sales in a prospecting company. You type in the domain and it will give you the individuals name, position, email, phone number, and even social media links. Super convenient, especially if you’re cold emailing.
I also use this tool to find the best marketing or sales/bizdev person in the company. If you can find an executive contact, it’s way more valuable than reaching out to a normal employee. It’s also great for finding people in a large company that you might not have heard of and want to reach out to.
ShoutEm’s search function is the best on-premise solution I have ever found for finding anyone in a business, and it works seamlessly with their CRM that we are going to talk about shortly.
Hunter.io email finder
Next up, there is the email finder feature. This is pretty similar to the search function, except that you’re entering an exact name and domain to discover if it’s real.
The other two features are the data export and password change feature. These make it easy to get your data out of the app, should you wish to do so, and they allow you to change your account password as needed.
We could say that the account creation is pretty straightforward (and secure), but that’s not really what this app is about. It’s about getting the data out of it, and this is where things get interesting.
This part gets a little technical again, so we’ll stick to the highlights.
After you create your account, you can click on "Search" to see if the email address exists in one of your folders (say Trash or Junk).
If it does, send it an email from another address and you'll get a reply! You'll also get a read receipt.
How does it work?
As mentioned by François Grante (founder of the software), Hunter.io works by searching and indexing emails it finds on company websites across the internet. For email addresses it finds, Hunter.io will log the common email patterns and apply that logic to websites its users are searching.
Take a look at how Hunter.io works in the following video:
Hunter.io's process is broken down into two major parts:
1) Application of machine learning to index emails on a massive scale, which is broken down into the following steps:
2) Application of Natural Language Processing to achieve email discovery. This includes keyword identification, IP location discovery and pattern matching for email addresses found in text.
Some of the basic concepts behind Hunter.io are as follows:
Hunter.io has raised over $5 million in funding from investors including: Cisco Investments, Founders Fund, SV Angel, AOL Ventures, Slow Ventures and AKTua Capital
Hunter. at the below excerpt from François on Quora for a use case on Hunter when using it with LinkedIn. Please note, the LinkedIn functionality was deprecated in August 2017, but the use case still applies to website research in general.
Overall, using Hunter.io is easy.
You can either enter websites to get a listing of contact information Hunter.io has for the domain, or enter a person’s name to find a specific email address.
What’s most important about Hunter.io are its bulk features. These help speed up the outreach process significantly.
When I use Hunter, I pretty much only use the bulk domain search and the bulk email verification tools.
The bulk email finder can be good if you have lots of names and companies but not email addresses, which should be a rare scenario, because when would you know who you need to talk to but not their email address… and in bulk?
Just seems weird.
Anyway… take a look below for a quick demo of how Hunter’s bulk domain finder works.
The bulk domain feature is by far the best option when trying to do large scale prospecting.
As for the bulk email verification tool…
You might be asking yourself, “Why does Hunter even need an email verification tool? Shouldn’t all the emails in their system be good already?”
There are two reasons why you might want to verify their emails after an export:
Hunter.io’s email database is simply a scrape and collection of all the emails it finds on the internet. There’s no guarantee that the emails haven’t been deleted, changed, left dormant, or placed as spam traps. The verifier tool can help filter out deliverability issues.
The second reason is if you want to verify emails you pulled from a different tool other than Hunter.io.
What Is Hunter.Io’s Pricing?
Hunter.io isn’t cheap.
As of 1/1/2018, Hunter.io charges $39/1,000 requests for their annual plan and $49 if you want to pay month-to-month.
A Hunter.io “request” is when Hunter successfully finds an email for a website, a verification that an email is deliverable or not or a search for an email based on a name and company.
Because Hunter.io has been around the longest of the email scrapers, it has the deepest database of emails and the greatest amount of community trust.
This gives Hunter some authority to demand a higher price point vs. some of its newer competitors.
Overall, I think the pricing is a bit high, but the value Hunter.io delivers is significant given the amount of data they also provide with each email (more on that later). Also, outreach is incredibly important to the overall success of a business. Hunter.io facilities that, therefore is probably worth the price of admission.
Is Hunter.Io Reliable?
Okay…
At this point in the review, I’m going to start getting into the actual performance of the tool based on the criteria I outlined earlier.
This section will focus on the reliability of the contact information generated from the web scrape that Hunter.io performs.
Ideally, you would want Hunter to be able to pull the best contact email address for the website you prospected. By “best”, I mean the email address of the person that is most likely to take the action you want.
For example, if I want to get links to a new article I published, I would need to find someone with the authority to change content on the website.
This key person might be the owner of the website (if it’s small), a managing editor, the author of the article or someone else entirely. Once captured, I would need to email that person and ask for the link.
Now Hunter.io might pull email addresses for this fictional target website, but they might not pull the BEST email address.
Therefore, I might end up emailing some random person who couldn’t care less about my cool new article and my outreach campaign promptly dies in a fire.
That is bad.
When it comes to outreach, there are many places where it could potentially break down and reduce your conversion rate. Gathering the right email is critical and is something a tool needs to be capable of doing.
That being said…
I thought a simple test of Hunter’s ability to capture the RIGHT email address could be a fun idea. This is by no means a scientific experiment but gives some insight into how well Hunter gets the job done vs. having an assistant manually cherry pick the correct email address from the target.
Hunter.io Pros
- Simple to-utilize on the grounds that it accompanies a Chrome extension.
- Consistent looking of email tends to utilizing a space name and contact information.
- Has its own adaptable CRM which is very flexible.
- Gives 50 free inquiries prior to finishing a paid bundle.
- Gives amazingly dependable outcomes.
Hunter.io Cons
- The costs of various bundles could be costly in case you are searching for a modest apparatus.
- Doesn't permit individual email looking.
- It's anything but an online media research device. Accordingly, it no longer allows LinkedIn integration.
Can Hunter.Io Save You Money?
The absolute last section of this aide comes down to dollars and pennies.
Will Hunter.io set aside you cash?
Perhaps.
As you've found in the previous super logical (mockery) tests archived above, there is unquestionably a component of penance when utilizing Hunter.io.
At the present time, I pay around .a dime/site investigated to URL commentator. On the off chance that I have a mission where I need them to investigate 1,000 spaces, that would cost me $100.
Assuming I needed to handle those 1,000 spaces through Hunter.io, that would cost me generally $50 expecting you do the month-to-month starter plan with Hunter.io and each area has somewhere around one email to pull from it. As an update, you get 1,000 solicitations from Hunter. Each time you measure a space you go through 1 solicitation.
Simple math.
By utilizing Hunter.io you are saving the time it would take for your connection manufacturer to investigate those areas in addition to the $50.
In return, you are taking on a bit of hazard that a portion of the sites you entered won't return an email from Hunter's information base, and the email that is returned may be some unacceptable email, which in the two cases, may bring about a bombed outreach endeavor.
As my tests showed (again not logical, yet at the same time wise), Hunter.io just gets an email about ~70ish% of the time and when it Gets an email, it snatches the "best" email just about ~40ish% of the time.
What does this all mean?
The investment funds you understood by utilizing Hunter.io will be counterbalanced by the expanded measure of connection prospecting you must do to assemble more areas to contact.
This is awful in light of the fact that there are a limited measure of areas that can be contacted for a given effort crusade.
Accordingly…
You will have to run more effort missions to get similar outcomes as though you just had somebody physically research every space.
On the off chance that you have huge loads of effort crusades you can do, you may come out net positive, however assuming you have a restricted measure of potential effort crusades, you should consider staying away from Hunter or any comparative apparatus and staying with manual effort until the instruments improve over the long haul.
Here is a speedy model from an amigo of mine…
Let's assume you are a site and have 10 truly incredible bits of content you need to advance. You do your prospecting and get a rundown of spaces to connect with for each piece of content.
A portion of those bits of content are in points that aren't exceptionally famous so there aren't that numerous spaces you can request to assist you with advancing it with a connection or a social offer.
On the off chance that you utilize a device like Hunter.io, you'll wind up consuming every one of the prospects and your effort missions might be less fruitful had you recently done manual effort.
In situations where the quantity of prospects is restricted, I would say that you might wind up losing cash on the off chance that you utilized Hunter.io.
Final Thoughts
Generally speaking, Hunter.io is an Incredible Instrument and one that I energetically suggest in case you are a one man/lady group and don't have the opportunity or financial plan to enlist additional assistance.
Hunter can let out and check a huge load of information rapidly.
What I like most about Hunter is their straightforwardness.
They really center around unadulterated email/lead catch and verification.
A ton of different instruments are attempting to heat in outreach, verification, scratching, online media following, and so forth and it gets overpowering and harms the center item.
The lone disadvantage to utilizing Hunter is that it will definitely miss some great prospects that might have changed over for your effort crusade.
As we've found in the above tests, with speed comes penance.
Yet, hello, we as a whole attempt to comply with Pareto's 80/20 law right? Should you care around a couple of missed contacts…, you can try this services.
