Cold emailing is one of the most popular ways to engage prospects. However, finding and gathering relevant email addresses is time-consuming and tedious, at least if you do it manually. Luckily, there are many tools out there that can help you automate that process.

In this post, we’ll compare two of the best cold email tools in the market today, Hunter vs. Reply.

We’ll share:

• What cold emailing is
• Why it’s important for growing business
• A comparison of Hunter vs Reply covering pricing, integrations and key features

Ready? Let’s get started

What Is Cold Mailing?

You probably already know what cold mailing is. But, just to make sure we’re on the same page, we’ll share a quick definition. 

Cold mailing is the process of sending emails to individuals or companies with whom you have no prior relationship. The defining characteristic of cold emails is that the recipients haven’t ever contacted you before.

The goal of a cold email will vary, but it’s essential for these messages to include a concise call to action. Most commonly, cold emails are used by sales representatives to invite prospects to a demo call. But cold emails can also be used for fundraising or hiring purposes.

Why Is Automated Cold Emailing Helpful for Growing Companies?

According to an analysis of over 65 million cold emails, 50% of cold mailing campaigns have a reply rate of under 10%. Cold emailing works. But it’s usually a numbers game. 

Cold mailing works best when it’s done at scale. And to do it at scale, you’ll have to automate it.

Automated cold mailing can help you to:

• Increase brand awareness and expand your network
• Generate leads in a cost-effective way
• Scale your outreach efforts

Increase Brand Awareness & Grow Your Network

Automated cold emails can help you to boost brand awareness and expand your network. How? By introducing your products to prospects who may not have interacted with your brand before, but are likely to find value in it. 

Generate Leads & Optimize Costs

Automated cold emailing can be a cost-effective way to generate leads and build your customer base. Cold emailing requires a much smaller budget than traditional advertising, and it allows you to target specific individuals or companies with a personalized message.

Scale Your Outreach

An automated cold email drip campaign can help you to reach thousands of potential leads in a single day. Besides, you can track its results and use them to optimize your next sales initiatives.

Overall, automated cold emailing is an effective way to generate leads and build relationships. While it may not always result in an immediate sale or conversion, it can be a powerful tool for growing your business over time. Especially, when automated and done at scale.

Best Cold Email Tools: Hunter vs. Reply

Hunter and Reply are two of the most popular cold email tools out there. Generally speaking, both tools allow you to:

• Find prospects’ emails
• Verify emails
• Engage prospects through automated campaigns

But what are their key differences? In this section, we’ll compare Hunter vs. Reply across four categories:

• Features
• Data sources
• Integrations 
• Pricing

Let’s dive in!

Hunter.io

An accessible cold email tool, Hunter searches through millions of email addresses to find verified contacts.

Hunter’s key features include: 

• Domain email search
• Email finder
• Email verification
• Cold emailing sequences and follow-ups
• Email tracking
• Automated outreach campaigns 
• Cold email templates
• A handful of useful integrations (including Zapier, Make, and various CRMs)

Hunter.io works by crawling a company's domain and logging all of the emails it finds.

You can check a company’s emails on Hunter by: 

• Typing the domain of your target company on their website 
• Using Hunter’s Google Chrome extension, which is a time-saver

However, Hunter doesn’t search for emails on LinkedIn or any other social platform. 

Additionally, Hunter can help you find the email of a specific person you want to reach, even if that email isn’t available on a public list. How? By analyzing a company's email patterns and making email suggestions.

You can test out different combinations, and verify each option with Hunter’s email verification tool. What’s more, you can even check whether those emails are still active. 

It’s worth mentioning that Hunter will be particularly effective if you’re targeting medium-to-large companies, rather than small ones. The reason’s quite simple: small companies tend to use contact forms, so they’re less likely to have branded emails listed publicly. 

Furthermore, Hunter.io's Campaigns tool can be integrated with either Gmail or Outlook for outreach campaign management. Nevertheless, this feature is rather basic and not very robust compared to other options in the market.

Hunter.io Pricing

Hunter offers a free plan which includes:

• 25 searches/month 
• 50 email verifications/month
• Support for 1 sending email address. 

Paid plans start at $34/month.

Hunter.io Pros

Hunter has some clear upsides, including:

• A generous free version for those who are getting started, including automated outreach campaign features
• A Google Chrome extension that helps you find a company’s email addresses by visiting its website
• Email validation
• Intuitive UX

Hunter.io Cons

No tool is perfect. Although it’s a good option, Hunter has some downsides:

• There are no social media search features, which can be a great con considering that LinkedIn is a massive platform for B2B prospecting
• The campaign tool feature is rather basic
• It’s a bit more expensive than most alternatives

Reply

Reply.io is a cold email tool that offers a wide range of features, including: 

• Automated outreach campaigns
• Email templates
• Email search
• AI email assistant
• Analytics
• CRM integrations
• Lead scoring
• Multi-channel outreach (e.g. personal emails, calls, Whatsapp, LinkedIn, SMS, etc)

Reply is so full-featured that it’s basically several products rolled up into one.

However, since we’re comparing Reply vs. Hunter, it’ll be fair to look at one feature in particular. Today we’ll focus on Reply’s email search.

Reply offers a browser extension that lets you automatically scan Linkedin to find prospects' business emails. Plus, you can also validate them. Using this extension, you can save contact info in your Reply contact list, and even book a meeting on Reply’s platform with just one click.

While useful, this extension is fairly limited if you’re not using Reply’s sales engagement tool.   

Reply.io’s Pricing

For email search, Reply.io's pricing goes as follows:

• The free plan includes up to 200 business emails
• The Advanced plan includes 500 business emails findings, at $49/month
• The Unlimited plan includes unlimited email findings, at $99/month

However, if you want all the features Reply has to offer you, you can sign up for the Sales Engagement plan, which starts at $60/month per user. 

Reply Pros

Here are a couple of reasons why you may want to choose Reply’s email finder tool:

• Includes CSV exporting, even on the free plan
• Connects with LinkedIn & Sales Navigator seamlessly
• Offers a user-friendly and intuitive UX

Reply Cons

Maybe Reply’s email finder tool isn’t right for you.

Consider that:

• It only scans LinkedIn
• It’s very limited if you don’t have a Reply Sales engagement plan

Hunter vs. Reply: What is the Best Fit for Your Company?

We can say that Reply is a comprehensive platform that will allow you to automate your sales outreach process fully. Meanwhile, Hunter mainly functions as an email search tool. 

However, if we only focus on Reply’s email search product vs. Hunter, there isn’t a clear winner.  Let’s compare these tools across our 4 categories:

Get the Most Out of Your SaaS Budget with Cledara

In this post, we explored two of the most popular cold email tools: Reply and Hunter. But, are you aware of how much your company is already spending on software? Are team members actually using your current sales stack? With Cledara, you can answer these questions with a click.

Cledara will help you to:

• Get a centralized view of your tool stack
• Manage access and seats from a single platform
• Identify unnecessary tools and cancel your subscription
• Analyze how each tool is being used
• Avoid shadow IT
• Onboard and offboard team members while keeping your data secure

Curious? Take control of your tech stack and book a demo today.