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 s