It’s a No for Hunter.iO
Hunter.iO is touted as a powerful tool for generating email lists for targeted B2B email marketing and sales campaigns. Unfortunately, when we tried it for ourselves, this tool came up short.
Digital marketers like to try new things. Well, actually, we have to—keeping up with the latest tools and technology is just part of the job.
Hunter.iO was our most recent exploration. Their marketing was compelling and a reference said they had had success, so we gave it a try. Touted as a powerful tool for generating email lists (including professional emails addresses, names, and titles) for targeted B2B email marketing and sales campaigns. Unfortunately, when we tried it for ourselves, Hunter.iO came up short.
The BOT Test
At Bright Orange Thread, we target the CEOs of companies with $1M-$20M in revenue. We were testing Hunter.io to see if we could add names to our email list. We paid for the service for 1 month at the Starter level ($49/month).
Sleek Design Guides You Through the Tool
We liked the minimalist design of the streamlined dashboard. The distinct options and clear design makes using the tool intuitive.
Limited Needles Found in the Haystack
Their most basic feature allows you to enter one domain name and it will spit out a list of email addresses, names, and titles associated with the domain.
You simply enter a company’s domain name and it populates a list of email addresses scraped from the website. It should be noted that it does not crawl the live sites, but rather pulls from a database of previously scraped data.
During our test, we found that this produced limited results. Our targets are small to medium-sized companies. While Hunter.iO sometimes found a few email addresses, names were not always found, and titles were found almost never. This was frustrating since we did not gain the complete data we needed for an email marketing campaign.
Bulk Email Search Came Up Short
In addition to searching for email addresses associated with a particular domain, Hunter.iO can also perform bulk tasks. By uploading a spreadsheet you can search multiple domains for emails, verify emails, or find particular email addresses. We used the bulk email search feature with the goal of finding email addresses for a list of names and companies we had scraped from LinkedIn.
This tool was less useful in finding bulk email addresses for many different companies. We needed to manually enter the domain of each company to find email addresses. Even after taking the time-consuming step of adding domain names, it was only able to find 87 email addresses from our list of 375. Not a stellar result. Admittedly, this is a small sample size. But we are a small company targeting other small companies.
Hunter.iO Can Help Salespeople in a Pinch, but It’s Not as Useful for Marketing.
If you’re looking to connect with specific people and already have their names, titles, and website, this tool could be an easy way to find their email addresses quickly using the free version of the software. Based on other reviews we’ve read, it seems to do better with finding email addresses for larger companies.
Not Helpful for Mass-Email Campaigns
Hunter.iO is not designed for scraping as many emails as possible for use in mass-email campaigns. It also does not find free email addresses like websiteowner@gmail.com. For a content marketing company like us, this makes the tool less useful.
Overall, this tool is geared more towards individual contacts whose email address you can’t seem to find. The free version of Hunter.iO gives you 50 searches per month. That should be more than enough for the few times you forget to ask for a new contact’s card.