Hunter.io Review: Can This Email-Finding Tool Save You Time and Money?

This Hunter.io review will highlight why it's one of the best tools for email marketing.

It can help you find accurate information about prospects, verify email addresses, and more. In this Hunter.io review, I’ll help you understand the tool so you can avoid the downsides while getting the most from its many benefits.

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You can try Hunter for yourself for free right here. Simply sign up for the free plan and see whether it meets your needs.

Hunter.io Review: What Is It?

This is one of the more accurate email finder tools. It has helped me personally with everything from link-building campaigns to cold outreach to sales and marketing teams of prospect businesses.

There are multiple ways that the tool accomplishes this task, including a Chrome extension that scrapes websites and an email verifier.

How Does Hunter.io Work?

Hunter.io works by scraping a company's website and logging all of the emails it finds. This allows you to see everything, including verify emails that may not be readily apparent when you first look.

However, Hunter.io does more than simply scrape a website for relevant email addresses.

It does this by looking for patterns in a company's emails and recommending suggestions. This can help if you try to contact someone specific within a company.

You can try out different combinations using their recommendations and verify each email using the email verification tool.

Hunter.io Review: The Tool's Reliability

All of the valuable things that Hunter.io does are pretty irrelevant if you can’t rely on the data. It’s not an unfounded concern, either. In my quest to find the best email marketing tools over the years, I can confirm many of them over-promise and under-deliver.

With Hunter.io, you’re getting data that’s been combed through for accuracy. This isn’t a guarantee that every name you come up with will be perfect.

One thing to note is that the tool is usually more accurate with medium to larger-sized companies. When conducting cold outreach, I’ve found smaller local businesses tended to be more hit or miss as they often had only contact forms without an email listed.

Many small companies also don’t have branded emails, which Hunter.io focuses on.

Hunter.io Review: What Is The Pricing?

This gets you 25 searches per month along with 50 email verifications. 

If that sounds a little low to you, then you may need to opt for a premium plan. Hunter.io offers four paid plans to make it easier for you to find the right level:

For users with more significant needs, Hunter.io offers custom paid plans. You will need to contact the company to discuss custom solutions.

From my experience using Hunter.io for cold email outreach (sending at the best times to cold email) and minor link-building campaigns, the Growth Plan has been sufficient. 

Hunter.io Review: Can It Save You Money? 

The answer to this is that it depends on what your time is worth.

If you’ve ever spent time doing these activities manually, then you know how long it can take to find even one email.

What’s more, if it’s just some standard info@ or support@ email, you don’t know how the company formats emails, so it’s tough to even make an educated guess.

Hunter.io can save you hours by taking the guessing work out of much of the process. If you have a virtual assistant curating your email lists, this can save them time, ultimately saving you money.

Hunter.io Review: Pros Of Using The Tool

Email outreach can undoubtedly be a primary money-making activity for sales and marketing teams in the case of cold outreach or link building as a service. However, finding emails is not where your money is made.

This can free up time that can be better spent on your core money-making activities. It can also provide better results from email campaigns through more accurate information.

Pros of Hunter.io include:

• Easy-to-use interface
• Convenient Google Chrome extension
• Free basic plan
• Accurate email verifier tool

Hunter.io Review: Cons Of Using The Tool

While Hunter.io is a great tool, it isn’t without its drawbacks. For one, the pricing is a bit more than similar tools. Many alternatives, which will be discussed later, give you more credits each month for the same price or less.

Another drawback is that you can’t search on LinkedIn for emails. With alternative tools like GetProspect, discussed more below, you can.

So, you'll need a separate tool if you want these features.

Cons of Hunter.io Include:

• No social media search function
• Costs more than similar solutions

The Features Of Hunter.io Analyzed

On the surface, Hunter.io may seem like just an email analyzer. However, the software has many other features that can be useful.

Some of the other features that make Hunter.io a great email discovery tool include:

Domain Search

The main homepage of the Hunter.io platform allows you to search for emails by typing in a specific domain. This makes it easier to quickly search through an entire website rather than going page by page and looking for the email you need.

One other big benefit of the domain search function is that the software can scan an entire website, including the code that you cannot see. This leads to an improved chance that you find the exact email you want without doing a manual site inspection. And you can also do a bulk domain search.

It also improves the chance that Hunter.io’s pattern recognition tool can detect how the company sets up their emails to make it easier for you to guess the email of the person you want.

Email Finder 

Email Finder is another nifty tool from Hunter.io that will allow you to find a specific person’s email at a company.

The tool works by trying different combinations of a person’s email address using patterns based on other detectible business email addresses from the company. This isn’t foolproof and tends to work better with larger companies and websites.

Email Verifier

The Email Verifier allows you to check emails you’ve collected so you can be more confident that they are valid and receiving emails currently. To use the email verifier tool, click on the “Verifier” button from the header menu and enter the email you want to check.

The tool will ping the email address to check that it is valid and receiving emails. One nice thing is that even if the email isn’t correct, it will tell you if the domain is receiving an email. This allows you to check different combinations until you hit the valid email address.

Bulk Tasks

If you regularly do mass outreach for link building, press releases, or mass cold emailing for business, Hunter.io offers handy bulk tasks use features.

The Bulk Tasks Tool allows you to perform a bulk domain search, email finds, author finds, and email verifications. To use the tool, click on the “Bulk” button from the top menu and select the listed functions you need to perform.

And for these bulk tasks, you have the option of inputting the domain manually or importing a list. To import a list, you must use either a .CSV, .Excel, .Numbers, or .TXT formatted file. 

Leads 

The Leads section is where all the people you wish to contact are saved. After you’ve found the correct email address and verified that it’s working through the email verification tool, you can add the information to the leads section.

It also integrates with other CRM solutions that you may be using. Hunter.io is capable of integrating with:

• Salesforce
• Pipedrive
• HubSpot
• Zoho CRM
• Gmail
• Outlook
• Zapier

You can easily add contacts and manage over 14 points of information about them. That information ranges from their LinkedIn and Twitter information to when they were last contacted.

Hunter.io Review: Campaigns

If you’re looking for a simple outreach tool or want to pare back the number of tools you’re using, this can be a good solution.

I’ve used it in the past for link-building efforts and find that it serves its purpose well. One downside is that the tool is a bit basic compared to more robust outreach solutions such as Postaga or Snov.io.

Hunter.io For Chrome

While it may seem like an insignificant detail, constantly having to click back and forth between screens and having to copy and paste domains and names can eat away at your time.

When done hundreds to thousands of times over a day, you’ve wasted a good half hour just on changing screens and copying and pasting information.

Not only does this save a lot of time, but it also makes searching through emails for larger companies with hundreds or thousands of employees much more convenient. The Hunter.io Chrome extension is free so that you can use it even on the basic plan.

Hunter For Google Sheets

One final tool that makes Hunter.io the optimal email solution for many businesses is the Google Sheets integration. 

Using the Hunter.io Google Sheets integration, you can quickly fill out lists of names that you have entered with connecting business email addresses. You can also take a massive list of emails from a purchased email list and verify them to help you clean up the list.

To use the Google Sheets integration, you will need to directly add the add-on from the Google Sheets add-on menu. Even with the free plan, you can use the Hunter.io Google Sheets add-on. However, you may find yourself eating through your credits quite quickly.

Hunter.io Alternatives

Hunter.io is a fantastic email finder tool for email outreach. However, there are alternatives you can explore that you may find better suited for your needs. Here are the top three that I’ve used personally:

1. Snov.io

While the emphasis with Hunter.io is on finding and verifying emails, Snov.io is more focused on the actual outreach part. However, the tool is equally accurate. It comes with its own robust set of features perfect for businesses that regularly conduct outreach.

2. Anymail Finder

For a near one-to-one replacement for Hunter.io, Anymail Finder is the way to go. While I’ve found it sometimes doesn’t find emails as well, it's one of the few email finder tools that offer more searches at each plan level, including the free version.

3. GetProspect

GetProspect is a good option if you focus more on B2B outreach, such as cold emailing or sales outreach for SAAS services. The tool works a bit differently from Hunter.io in that it allows you to search emails from LinkedIn.

Hunter.io Review FAQ: Common Questions About The Tool

While the information above outlines the many benefits of Hunter.io, here are answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about the software.

Is Hunter.io Compliant With GDPR?

Hunter.io has done a lot to become and maintain GDPR compliance with publicly available email addresses since 2018 when the regulation first came into effect. 

It is also on you to make sure you are using the tool properly and remaining compliant on your side.

How does Hunter.io find emails?

Hunter.io finds emails by scraping a website and looking for any present emails on the site. This includes emails both on the front end visible by users of a website and any emails hidden in code or hard to find within privacy policies and other locations.

Can you use Hunter.io with LinkedIn?

Hunter.io cannot be integrated with Linkedin. According to information that Hunter.io has put out on this matter, it is against Linkedin’s terms and conditions and privacy policy to use extensions on their website. Hunter.io has gone out of its way to remain compliant with this policy.

How Good Is Hunter.io's Email Verifier?

While it isn’t 100% accurate, it does a great job of verifying emails against its large database of corporate information. The email pattern predictor is also a great feature. It can help you find emails that may not be explicitly listed on the website.

How Much Time Can Hunter.io Save?

Over the long term, the tool can also lead to higher revenue and return on outreach spending by providing more accurate emails and getting you into the exact inbox you need rather than a random person at the company.

How Useful is The Hunter.io Data?

This can include agency owners and digital marketers that regularly utilize:

• Email marketing
• Cold email outreach
• Link building outreach campaigns
• Guest post campaigns
• Podcast outreach

Using Hunter.io data, you can more easily find the decision-makers at the companies or websites you are trying to work with. That way, you can move past the gatekeepers that may not forward your email requests.

Hunter.io Review Final Thoughts: Is Hunter.io Worth Using?

As you can tell from this Hunter.io review, it's an indispensable tool that I use in my daily workflow.

The database that you are working from is also quite substantial and growing every year. That makes it more likely you will find the exact emails you need.

If you are more focused on social media, Hunter.io may not be the best tool for you as it completely lacks these features. 

However, if you are engaged in regular B2B outreach or link-building outreach, Hunter.io is definitely worth trying out for their free features before committing to a paid plan.

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