Business owners, salespeople, and marketers alike agree that outreach is essential for any business. Gathering emails is crucial for your cold emailing campaign, and this is where email finder tool like Hunter shines the brightest with its ability to find any email address you are looking for. Besides that, as a tool it offers many more functions with new features coming out regularly.
Some of the most prominent features of Email Hunter are:
- Domain Search – Here you can track emails addresses from a list of companies and websites.
- Email Finder – Allows you to track email addresses of the persons you are interested in.
- Email Verifier – Using this feature, you can check if the email address you have on your list is valid.
- Bulk Tasks – This gives you the option to search or verify a list of email addresses swiftly.
- Google Sheets Add-on – This feature provides the option to organize and save your search results to Google Sheets.
- Mail Tracker – Here you can get delivery reports on the emails you send and get notified when they are opened.
- Chrome & Firefox Extensions let you find the people behind any website, allowing you to gather information like:
- Names
- Professional email addresses
- Social networks
- Job titles
- The public source where this data has been collected
How to get access to Email Hunter.io services
If you want to use Hunter.io you will have to create an account. While casual users can make 100 requests per month, there are many more options for those that use one of the other 4 plans (Starter, Growth, Pro, and Enterprise) in accordance with their budget. A request is considered to be one of the following actions:
- A domain search that returns the email addresses from a certain domain.
- An email address found through search with First name, Last name and Domain name.
- The verification of an email address
Domain Search
This feature allows you to find all of the public professional email addresses under a specific domain. Besides email addresses, you can also find a lot of additional information about your leads, such as:
- Full name
- Phone number
- Job title
- Twitter and LinkedIn profile
If you wish to find a specific person, you can filter your search results by typing their first and last name. This tool also gives you the option to see the email addresses from particular departments of the company depending on the job titles that appear in the search results. One of the most useful features is autocomplete, which suggests the domain name as soon as you start typing, just in case you are not sure about the spelling.
There are, however, some restrictions on the tool’s usage. There is a limit of 5000 email addresses that can be extracted per domain. Also, as this tool is designed for professional use only, it will not show results with personal email addresses.
Email Finder
This is a useful option for tracking specific email addresses without any searching and filtering. You do that by inserting the full name of the person whose email address you are looking for, as well as the name of their company. If the email address is available publicly on the internet, it will be shown in the search results.
Email Verifier
This tool helps you check whether an email address you are interested in is valid or not by checking its deliverability. This is very useful for cold emailing campaigns since it eliminates high bounce rates. Eight factors that define if the email address is reliable or not:
- The email address format is valid and looks correct.
- The name of the email address is not a random combination of characters, but one that makes sense.
- The domain name is used for temporary email addresses.
- The email address is running under webmail such as Gmail or Hotmail.
- There are email exchanger records on the email address you are checking. This will inform you if there is a mail server authorized to accept emails under the recipient’s domain.
- There is a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server.
- If it confirms the presence of SMTP, then it checks to see if it bounces or not.
- There is a catch-all domain, which means that the email sent will be received even if the domain is misspelled.
You should keep in mind that even if the email address gets the checkmark from the Email Verifier, which means it is valid, there is still a small chance of bouncing since this verifier is correct a whopping 95% of the time.
Email Verifier also comes with some restrictions. You can check up to 200 email addresses under the same domain every 24 hours. The tool is designed for professional use only, which means you can’t check any personal email addresses.
Bulk Tasks
Bulk Tasks allow you to upload a CSV or TXT file, or even to copy/paste the list of the domain names you are interested in and search for them all at once. So, instead of searching for each domain separately, you can save some serious time and effort.
You can also use the Bulk Email Finder to find multiple email addresses from a list of names and companies or domains. However, with the Bulk Email Finder you are allowed to find up to 150,000 email addresses per file.
Bulk Tasks also includes the Email Verifier tool that allows you to verify a list of multiple email addresses coming from different domain names. You are allowed to include up to 200 email addresses that are under the same domain name at once.
Google Sheets Add-On
This add-on lets you save all the data you find on a sheet in Google drive. This means you don’t have to make a list of domain names or personal data to upload them to Email Hunter. Instead, you can make utilize the available integration and send data faster and easier.
There is a limit of 500 rows for Email Finder, so for a bigger search, you will need to use the Bulk Task option. You also need to provide the First name, the Last name and the company/domain name to search.
MailTracker
This is the latest tool of Email Hunter which allows for tracking emails you send via Gmail. You will receive a notification and see the tracking details in Gmail as soon as someone opens your mail. That way you can know when the best time to follow up is.
Browser Extensions
This allows Chrome and Firefox users to track any email address from the website they are browsing at any given time with a simple click on the extension icon. It is free to install and users that don’t have an Email Hunter plan can send up to 100 requests a month.
Organize your cold email campaign
How to Build a Valid List for Cold Email Campaigns
To start your cold email campaign you need two basic inputs – valid emails and a well planned message. If you wish to avoid the classic manual process of searching sites and navigating to find emails, our suggestion is to:
- Create a Google Sheets file
- Get a free or paid account in Hunter.io
Collect domains of websites of potential customers
Once you have defined the branch of business you are targeting, you should visit startup listings, company directories, or search the internet and start collecting the domains of each business on a sheet within the Google Sheets file.
Generate an email list using Hunter.io
To generate emails for your campaign you need to go to your Google Sheets and install the Hunter.io add-on. Once you have done that, activate the add-on with your Hunter.io account by going to the Hunter.io API page and generating a key that you need to copy-paste into the add-on.
The next step is generating emails according to the domains of the websites that you have collected. This can be done by selecting the cell with the domains and using the option Bulk of the Domain Search tab. A new sheet will be created which you will fill in with the emails obtained and the following information additional information:
- Email addresses
- Confidence score – This is the level of reliability of the email. Ideally, it should be greater than 80.
- Type – This is where you define whether the mail is personal or generic. Our recommendation is to use personal, however, if there is only a generic link for the company you are targeting, then you should try your luck with it.
- The number of sources – Hunter extracts emails from public sources and stores them. This number indicates how many sources the email is extracted from, which increases its confidence.
Validate the emails before sending messages
You must verify that emails are valid. Cold emailing is based on sending many emails since open and reply rates can be very low. If your messages start bouncing due to the email addresses you collected not being valid, your messages could be labeled as spam and you could be blacklisted. Hunter’s Email Verifier has a success rate of 95%, so it will help you discard many emails that would otherwise bounce.
Design the right email for your campaign
Once you have gathered and verified the email addresses, you should start working on your messages. Since you are doing B2B advertising, which means your customers are companies, consider following these instructions:
- Cold emails should look personal and not like promotional material, so avoid using images.
- Create a good subject line since this determines whether your email gets opened or goes to the trash or spam folder. Keep it short and personalized by using the first name of your lead.
- The main focus of your message needs to be on what you can do for your leads. It is a good idea to investigate their website and find ways your product can be useful to them.
- Define your objective with a strong call to action.
- You need to find the right balance between the formal and informal tone since going all the way in either direction can affect the response rates.
Once you have written a good subject line and composed your text with a strong call to action, you can start sending your emails. You can also create some cold email templates depending on the marketing segments and the email addresses collected.
Don’t feel discouraged if your reply rates are low at the beginning. People rarely do everything right on their first try. Consider this as a chance to learn and improve. Maybe you should tweak your subject line or the text itself a little bit. The smallest of changes can sometimes go a long way in cold emailing strategies. Use Mail Tracker notifications to get valuable insights on whether your emails are delivered and opened. Once you get a response from your client, don’t forget to follow up with a message in a timely manner.
Conclusion
Cold emailing is still the cornerstone of a good B2B strategy. Hunter provides every tool you need for your cold email marketing to be successful. From here on, everything comes down to trials and errors. From every error you make, you learn something new that will improve your strategy. It is important to try different approaches and have fun with your campaigns, and the results will be sure to follow.
