Cold Email Outreach Strategy: Using hunter.io Data to Personalize and Connect

• updated on
August 31, 2023
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Email outreach is a pivotal component of sales prospecting and lead generation. However, generic cold outreach often sees low response rates. Using enriched data from tools like hunter.io can help personalize and humanize your cold emails for better results.

Before we dive into how to leverage hunter.io for personalized outreach, let’s briefly explain what hunter.io is for context.

Hunter is a leading sales intelligence platform used by over 100,000 businesses to identify prospect contact data. Its powerful email finding features uncover email addresses in seconds using only a domain name.

Hunter then enriches those email addresses with additional intel like full names, job titles, company details, address information, and social media profiles. This provides sales and marketing teams robust prospect data to drive personalized outreach and pipelines.

Key capabilities include:

  • Email finding from domains
  • Email verification and deliverability
  • Company and contact data enrichment
  • Powerful search filters
  • Email scoring to prioritize outreach
  • Bulk finding and exporting
  • Email productivity integrations
  • Chrome extension for finding emails on the fly

In summary, Hunter is an invaluable prospecting tool that supercharges cold outreach with its depth of accurate contact data and context for personalization.

Why Personalized Outreach Matters

Buyers have come to expect personalized communication. According to Statista, 80% of customers are more likely to engage with personalized messaging. Generic outreach simply doesn’t cut it anymore.

Targeting prospects with relevant, customized messaging demonstrates you understand their needs. It builds trust and rapport from the first touchpoint. Enriched data makes it easy to tailor emails to each recipient.

Ways to Personalize Cold Emails

There are a few key areas where customization has major impact:

Subject Lines

Emails with personalized subject lines have 26% higher open rates according to Campaign Monitor. Include the prospect’s name, company, or role right in the subject line. This immediately catches attention and cues relevancy.

Email Body Copy

Mentioning the prospect’s name, company, role, interests, location or mutual connections in the body copy creates instant familiarity. Asking about challenges specific to their industry also demonstrates you get where they’re coming from.

Content Attachments

Further customize by attaching content tailored to the prospect’s interests or role. For example, attaching an industry-specific case study, a guide for their job title, or article on a topic they tweet about.

Follow-Up Sequences

Personalize follow-ups based on prior prospect engagement and preferences. For example, if they opened a case study, send more content in that vein.

Enriching Data with hunter.io

While basic personalization is doable with just names and companies, hunter.io takes contact enrichment to the next level. It equips sales and marketing teams with additional context for deeper personalization and humanized outreach.

Verified Email Addresses

Having an accurate, deliverable email address is the baseline requirement for any successful outreach. Without it, emails simply bounce and never reach prospects.

Hunter provides real-time email verification to confirm addresses are valid and accepting mail. It also detects disposable and catch-all emails that brands may not want to target. Verified emails ensure your carefully crafted messages actually hit inboxes.

Job Titles and Roles

Knowing the exact job title and role of your prospect is powerful personalization ammo. People engage better when addressed according to their responsibilities.

For example, content and messaging tailored to a CMO will be completely different than what resonates with a Director of Engineering. Hunter pulls job title data from a variety of sources, including social sites like LinkedIn.

Accurate job titles let you qualify leads, route them appropriately internally, and personalize outreach for relevancy.

Company Intel for Industry-Specific Messaging

Understanding a prospect’s company beyond just the name also enables better customization. Details like company size, industry, specific technologies used, leadership team, priorities and challenges open doors for industry-specific messaging.

For instance, highlighting your experience assisting companies in their vertical demonstrates you grasp their realities. Mentioning tools or languages they rely on shows your product’s fit.

Hunter scours the web to identify these telling company details so you can incorporate into communications and collateral.

Interests and Content via Social Media

Social media profiles like Twitter and LinkedIn provide a peek into prospects’ interests, content shares, causes they champion, and groups they engage in. These insights breed endless personalization possibilities.

Something as simple as asking about their favorite football team can instantly build rapport. Sharing an article on a topic they tweeted about demonstrates attention to detail. Hunter surfaces key socialintel to steer messaging.

Complete Contact Details

While email addresses are essential, prospects also appreciate alternate ways to engage like direct telephone numbers and physical addresses. Providing these convenient contact options makes you more accessible.

Hunter gives sales and marketing pros this complete contact data arsenal so outreach can happen across channels when appropriate.

Armed with Hunter’s wealth of enriched prospect intelligence, sales and marketing teams can craft resonating messaging personalized at scale. The depth of customization and humanized touch simply isn’t possible relying on generic databases. Hunter contact data gives that game-changing edge.

Personalizing Cold Emails with Hunter Data

Here are some examples of personalizing cold emails using prospect information uncovered with hunter:

Subject Line

"{ProspectFirstName}, quick question for you re: {CompanyIndustry} trends"

Email Body

"Hi {FirstName}, I noticed on LinkedIn you're the {ProspectJobTitle} at {CompanyName}. Our clients in the {CompanyIndustry} industry often ask us about {IndustryTrendTakenFromProspectsTwitterAccount}. Do any of these challenges resonate with you?"

Content Attachment

"[GuideForProspectsJobTitle].pdf"

Follow-Up Email

"Hey {FirstName}, just wanted to check back given you downloaded our {CaseStudyTopic} case study. Is achieving [goal outlined in case study] a priority for you this quarter as well?"

Key Takeaways

  • Personalized outreach converts better, but generic data only allows basic customization
  • hunter.io enriches contacts with deeper context like titles, social profiles and more
  • Use prospect names, jobs, company, interests, location and challenges to customize
  • Subject lines, email copy, attachments and follow-ups are key areas for personalization
  • hunter data enables highly tailored, humanized outreach for improved engagement

Leveraging enriched intelligence is the key differentiator setting your outreach apart. With Hunter’s actionable prospect contact data, you can craft resonating messages that demonstrate understanding and relevance right from the first touch.

From The Author

Jacob Kettner

As co-founder of SerpFocus, I'm driven by a passion for helping businesses grow through strategic SEO. I started my digital marketing career at a boutique agency focused on local SEO for small businesses. Read my full bio.

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