Obtaining accurate contact details is vital for any outreach plan, but finding these details can often take time and involve a lot of digging online. There are multiple tools and chrome extensions available to assist your outreach efforts; here are three that I’ve tried recently, and how well they’ve performed.
Hunter.io
Hunter is the first tool I experimented with for finding and verifying professional email addresses. Hunter provides a user-friendly chrome extension that’ll indicate whenever email addresses can be found by filling in the extension icon in red (a greyed-out icon means that no information could be found on the page).
Domain search
By entering the desired domain, Hunter will pull up any email addresses known to be attached to that domain, and it will even filter them by department, such as sales or marketing etc. For larger companies, Hunter has hundreds of pre-saved domains that it will suggest in a drop-down menu as you type – this can be very helpful if you aren’t 100% sure of the domain name used by the targeted company.
Email finder
By entering the targeted person’s name as well as the company domain, Hunter will provide you with their email address if it is known. Hunter will display whether the email is confirmed to be correct, and if it isn’t, it will display what percentage reliability the email is believed to be.
Free vs paid
Using a free account, Hunter allows you to search for 25 emails per month and verify 50. I personally found that I hit this limit very quickly, which wasn’t ideal.
For any more than this, you’ll be required to purchase a subscription; starting at £36 a month for the lowest plan and ranging up to £293 per month for the largest, most inclusive plan.
Hunter.io – Final thoughts
Using the free account, I found that Hunter was semi-successful in finding leads. One problem I had quite frequently was Hunter claiming there were no email addresses found on the page, however in most of these instances I was staring right at an ‘info@’ contact email. Obviously, emails of this format aren’t the best for targeting outreach anyway, but I felt it’s worth noting that Hunter’s crawling isn’t 100% effective.
Another notable setback of Hunter is that it doesn’t work for social media, such as LinkedIn. Again, this isn’t a dealbreaker, as there are many other extensions that do work for social sites.
Not every email that I searched for was in the database, however, a few days after my searches with Hunter, I received a follow-up email that provided me with new addresses that had been added to the database matching my previous search queries. This was a lovely surprise in my inbox, a definite point to Hunter for that!
AeroLeads
I turned to AeroLeads next to try and reach contacts in other locations. AeroLeads is an ideal extension to run alongside Hunter, as it’s specifically built for LinkedIn, Sales Nav, AngelList and Crunchbase.
AeroLeads works off of credits. One credit = one confirmed lead. You can search the above-mentioned sites for information, but the details will be partly censored until you add the individual as a prospect, which costs one credit.
Here’s an example, using our Founder of Browser Media, Joe:
As you can see, the extension pulled up both an email and phone number, however, they’re censored. To find the full details you’re required to add the contact to your prospects list. Once they’re added, the asterisks disappear and you’ve secured their contact details at the cost of one credit.
Chrome extension
The AeroLeads chrome extension opens a slim window where information is pulled from your current page and their database is searched. If no results are found, you can add the contact to your prospects, where AeroLeads will then crawl the web for additional suggestions.
Email finder
With a very similar interface to that of Hunter, the email finder provided by AeroLeads works just as well. Unfortunately, AeroLeads doesn’t offer a database of popular domains, so you will need to know the targeted domain before searching for individuals through the finder.
Contact search
AeroLeads have a handy contact search within their site, with over 650 million contacts in their database. There are multiple filters to help home your search in the right direction using any information you already have for the contact.
Free vs paid
With AeroLead’s free plan, you only get 10 credits per month, which, as you can imagine, gets used up very quickly. Their lowest plan costs $49 (£41) per month, giving you 2000 credits. The plans scale up to $499 (£420) per month for the largest package, in which you receive 30,000 credits.
AeroLeads – Final thoughts
AeroLeads definitely aided my searching efforts by allowing me to search directly on LinkedIn, however, there were a few downsides that personally have put me off using this extension in the future.
The AeroLeads extension opens into a separate window, which is definitely helpful in some aspects for keeping the information separate from the page. For someone who works mostly in fullscreen, this proved more of an annoyance than anything, slowing down my searching process. This isn’t a major problem, and as I said, it can be beneficial for some, but it definitely put me off of this extension.
Something else to note, when downloading the extension I was signed up for their mailing list. This isn’t normally an issue since you can unsubscribe from mailing lists at any time. Unfortunately, the unsubscribe button on all AeroLeads emails has led me to a 404 error, and I’m still receiving their emails to this day.
Find That
Find That have dubbed themselves ‘The Yellow Pages of Email’. Similar to AeroLeads, the Find That extension works solely on social media. In comparison to Hunter and AeroLeads, Find That has significantly fewer features to utilise, but as an email finder and verification tool, it still works very well. Find That works off of credits, however, you’re not charged per search, only if the database finds an email in response to your query.
Email verification
Find That seemed to yield the most accurate results out of the tools that I’ve tested. They will clearly state if the email is confirmed and verified, giving a confidence score if the details aren’t 100% confirmed to be correct. This is a very valuable addition that results in much lower bounce rates for email outreach.
Chrome extension
Using the Find That chrome extension to find email addresses on LinkedIn didn’t work quite as smoothly as AeroLeads, which often yielded results instantly. With Find That, it commonly stated that no email could be found. However, you are given the option to suggest a domain name allowing the extension to search again. If you have an idea of the possible domain name for the contact, the new results are often accurate.
Free vs paid
Find That works on credits, offering a variety of different plans depending on your needs. With a free plan, you get 50 ‘find’ credits and 100 ‘verify’ credits, which is a huge leap from the free options with AeroLeads.
In terms of paid plans, they begin at $29 (£24) and lead up to $249 (£210). You can purchase plans specifically for finding contacts and separate plans for verifying. They do also offer a bundle plan for users who need to both find and verify their contacts. The prices do not differ between these plans, however, the credits you receive do, so that’s important to check before paying for a plan.
Find That – Final thoughts
Find That is possibly the most accurate out of the three tools I’ve tested, at least for the contacts I’ve been trying to reach. Accuracy is vital when finding contact details as you want to ensure your outreach efforts are landing in the targeted inbox and not bouncing back.
Depending on your usage of search tools of this nature, you may find that the free version of Find That is lacking in features, but I guess this is to be expected for a free package. For my personal needs, the free package has worked adequately well, especially with the extra credits given in comparison to AeroLeads.
What’s the best Chrome extension?
There isn’t really an answer to which extension is the most beneficial for your outreach efforts. This highly depends on your specific needs and goals, as each one has the upper hand in a slightly different way.
I personally enjoyed using Hunter.io the most, purely due to the interface being very user-friendly, but they could have scored better in my mind by providing slightly more searches with the free account.
From what I used of AeroLeads, it seemed to be an effective tool. Unfortunately, only very few credits were provided in the free package and therefore I ran out very quickly. For me personally, the extension opening as a separate window was also a deal-breaker, slowing down my search process.
I found Find That to be the most accurate, yielding the most confirmed email addresses from this tool. Again, Find That provides a respectable amount of monthly credits for the free package which is a big plus.
There are many other tools available online that can search and verify contact information, these are just the three that I’ve experimented with. Give these three a try if they sound like a good fit for your needs. If you’re still struggling, here are some other chrome extensions for assisting outreach:
