- 11th Sep '20
- Sell SaaS
- 13 minutes read
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SHAREHunter.io Review and Alternatives: Find Anyone's Email Address in Seconds
Hunter.io is a software suite designed to streamline lead generation and email outreach campaigns. When companies attempt to scale up their outbound sales, such tools are incredibly helpful.
The name of this software hints at its primary purpose. Hunter enables you to generate qualified leads for your email marketing campaigns quickly and effortlessly. The tool is particularly useful for B2B marketing efforts—all you need is the domain name of a specific company, and this software will provide you with a list of emails associated with that domain within minutes.
We will go over its features in more depth below, but suffice it to say that Hunter boasts powerful data enrichment options within its marketing software. If you’ve already compiled a list of professionals in a given field, you can use Hunter to find their email addresses by inputting their first and last names.
Throughout our thorough platform review, we will explain how Hunter manages all of this, and see just how good it is.
Why You Should Listen to Us About Hunter
Regardless of what software we are talking about, there are usually plenty of reviews online. But it's one thing to examine a digital tool superficially, and another to review it with experience and authority.
We have what it takes to help you come up with an informed opinion about software like Hunter. The CEO of Sell SaaS, Mathieu Picard, is also the founder of AnyLeads. This company is an industry leader in the field of lead generation, helping renowned firms like Microsoft and Amazon. In less than five years, AnyLeads has helped clients generate over ten million leads!
We have plenty of experience with lead generation and conversion, which gives us the insights required to judge platforms like Hunter fairly and adequately.
Apart from Hunter, we’ve also worked on reviews of over twenty SEO audit tools and other digital marketing software. If you’re unsure whether Hunter is what you need, you can check out its alternatives that we’ve analyzed as well.
About Hunter
Image source: woodpecker
Hunter is a tool that facilitates finding email addresses of professionals based on their companies and domains.
According to 99firms, in 2020, digital marketing has surpassed traditional trade-show-centered efforts in the B2B industry. This is evident by the average B2B marketing budget, more than 50% of which is now set aside for digital marketing.
Such circumstances have created the demand for tools such as Hunter. Without them, obtaining crucial email leads would be a tedious, manual task that takes months.
As a B2B marketer, finding the necessary contact details to make a pitch to another company can be hard. Doing so manually takes a ton of time and energy.
That’s where Hunter comes in, allowing you to find and verify email addresses for any domain or company based on someone’s name or job title. The platform’s email verification feature is there to make sure that the tool generates accurate email addresses. This ensures that your email campaigns don’t end up having a high bounce rate and drag down your sender reputation.
If an email address is indexed somewhere publicly, Hunter’s crawling algorithm will search the Internet for it and find it. There are situations where Hunter can’t find someone’s email in the available databases. In that case, the software can generate an email address with the highest likelihood of being used by a specific contact.
Hunter helps companies:
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Conduct domain searches
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Find professional email addresses
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Verify email addresses
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Automate simple email campaigns
The software can be used as an add-on for Google Sheets or as a Google Chrome browser extension.
| Hunter Across Different Platforms | |
| Google Sheets | Find email addresses from a list of contacts presented in a Google Sheet. |
| Google Chrome | Extract email addresses from any domain that you’re currently browsing. |
Hunter First Impressions
When you reach the Hunter landing page, you will be greeted with an utterly simple web interface. At its core is a search box where you can enter a domain whose connected emails you want to search for.
The design of the website is sleek and easily navigable, allowing for optimal user experience. We will examine the different pricing options Hunter offers below. For now, it’s important to note that the basic version of the software is available for free. You can try out Hunter’s lead generation options for as long as you’d like, provided you don’t search for more than 50 websites per month.
This is an excellent way for marketers to try out the software’s basic features and make sure that they're satisfied with what Hunter has to offer before paying for a monthly subscription.
Hunter.io Landing Page
| Hunter Overview | |
| Price | $0 – $399 |
| Year founded | 2015 |
| Number of employees | |
| Capterra reviews | |
| g2 reviews | |
| Facebook followers | |
| Twitter followers | |
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Hunter Pricing
Hunter offers a wide range of different subscriptions. Apart from the free subscription that doesn't provide access to the Google Sheets add-on and the Chrome extension, the other subscription levels mainly differ in the number of monthly search requests available:
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Free — $0 and 50 searches per month
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Starter — $49 and 1000 searches per month
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Growth — $99 and 5000 searches per month
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Pro — $199 and 20000 searches per month
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Enterprise — $399 and 50000 searches per month
Hunter Features
Although Hunter is primarily a lead gen software, it does come with a few additional features that can help streamline your outreach efforts.
Hunter’s features come down to:
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Lead generation
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Integrations
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Data filtering
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Bulk tasks
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Campaigns
Lead Generation
One thing Hunter excels at is lead generation. If you've got the personal name, job title, or just the company domain for an industry professional, the chances are that Hunter will be able to find their email address or generate the most likely version of it. In the latter case, the platform will also verify if the generated email address is genuine to prevent excess bounces.
One thing to keep in mind that, although Hunter does verify that the automatically generated email address exists, there’s no way to guarantee that it’s the address of the person you’re trying to reach. We would caution against sending outreach emails to these “predictive” email addresses.
Integrations
Another excellent feature of Hunter is its integrative capability. Not only is Hunter usable with the G Suite applications, but you can also integrate it with a decent range of popular CRM solutions. Lead data obtained from Hunter can be automatically imported into the following platforms once their APIs are connected:
Data Filtering
Data filtering is another well-designed aspect of Hunter.
Once you import lead data or acquire it through Hunter, you can filter and segment it using several mutually compatible tags. This makes finding lead information far easier whenever you need it.
Bulk Tasks
Marketers rarely handle individual email addresses when planning email marketing campaigns. In practice, this would mean spending too much time on each lead. The Hunter devs had this in mind, so they included a handy bulk task feature. This feature allows you to perform all of the necessary searches available on the platform in bulk.
For instance, you can find email addresses for an entire list of contacts instead of searching for them one by one—all you have to do is import your contact list in a CSV format. You can also verify emails in bulk, or extract addresses from a list of domains and companies.
Campaigns
Due to high demand, the Hunter team added automated cold email campaigns to the platform. Up until 2019, one of the significant drawbacks of this software suit was the fact that you could use it to find leads for your email campaign without having the ability to conduct it from the platform itself.
All of that has now changed with the inclusion of the Hunter Campaigns feature. It should be noted that this is only a basic option for cold campaigns via email designed to work with G Suite or Gmail. If you're used to more sophisticated email marketing software, a dedicated email automation solution would still serve you better.
Hunter has managed to provide a combination of personalization and email automation with decent results. The platform provides you with templates for follow-ups and initial cold emails, which you can edit to suit your campaign and company.
This allows marketers who use Hunter for lead generation to optimize their content, instead of losing time on the technicalities of email campaigns.
The features of Hunter Campaigns include:
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Personalization — edit and review any email template provided by Hunter
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Scheduling — set when your campaign emails will be sent and determine their daily quota
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Tracking — see how your target audience interacts with the emails
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Verifying — ensure you send emails with the highest rates of deliverability
All of these Campaign features are found in the free Hunter plan. Higher subscription tiers enable you to manage a campaign using more than one Gmail account.
Hunter Drawbacks
No matter how you look at it, Hunter is a simplistic tool. The lead generation achieved through the platform’s email search feature is precise and reliable, which is incredibly useful in cold email campaigns. However, it should be noted that this platform isn’t great at providing other contact data.
If you want to conduct a cold email campaign, Hunter is the platform you need. Yet, it's lacking when it comes to text message marketing or cold call campaigns. Once you find leads through Hunter or import them from your CSV files, you can categorize them by industries, companies, sectors, job roles, social media accounts, etc. — but you can't find this information automatically using Hunter.
You can use the platform to find someone’s email and plan out your email campaign, but you’ll have to obtain additional lead information either manually or through a different software solution. Unfortunately, you won't be able to find any other industry-wide data for a particular niche, either.
What does all of this mean for you? If you want to conduct a comprehensive B2B marketing campaign that relies on more than email blasts, you’ll need to use additional digital products besides Hunter.
On the plus side, the email data provided by Hunter’s algorithm is precise and up to date. Its process of email verification is trustworthy. When it comes to company data, the most you’ll be able to get out of Hunter are public emails registered with the company’s website domain.
Should You Use Hunter?
There are plenty of reasons why Hunter is a valuable email outreach platform beside the features we’ve mentioned above. It doesn’t support just English websites and companies — the tool is available in French and Italian as well.
Keeping the fact that Hunter is a web-based tool in mind, it's also important to note that the majority of users have reported minimal downtime. The user interface is clean and easy to navigate, and all of the reports are presented in an orderly manner.
We’d be remiss not mentioning some of the downsides of the platform as well. Seeing as the platform is integrated with Google’s web-based apps, the lack of mobile support is surprising. If you want to use Hunter, you will need to use a desktop browser.
According to Netmarketshare, around 70% of Internet users access web pages using Google Chrome. Still, the fact that Hunter is not compatible with Firefox and other browsers may turn away some of its potential users.
The problem with Hunter that users have talked about most often is its lack of support for social media. Hunter cannot extract email addresses from social media profiles of industry professionals. If you’re looking for additional information on your prospects, Sell SaaS has exactly what you need—a powerful data enrichment software and an easy-to-use email, phone, and social media extractor.
Hunter Alternatives
If you’re looking for an email finder that lets you create simplistic outreach campaigns, Hunter might do the job. The trouble is, Hunter’s price is a bit steep, especially when you consider how little it offers in terms of email marketing optimization.
There are plenty of free email lookup tools out there, so although Hunter does its job well, it does very little for the $49 you’d end up paying for it with the cheapest plan. If you’re looking for a more robust lead gen and email marketing software, check out Hunter’s alternatives.
White-Label Software
Hunter is primarily used by online marketers and marketing agencies looking for prospective leads in their email campaigns. If you decide that Hunter doesn’t meet the needs of your business, there is another avenue that is more efficient and more lucrative—white-label digital products.
Sell Saas offers a variety of white-label lead gen and email marketing software solutions that you can use to optimize your marketing efforts and skyrocket your profits. The best part is that you can also resell digital products made by Sell Saas under your brand and keep the majority of the profits. That way, you’ll create an additional, passive revenue stream, boost brand awareness, and build your reputation in one fell swoop.
Sell Saas provides software for lead generation, allowing you to extract leads from a list of domains or companies. The information can be exported into a simple Excel file and arranged by size, industry sector, and geographical location.
Our enrichment data software also has capabilities for extracting additional information on your leads, which will help you personalize your outreach campaigns and boost engagement. After providing domain names, you will receive social media URLs and usernames—something Hunter can’t do.
Apart from the data-extraction-focused tools, we also provide other types of digital marketing software, such as:
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Chatbot solutions for lead conversion
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Review widgets that increase prospect interaction
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Fake email blockers for your website
Conclusion
Hunter.io is an excellent platform for B2B professionals looking to extract lead information for cold email campaigns. Although the devs have added campaign management options, these are relatively rudimentary. Other competing software solutions and white label software may be a better choice in that regard. When it comes to email extraction, Hunter does its job well.
White label software