74% of marketers have said that targeted emails increase their overall customer engagement rates.
The journey to record conversions in your email outreach efforts starts with the right tool.
Hunter.io is known for being a great tool for finding business connections, verifying email addresses and sending cold emails.
This extensive review will help share insights as to whether it’s the right tool and fit for your current business needs.
Features and use cases
Like every other lead generation and email outreach tool, Hunter has several features that make it a great option.
Some of these functionalities include:
1. Domain search
If you ever need to find the contact information of people within an organization, Hunter’s domain search feature allows you to find this with the company’s domain. Once you enter the domain address, it sweeps the web to find this data.
Usually, you’d get the email addresses along with the full name, job title, phone number, LinkedIn profile and any other social profile associated with the user.
This ensures you’re emailing the right person at whatever time.
Hunter also shares the sources of this information. So you’d know whether it was gotten from the company’s website or an article online.
It also includes some details about the company like the industry, location, etc.
2. Email finder
There’s also a functionality that allows you to find a specific person.
If you already know their name and where they work, there’s no point going through a long list. Streamline the search with email find and it’ll share the details of that exact person.
There’s also a bulk email finder to help you find multiple people across different industries. Simply upload a CSV or TXT file with the names of these people and it’ll reconfigure your file with the email addresses included.
3. Email verifier
Before sending out your emails, you need to know if they’ll hurt your deliverability.
This feature is designed to help you figure out how authentic an email is by checking its deliverability status.
It usually gives out the results through a confidence score. The higher the score, the higher the deliverability that the email address will record.
You can also run a bulk email verification check.
4. Campaigns and reporting
This feature allows you to send email campaigns and cold outreach to the email addresses you find using this software.
However, you have to connect your email address to be able to send these messages. This is because the layout is just like regular email sent from Outlook and Gmail.
It has personalization so you can add their names to areas of your message, add videos and attachments like Gmail, and use any of the preset templates. You can also build cadences for automated sequences for specific campaigns and track your results afterwards.
The reporting gives you KPIs on the performance of your emails. You can also filter these results by campaigns, date and top performers.
5. Extensions and integrations
If you prefer using Chrome extensions and add-ons to work, this software offers many variations.
There’s the Chrome extension for finding email addresses when you’re surfing the web and a Firefox add-on for finding and saving email addresses as well.The Google Sheets add-on is also great for finding and verifying existing emails on your spreadsheet.
There are multiple integrations with other email marketing tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho and Zapier for many other software types.
Pricing and Value for Money
Free plan ✅
However, like most free plans, features like domain search, adding attachments to emails, campaign reports and multiple team accounts are not available.
Upgrading to a paid plan starts at $34/month on the annual plan or $49 on the monthly plan.
Starter | Growth | Business |
$34 | $149 | $349 |
500 monthly searches | 5,000 monthly searches | 50,000 monthly searches |
1,000 monthly verifications | 10,000 monthly verifications | 100,000 monthly verifications |
3 email accounts | 10 email accounts | 20 email accounts |
For a tool that only prioritizes lead generation, you can expect to spend more than $1,200 with a team of 10 members per year which is quite expensive when you compare it to other tools like lemlist which costs less than $1,000 with more extensive features.
Ratings, pros and cons
Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐
We went through user reviews across popular software review sites like G2, Capterra and GetApp.
G2 – 4.4/5 (540 reviews) | Get App – 4.6/5 (615 reviews) | Capterra – 4.6/5 (614 reviews)
What users liked | What users disliked |
Ease of use | You can’t find email addresses of very recent companies |
Simple features | It doesn’t have a corrective typing feature so you have to be accurate in your search |
Responsive customer support | Since it extracts leads from the web, not all websites provide adequate professional emails |
Great for collecting email addresses | The free credits have been reduced over the years |
The free plan was sufficient for simple needs | Compared to some other tools, it is pricey, even with the free credits. |
Hunter.io is an excellent tool for lead generation, especially on the free plan.
But, when it comes to nurturing these leads, you don’t have enough features to work with — even on the paid plan.
Hunter.io can get quite expensive if you need to increase the number of leads you generate every month.
✅ Pros
- Simple and easy user interface
- Updates database with new publicly available emails
- Multiple cold email templates are available
- A free plan
- Multiple integrations and functional add-ons
- Invite team members to collaborate and grant role permissions
❌ Cons
- Once emails are removed from a website or source, they are automatically removed on Hunter too
- You can only send campaigns when you connect a Gmail or Outlook account
- It only verifies professional emails and cannot verify emails that are associated with an “accept all” condition
- Limited email campaign features e.g no A/B test or email warm-up
- The paid plans can be quite pricey
- No AI email assistant
Hunter vs lemlist
lemlist is a better and cheaper alternative to Hunter especially if you want to generate leads and do a multi-channel outreach at the same time.
Here’s a comparison based on features and price
Hunter | lemlist | |
Free plan/trial | ✅ | ✅14 days |
Email finder and verifier | ✅ | ✅ |
Integrations | CRM and Zapier | CRM and Zapier |
Email campaigns | 2,500 on the starter plan | Unlimited on all plans |
Multi-channel outreach | ❌ | ✅Email, LinkedIn & Calls |
AI Assistant | ❌ | ✅ |
Custom landing pages | ❌ | ✅ |
Lead generation database | ✅ | ✅ |
Email warm-up | ❌ | ✅ |
Pricing | $34/month on Starter | $32/month on Email Starter |
Other Hunter alternatives
In addition to lemlist, there are some other alternatives you can consider giving a shot instead of Hunter. Some of these options include;
1. Hubspot
Hubspot has a more robust lead generation program that allows you to track, score, send messages and grow your business. It also has features like forms, landing pages, SEO tools and more.
However, because of how robust it is, it can be difficult to learn especially when creating workflows.
2. Apollo
The one thing Apollo has is lead scoring.
You can rank your leads based on how responsive they are and how close they are to reaching the goals set. With this, you can prioritize your most promising prospects instead of simply sending out another batch of emails. It also has a very extensive database.
The major deal breaker is that it is more expensive than Hunter.
3. Klaviyo
While Klaviyo is easy to use, it is targeted more towards eCommerce websites.
It’s more of a CRM tool that allows you to send outreach via multivariate options like push, email, and SMS.
Unfortunately, it’s better for lead nurturing than lead generation.
Key Takeaways
We can recommend Hunter to agencies who want to focus on lead generation first. It’s easy to set up, has little to no learning curves and can host multiple team members on one account.
After comparing lemlist and Hunter feature, we recommend lemlist as the most cost-effective solution.
With lemlist, you can focus on generating leads and nurturing them by scheduling multiple types of campaigns or test variations of your messaging.
Also, Hunter doesn’t offer enough details about your sales pipeline unless you integrate with another CRM tool.