Messaging Madness 2025 has concluded. For a month, we voted on what makes a good cold email, comparing the incomparable and trying to capture the essence of relevant messaging.

We created four scenarios with 16 entries per scenario. We selected sixty-four entries to face off in a scenario-based bracket. 130,638 votes were cast. Four skilled competitors won their scenarios and were granted a yearly Hunter subscription. The one and only Anna Sahakyan emerged victorious, winning an additional $1,000.

What have we learned from this frenzy of email copywriting?

First, that circumstances had a powerful impact on the outcomes. What played an essential role in Round 1, where voters needed to decide on 32 different matchups, wasn’t as much of a factor when there were only eight, four, or two emails to compare.

Second, we learned that a cold email can be 50 words or 200 words, and its length doesn't necessarily matter as long as it’s relevant.

Let’s dive into the details.

Methodology

To understand what happened in this tournament, we took a look back at the 64 emails and the votes they received in each round, starting with four scenario-specific rounds and finishing with two rounds played out between the four scenario winners:

• Round 1 (64 emails)
• Round 2 (32 emails)
• Super 16
• Open Rate 8
• Follow-up 4 
• Championship game

We also analyzed how our internal scores played out in reality. 

Before the bracket went live, we manually rated all entries based on five factors, rating each email on a scale from 5 to 15. Based on these ratings, the top 16 of each scenario entered the tournament. 

Now that we have our winners, we examined the predictive power of the scores assigned to these emails.

Additionally, we performed feature engineering by adding multiple quantitative (e.g., word count, paragraph count) and qualitative metrics (e.g., type of CTA) that describe these emails, which helped us understand how they differ.

Needless to say, we shouldn’t blanket apply the results of this tournament to all cold emails. This wasn’t a scientific study, and participants were free to ask anyone from their LinkedIn followers to their moms for votes. 

That being said, some best practices proved relevant despite the unusual format.

Findings

Our predictions were both right and wrong.

Before the tournament, we ranked each entry in five categories, awarding 1-3 points in each:

• Clarity/transparency
• Personalization
• Relevance
• Trustworthiness
• Readability

This was our method for selecting the best entries, but the public votes didn’t always align.

Two of our favorites were eliminated in Round 1. But as the tournament progressed, our scores better predicted the outcomes. We rated the four top spots 11, 15, 13, and 11 points, respectively.

Our explanation here is that as Messaging Madness progressed and there were fewer matchups to vote for, voters paid closer attention to the qualitative factors that we had prioritized in our internal scoring. 

In other words, when faced with rating 32 different matchups, the visual appearance of the email was more important to voters than intricate personalization.

Can we learn anything about cold emails from this? Perhaps the parallel is that if your inbox is cluttered with external emails (and 37% of decision-makers get 10+ cold emails/week), you’re less likely to judge them on their merit, and more likely to look at their superficial qualities.

Personalization and relevance matter

Our belief that relevance is key to writing a good cold email and that personalization is crucial to achieve that was baked into our internal scoring.

This was largely because Messaging Madness launched after our State of Cold Email research, which found that irrelevance was the #1 reason decision-makers ignore cold emails.

Round 1 showed that, when faced with a ton of emails to review, voters didn’t pay as much attention to the content of the emails as they did later down the line. However, in consecutive rounds, personalization and relevance-related factors played a major role.

With the help of AI, we analyzed all emails to check if they contained specific references to the target persona. 

We asked GPT-4 to look for things like mentioning a news item or quote, referring to a specific product they use, or citing public info like a hiring post, industry trend, or review.

Not surprisingly, these indicators of relevant messaging were associated with an average of more votes.

We also checked how many typical personalization tokens (e.g., {Recipient_Name}, {Company_Name}, or simply a made-up name) these emails contained. 

Compared to our internal personalization scoring, which was based on more than just using tokens, using these placeholders didn’t matter as much.

In fact, in Round 1, using placeholders damaged your vote count. Our explanation is that these placeholders look “templatey” and that’s why they lost votes. In a real scenario, as long as the custom attributes are implemented properly, this wouldn’t have a negative impact.

The lessons here are:

• (Obviously) make sure the custom attributes in your emails work so you don’t open with the legendary “Hi name.”
• Deep personalization isn’t a silver bullet. You first need to grab the reader’s attention with superficial qualities—pattern interrupt, a pleasant layout of the paragraphs, relative brevity, etc.—and then show relevance to keep the attention and generate interest.

Brevity and conciseness are two different things.

The tournament revealed that word count has a complex relationship with the success of cold emails.

Especially in later rounds, we found that longer emails prevailed. However, in Round 1, shorter emails performed slightly better.

The #1 and #2 emails were 141 and 236 words long, respectively. They wouldn’t pass a cold email quality check on LinkedIn, but thousands of people still voted for these longer messages.

There’s a structure component to email length, too. Using too many paragraphs correlates negatively with the vote count.

We didn’t find a significant difference in performance between emails with and without bullet points or ordered lists, so formatting had a minimal overall impact. 

Readability, quantified using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, also didn’t consistently correlate with votes. Flesch-Kincaid grade level measures word and sentence length to determine how difficult something is to read.

The average Flesch-Kincaid score for all entrants was around 9. The four top emails had respective Flesch-Kincaid scores of 10, 10, 8, and 2.

Follow-up Four was diverse.

The final lesson came from taking a closer look at the four emails that came out on top. 

Just like the four scenarios entailed different value propositions and personas, the four winners created significantly different emails.

Conner Eagleton won the Growth Manager scenario with a short email, using just 52 sharp words with a Flesch-Kincaid score of 2. He stood out with his clever phrasing that let him paint quite a full picture with just three lines of text. He even managed to squeeze in some social proof. This is an excellent example of a quick cold email that's focused on probing your recipient's needs.

On the other hand, Felipe Moraes used a long email that's more conversational.

Ryan Rogers, on the other hand, won the Pre-revenue Founder scenario using 236 words, meaning that his email was about 354% longer. His Flesch-Kincaid score was 10! Ryan showed how a friendly approach works well when there's a live event involved. His email is also on the longer end, which helped him provide extensive social proof and multiple arguments in favor of his solution.

Finally, Anna Sahakyan won with 141 words that paid an extensive compliment to the recipient. Her tone was warm, and it's clear that she didn't sacrifice her personal touch for the sake of brevity.

Cold email lessons from the competition

1. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to cold email. Your audience and the goal of your campaign must dictate how you structure your email. SEO outreach must be smooth and can be short because it's a mutually beneficial partnership, and you only need to show yourself as an easy-going, trustworthy partner. But if you're reaching out to COOs in larger companies, you'll need hard facts to convince them that you're worth their time.
2. Since you can never be sure a campaign will work until you try it, you need to look at the right metrics and repeatedly tweak your approach. This also means that you shouldn't burn through thousands of leads with a single send, and instead take a slow approach to give yourself time to pivot.
3. Superficial features (like paragraph count or using an image) can positively influence how someone feels about the message you send. However, decisions are always made based on deeper factors—relevance, arguments, and your offer.

The problem is that it's hard to scale relevance without multiplying the manual effort. And the solution is our upcoming AI Writing Assistant—join the waitlist now.

Our May update makes it easier to find the decision makers you want before using a Search Credit to reveal their email address.

TL;DR

Historically, Domain Search in Hunter provided 10 emails per Search Credit, but you had minimal visibility into the department or role associated with the contacts. This was great for bulk outreach, but as we've learned, it's not nearly as effective as targeted outreach.

This update helps you:

• View decision makers before spending credits
• Filter by department and title
• Import companies manually or via CSV
• Reveal only the email addresses you want

Cold outreach is highly effective when targeting your contacts and personalizing outreach. To better enable that, we've updated Domain Search to emphasize departments and decision makers.

This will enable you to spend credits more wisely and help you pinpoint your outreach to the right team and decision maker.

Log in to Hunter or create your free account to see how far your Search Credits now go.

How to use the decision maker update

Because this update impacts two key parts of Hunter, let’s walk through how we would find specific decision makers from two different departments at SaaS billing company, Paddle.

In both scenarios, we’ll:

1. Find leads at Paddle
2. Identify the relevant decision makers 
3. Reveal their email address

How to use this in Domain Search

We want to promote research to Paddle’s Marketing leadership.

1. Enter “Paddle” into the “Find email by company” section

2. Identify their Marketing decision makers

In the results, enter “Marketing” into the “Job Title” filter to focus on Marketers.

3. Reveal the email address

Search the results. Once you are happy with the leads, select the button next to each name and then “Save to leads.”

You’ll spend one Search Credit per lead saved.

How to use this in Discover

We want to offer consulting to Paddle’s HR leadership. 

1. Find leads at Paddle

Click “find email addresses’ and you’ll see a list of leads prioritized by decision makers. 

2. Identify their HR decision makers

Click the “Decision Makers” tab, and use the “Department” filter under “Filters.” 

3. Reveal the email address

Once you have confirmed the lead is correct, click “Reveal” to use one Search Credit and see the email address. 

New ways to import companies

There’s also a bonus update: you can now manually add companies in Company Lists via CSV upload or individually within a list.

Simply add a company name or domain to Hunter, and it is instantly enriched.

This is a small change that helps bridge activity outside of Hunter by finding decision makers at those companies using Hunter. That could be the difference between successful and average campaign results. 

How to use the new company import

There are two paths to importing companies into Hunter. Here’s how.

How to add a company manually 

We want to add two companies - Preply and ZeroTier - which is a likely task if you’re running ABM. 

While in Company Leads, click “New company” in the top right of the screen. Type the company name or domain to import:

If another company becomes a lead - e.g., Cradlewise - we can add them into the Preply and ZeroTier list by following the above process and choosing “Add to a specific list”:

How to add companies in bulk

If you have a long list of companies outside of Hunter, bulk import is now possible.  

Our scenario has an extra list of companies to add to Preply, ZeroTier, and Cradlewise. We’ll head back to our list.

Click “Import companies” at the top right of the screen and import our list of companies - a mix of company names, domains, and company and domain names.

Within seconds, we see the leads added into Hunter, auto-enriched, and ready to find our decision makers via Discover.

Try it yourself

This update is a step forward for smarter prospecting in Hunter. 

With more control over how you use your Search Credits to improve your outreach, your campaigns will be better targeted and more personal, which are two keys to success.

It’s all waiting for you.

For more information on this update, please visit our Help article here.

Share your thoughts on the new experience

Your comments helped shape this change. Please share your thoughts below.

AI can make cold outreach better. This isn’t a debate anymore. And if you’re using Hunter, then you’re already leveraging AI which we’ve implemented across the platform.

Through our research, we found that 67% of decision makers don’t care if you use AI to write your cold emails. 

At the same time, there’s a problem with how AI is used in cold email.

The emails that I tend to get nowadays:

• Are packed with AI buzzwords, 
• Use irrelevant AI-powered personalization.

AI has its place in your cold email toolset, but we shouldn’t use it for automation only. It can and should serve to make your messaging more relevant in a scalable way.

In this article, I’ll share specific use cases AI has in the context of cold email, and how to prompt it to give you what you need, from copywriting to researching your ICP and evaluating your sequence.

Write cold email copy with AI

We’ve all seen AI slop, but it doesn’t change the fact that AI is great at writing. It’s fast, the quality of its output is directly proportional to the effort you put into your prompts, and with sufficient prompting, its writing can truly impress.

There are two problems, though, when you try writing cold emails with AI:

1. AI doesn’t know what you know.

Whether you realize it or not, you possess a trove of tacit knowledge about your product/service and your prospects, and you tap into it whenever writing your messaging. 

AI doesn’t even know the trove exists. It “knows” a lot thanks to its training, but it doesn’t have an understanding of your business. And unless you provide it with that crucial context, its output will be mediocre.

2. AI isn’t good at doing two things at the same time. 

There’s a reason why many cold email tools offer a similar workflow: you add recipients, then create copy and personalize.

It’s because these steps naturally flow from each other. You first need to know who you’re contacting, and only then can you create relevant messaging.

When you ask AI to do everything at once, you disrupt that flow, and email relevance gets lost in translation.

You can address both problems by providing contextual information and by breaking down the copywriting process into several steps. Here’s how.

Document key context

Just like you, AI needs to understand who your recipients are, what they care about, and how you can help them. 

Document these in great detail:

• Who your ideal customer is
• What problems you’re addressing
• What the solution you’re offering is
• Your unique value proposition

Use a step-by-step prompting workflow 

We have tried dozens of approaches to prompting for cold-email copywriting, and we’ve tested many existing solutions. We’ve realized that bad results come from the fact that you don’t provide enough information, and that you’re trying to do everything at once. An ideal approach that we implemented in our AI writing assistant is to break down the process into two main steps:

1. You give AI your broad ICP information, and as much context about the problem/solution as possible, in order to create an email template that is not personalized but highly relevant for everyone in the audience.
2. You use AI to personalize every email, using the available data points about every recipient to reshape the template created at the previous step.

Here’s a prompt that resembles what Hunter’s AI Writing Assistant does:

Here's the output:

In the second step, personalize the template for the individual recipient with this prompt:

You are a world-class BDR, and you're doing your best work. Create a personalized cold email by contextualizing the template I provide to make it maximally relevant to the specific recipient.

Here’s the contextualized output:

When it comes to choosing a specific model to write your cold-email copy, I recommend choosing advanced models with reasoning modules like OpenAI’s o3. Especially if you just want a template to later personalize for every recipient, you want the best model available, because you won’t be spending tons of credits on this anyway.

Otherwise, you can give Hunter’s AI Writing Assistant a try. We built it to get your email sequence 80 % there, as long as you provide it with solid input.

Figure out what your prospects want

To be relevant, you need to know what your recipients care about and how your product or service helps. 

AI can help you:

• Challenge your assumptions about your ideal customer’s pains and gains.
• Narrow down your value props for subsegments of your market.

Here’s a prompt that I absolutely love: 

Here's the output:

When you segment your audience to create multiple smaller campaigns, you can do this for a list of personas to understand how your messaging can differ.

This uses AI's built-in knowledge about the given job titles, and the more details you can provide, the better the output will be. 

Taking it to the next level, you can supplement what AI already knows with your own data: blog articles, social posts, or even sales call transcripts.

Figure out the best person to contact

If you have multiple contacts at a single company, it’s often a good idea to contact several of them… But not at the same time. Start by selecting the single best person to contact.

Sometimes, it’s a no-brainer. However, there are also times when choosing the recipient can be tricky, either because job titles are ambiguous or simply because of scale.

Furthermore, you don’t always know the job titles, and sometimes you’re dealing with generic email addresses like office@example.com. 

AI can help. If it’s a single company that you’re struggling to figure out, use this prompt: 

Here's the output:

At scale—for example, if you used the Bulk Domain Search and you have a ton of companies and profiles to go through—you can paste the CSV into the AI tool you’re using and ask it to produce a table with a single recipient chosen per company. This can be imported directly into Hunter to easily contact these recipients with a campaign.

Create synthetic recipients and ask AI for their reactions to the emails you send.

This is my favorite use case. 

A major pain point with cold email is that you never know how your recipients will react to what you send them, especially when you start sending a new campaign.

AI can help you predict the various reactions your messaging may generate and adapt your sequence before you burn too many leads. 

Here’s a prompt:

And here's the output from GPT o3.

Yes, you could do this on your own. But let’s be honest: AI has near-limitless creativity, and it doesn’t have your biases, which means the personas it creates are bound to uncover something you didn’t consider about your campaign.

It’s astonishing how much this approach can teach you about your email draft. By giving different perspectives a name and backstory, AI helps you understand how to preemptively address concerns and improve your messaging.

Create follow-ups that add value

For most cold email campaigns, following up is a surefire way to get more replies.

But writing efficient follow-ups isn’t always easy. Most people aim to make the first email in the sequence packed with value, leaving seemingly nothing to add later down the line. That’s one of the reasons why many follow-ups are nothing more than a boring “Hi, have you seen my previous email?”

AI can draft entire email sequences to give you ideas for how to reengage your recipients with consecutive messages.

The trick to getting good output is to force it to write follow-ups that offer alternative CTAs and value props.

Here’s an example prompt:

This is my cold email: {paste your initial email}

I want to send this to {paste your recipient information here}

The output is really good, especially for a first step:

Figure out a goal for your campaign

Before you let AI loose on copywriting, decide exactly what the sequence should accomplish. Do you want to book demos, validate interest, or route prospects to a piece of content? Defining a single, measurable objective shapes your call-to-action so it’s clear and friction-free.

With some campaigns, there are multiple CTAs you can try, and figuring out the best one takes time. 

Using AI, you can create quick previews of the same email with varying CTAs, and anticipate how your recipients will react.

Here’s a prompt:

And here's the output with various CTAs to test.

Change the tone of voice

Tone of voice represents subtle, yet significant, changes in your messaging. Changing the tone of voice doesn’t change anything about your offer, but it impacts how you come across.

Even a perfect message can flop if it “sounds” wrong. AI makes it painless to create voice variants that are wildly different from your typical voice.

And here's the output:

Turn an email into a LinkedIn DM/voice message script

Cold outreach doesn’t live in the inbox alone. Repurposing your email for social or voice keeps messaging consistent while meeting prospects where they already spend time.

1. LinkedIn DM – tighter character limit, faster payoff.
2. Voice note – conversational, human, perfect for objections and micro-stories.

You’ll get two modality-ready assets in seconds—no need to reinvent the wheel.

Ask where to find data

Personalization lives or dies on data. While Hunter has tons of datapoints on companies and professionals, we won’t ever satisfy every single data need you might have. 

When you’re not sure what to enrich or where to source it, let AI brainstorm for you.

With AI's knowledge of the various data sourcing methods, you're bound to get inspired by the output.

From personal experience, I have to say that AI can be too optimistic about easily acquiring data points like G2 or Capterra reviews: in practice, they are really hard to scrape. Still, this can give you a starting point, and with some research, you can find methods of getting data from just about any location online.

Wrapping up

I used to be sceptical about AI when it first saw it impact my inbox, and I was wrong. The question isn’t if, but how we should use LLMs to make the job of connecting with our prospects easier.

When writing this article, my main goal was to inspire you to use AI for your outreach campaigns beyond simple personalization tricks. 

If you found any of this interesting, make sure you give Hunter’s AI Writing Assistant a try—we’re building it precisely to help you be more relevant.

Sometimes, my email campaigns underperform. It happens more often than I’d like to admit, and when it does, one of my first instincts is to review the copy. 

I go into the Campaigns editor and look at what I wrote when creating the sequence, certain that I must have messed up.

But I usually find that my copy is solid, and while I could always make tweaks, there’s nothing that stands out as really bad.

In fact, it’s usually the targeting, not the copy itself, that’s at fault. 

When my campaigns underperform, it’s usually because I aim to target a big segment with the same message. Because I’m lazy.

The fix? Segmentation:

• I take my list, 
• I review what I know about the recipients, 
• I find smaller groups of people within the list,
• I break it down into smaller segments,
• I create separate campaigns for these smaller segments, making slight tweaks to my copy.

You might think that this level of effort only pays off if your ticket size is high enough. This may have been true a couple of years ago, but I don’t think it’s true now. 

In 2025, mediocre outreach doesn’t get you mediocre results. It gets you no results.

Let me show you how I segment my audience and create more targeted messaging in a time-effective way.

Enrich your lead list

Segmentation is unlocked by data, and the more datapoints you have, the more likely you are to find ones that help you create smaller lists. If all you know about your recipients is their names and job titles, that doesn’t get you far.

Wherever you store your lead data, and however you acquire it, look for ways to get as many data variables as possible.

If you’re using Hunter, storing your prospect data in Leads makes it easy to enrich them with every data point we have with them and their company. Even if you upload nothing but an email address to Leads, we’ll automatically enrich it (as long as we have the information in our database).

But even if you prefer to use your CRM, you can use our Enrichment API endpoints to get a bigger picture of who your leads are. 

The Combined Enrichment endpoint offers over 100 datapoints on the prospect and the associated company. While we won’t ever have every detail on every lead you have, you’re bound to deepen your dataset by enriching it with Hunter.

Review your lead list and create subsegments

Having the data is one thing, but knowing how to act on it is another. To efficiently segment, you need the ability to quickly understand the smaller segments hiding in your large list.

Lead data is typically characterized by high cardinality, which means that there are many different values for every variable. 

For example, our linkbuilding campaigns target people that have control over a company website. Their job titles include:

• Editor
• Content Editor
• Marketing Manager
• Content Writer
• Head of Marketing

In practice, these people often share some responsibilities—including the ones that make them our target audience—but there are also significant differences.

It’s difficult to manually sort such data, which is why we added data visualizations to Leads.

These charts can quickly show you where your recipients are and, more importantly, help you view subsegments with a single click.

The key when doing this is to keep your broad messaging in mind and think “Is there anything more specific that I can say to this subsegment?”

After you find an interesting combination of characteristics, save the results to a new list.

Improve your cold email copy

The last part is easy. You take your initial template, and you scope it down based on job titles, geography, company size, or anything else you used in your analysis.

If you’re stuck, AI can be of great help here. For a quick start, try this prompt in your AI chat tool of choice:

“This is my cold email template: {insert initial email}. Initially, I targeted {broad persona}, but I want to contextualize the copy to specifically target {narrowed segment}. Based on what you know about what makes this narrower segment different from the initial segment, suggest changes to the copy and provide an explanation for why they would make the message more relevant to the narrower segment.”

Our upcoming AI writing feature makes iterating on this even easier. You can rapidly test how different framing of who you’re targeting, the pain you’re solving, and the details of your solution, affect the copy. 

It’s critical to note that AI can help by using its understanding of the market, but it doesn’t take your hands off the steering wheel. Your insight into the value your product or service provides is not replaced here.

If you want to give it a try, join the waitlist here.

What’s next?

Our State of Cold Email report shows that relevance is the key to getting anywhere with cold email. And even though relevance is achieved by writing excellent email copy, it’s not possible to be relevant to everyone at once. 

That’s why segmentation is so important. However, if we look at the current landscape of outreach tools—including Hunter—segmenting your lists isn’t easy. We’ve made it one of our main priorities to help Hunter’s users segment without having to spend hours on creating smaller lists and targeting them with campaigns.

As a first step, we completely revamped Leads, making it easier to analyze and filter your lead data. What’s coming next is the AI-assisted messaging to speed up generating email copy that’s partially automated but maximally relevant. 

But we’re not stopping there. Later this year, we’ll introduce tighter CRM integrations so you can use your own data in Hunter, and even more AI-assisted features. 

Relevance is the #1 most important factor in determining whether or not your cold email will generate a reply.

This is our main finding from surveying decision makers and analyzing 11 million cold emails.

71% of the surveyed decision makers said they typically don’t reply to cold emails because they don’t address relevant problems. We also found that personalizing your emails, which helps make them relevant, can greatly boost reply rates.

As if that weren’t enough, Hunter’s Messaging Madness tournament showed how deep insights about your recipient differentiate good emails from great emails.

If your outreach efforts haven’t been generating results or you’re simply looking for ways to send relevant cold emails at scale, read on. We’ll cover how to source your B2B lead data and how to leverage it to send truly relevant emails.

What makes a cold email relevant?

Relevance defines how well your message resonates with your target audience, or how your offer aligns with your recipients’ needs and interests.

It’s useful to think of the relevance of cold emails on a spectrum. 

On the one hand, you have emails that are blasted out to anyone and everyone, hoping that someone will answer like hoping for a needle in a haystack. These emails are pure spam because zero effort was put into finding an interested audience and demonstrating the relevance of the offer to that audience.

On the other hand, you have hyper-targeted cold emails that use accurate B2B data to segment recipients and personalize the content. These messages speak directly to the recipient’s actual needs and offer an appropriate solution. 

Somewhere in the middle is the average cold email, sent with good intentions but lacking in relevance.

How do we move such emails to the right side of the spectrum: how do we make them more relevant?

It’s with targeting and personalization. Proper targeting means you’re contacting people based on their needs and interests, and personalization helps demonstrate that you’ve done your research so you have a good reason for reaching out.

Relevance boosts reply rates

It’s clear that the more relevant your emails are, the more likely they are to generate interest. While there are other factors such as deliverability & efficient copywriting, you won’t get positive replies unless you convince your recipients that you can help them.

Our research demonstrates this in multiple ways. First, we’ve found that decision makers name relevance as the #1 factor determining whether or not they reply to a cold email, followed by personalization.

Secondly, we know that campaigns with a relatively small number of recipients generally outperform larger campaigns. Segmenting your audience makes writing relevant copy easier.

Finally, we know that campaigns that heavily use personalization (custom attributes to automatically inject recipient-specific details into individual emails and manually editing at least some of the emails in the campaign) perform much better than those without any personalization.

How to create a relevant email sequence from scratch

Step 1: Find accurate B2B lead data

Accurate B2B lead data is what you need to segment your audience into smaller, hyper-targeted lists, and create personalized emails.

Why do most cold emails lack the relevance needed to generate interest?

It’s typically because senders lack the data to segment and personalize. 

To avoid sending spam or, at best, generic cold emails, start by creating a targeted lead list full of relevant-enabling data.

At Hunter, we emphasize data accuracy and integrity over volume. In our internal benchmarks, the accuracy of Hunter’s B2B data comes out on top over other providers like Apollo or Clearbit.

That’s why I recommend that you start your list-building efforts with Discover.

Discover (Hunter’s B2B database) contains detailed, accurate records on millions of companies

In Discover, apply the attributes of your ICP to your search, and you’ll quickly surface thousands of relevant accounts. The more filters you apply, the more narrow your targeting will be, helping you increase relevance from the get-go.

Step 2: Segment your leads

Segmentation adds another layer of accuracy to your targeting, even if your search for leads was grounded in a thorough understanding of your ICP.

Hunter helps you segment your lead lists if you upload them to Leads. It does so by automatically analyzing your data to find patterns and show them in our data visualizations.

Look for patterns and think about the ways to split your list into smaller segments based on common characteristics that are expressions of similar needs.

We recommend that you look for segments of up to 100 recipients for maximum relevance, and a correspondingly high reply rate.

Step 3: Create a sequence template

With a segmented lead list, you can proceed to create email content.

You should think of a message that is general enough to apply to everyone on your list but maximally specific to an individual recipient.

You’ll later further personalize this template with custom attributes.

Step 4: Apply personalization to your template

Finally, personalization should be applied to leverage the recipient-specific details. Decision makers consider personalization to be important, and behavioral psychology tells us how it can make messaging more persuasive.

The two basic ways of personalizing your emails are:

Custom attributes: This method means using the lead attributes included in your lead list to automatically inject recipient-specific data into your cold email template.

Manual editing: When sending campaigns in Hunter, you can also edit any of the automatically created messages to add even more relevance for specific recipients.

Using both methods improves relevance and reply rates.

But with AI, there are now better ways to personalize emails at scale.

Can creating relevant emails be made easier?

We’re about to release an AI Writing Assistant to help you automate this exact process and leverage more recipient-specific insights than you could just using custom attributes.

Our AI Assistant is built to do the following:

• It looks at your lead list and summarizes it into an ICP (or you can manually describe it.)
• Given input about the problem you’re addressing and the specifics of your solution, it generates an email that bridges the gap between your ICP’s attributes and your offer. At this step, the message isn't contextualized for individual recipients yet.
• Finally, it personalizes the email for each lead, looking for the available data points that reinforce relevance for the individual recipient.

While no AI can replace your unique understanding of your business and your customers, you should give our AI Assistant a try to support your email copywriting. In a nutshell, it can help you replace the tedious effort of manually editing your messages for increased relevance, or at least get you 90% there.

If you're interested in trying this feature, make sure you join the waitlist here.

If this is your first time using Hunter, welcome!

In this quick guide, I’ll show you how you can accomplish what you came here for, and progress to running your entire email outreach process inside our platform.

What is Hunter?

Hunter is the simplest cold email outreach platform.

You can use Hunter with a Free account. It includes everything you need to run targeted cold email campaigns from start to finish.

Upgrading to a paid Hunter plan unlocks more credits for finding and verifying more B2B contact information, along with other features that make it easier to scale your outreach. But even as a free user, you get credits that renew monthly and that you can spend to find and verify email addresses.

How to use Hunter?

Hunter can help you run the entire process of sending cold emails:

1. Finding the right companies to target.
2. Finding ideal recipients and their email addresses
3. Verifying email addresses.
4. Storing and managing lead data.
5. Creating, sending, and scaling automated cold email campaigns.

Some of our new users are building their outreach campaigns from scratch, and others come to Hunter with a long list of emails to verify and contact.

Below, we'll go through Hunter's features one by one, starting with helping you figure out who to contact, and ending with how you can automatically send your emails through Hunter.

1. Find the right companies to target.

Discover

If you want to find companies to contact, use Discover—Hunter’s B2B database.

It lets you filter by HQ location, headcount, industry, keywords, and more. Some additional filters become available after you upgrade from the Free plan.

After you find the right target companies, you can save them to Leads, or proceed to find email addresses of their employees.

Finding prospect companies with Discover is free, but there are limits to data exports, and finding email addresses inside Discover costs credits.

For more, review our Help Center article about Hunter Discover and the video walkthrough.

Signals

We also offer a more intricate way of finding target companies with Signals. This lets you set up a continuous search for relevant companies based on their job postings or funding news and track a specific company for updates.

Here's a more detailed walkthrough of Signals.

2. Find ideal recipients and their email addresses.

We let you find emails in two different situations:

1. You may only know the name of a company you want to contact—for example, when you find it in Hunter Discover—and you now need to identify the right person to email and their email address.
2. You may already know the person's name—for example, when you find them on LinkedIn—but you now need their email address.

For #1, Domain Search is the perfect tool, and for #2, Email Finder is the better choice.

Domain Search

You give the Domain Search a website address or a business name, it will return multiple email addresses belonging

This lets you select the best person to target with your outreach. And if there are too many results to browse, you can always narrow them down using the filters.

If you have a list of target companies, you can import them all to do a Bulk Domain Search.

Domain Search is also used inside Discover when you click on a company and find email addresses within Discover.

Plus, if you're using our browser extensions, Domain Search is what's powering them.

If you want to learn more, review the Domain Search help articles and the video walkthrough.

Email Finder

The Email Finder requires both a company name AND a person's full name. It returns an email address that's already verified (showing you how safe a given address is to contact.)

Like our other tools, it can be used in Bulk mode to find email addresses for a list of people.

For more, check out the Help Center and the video walkthrough.

3. Verify an email address.

Hunter offers a robust and accurate Email Verifier to help determine if an email address exists, and how safe it is to contact.

Email addresses shown in the Email Finder are already verified, but you may still need to verify some addresses you find in the Domain Search or outside Hunter.

Here's a TL;DR of the possible verification results:

• Valid: fully safe to contact.
• Invalid: it doesn't exist and your message will bounce.
• Accept-all: there's no way to be sure if it exists or not, but we show a confidence score.

Just like the Email Finder and the Domain Search, you can use this feature in bulk mode.

For more, visit our Help Center and check out the video walkthrough.

4. Store and manage your leads.

Any company or person you find in Hunter can be saved as a Lead. And you can upload your leads from elsewhere into Leads.

The purpose of Leads is to help you organize, enrich, and use your lead data.

After you save people or companies in Leads, it's easy to segment them using our enriched data, and target your lists with cold email campaigns.

5. Create and send cold email campaigns.

If you want to automate sending cold email campaigns, use Hunter Campaigns.

With Campaigns, you connect your own email account to Hunter, take your leads, create relevant messaging and personalize with custom attributes, and Hunter takes care of the sending part—including scheduled follow-ups for the recipients that don't reply.

Furthermore, you can see detailed reports on campaign performance, manage all replies in a unified inbox, set up daily sending limits for better deliverability, and much more.

For more, visit the Campaigns Help Center and watch our video walkthrough.

Next steps

With this breakdown, I hope you'll quickly find your way around Hunter and start forming an ideal workflow.

If you need more guidance, here are some essential resources:

• Hunter's Cold Email Guide, which can be useful if you're just starting to send cold email campaigns.
• Our Help Center, which contains product-specific advice.
• Live demo with our Support team, where we go through the platform in more detail.

And if you have any questions, reach out to our team at contact@hunter.io.

Time flies when you're having fun. February went by in a flash, but we've released some substantial and exciting updates to the Hunter platform:

• We've added 2 million additional B2B profiles.
• Our Technology data is completely revamped, adding over 1,800 technologies for more granularity in Discover/Domain Search.
• For power users, we have a new API endpoint to start campaigns programmatically.

Let's dive in!

2 million more profiles

We're not done after exploding our coverage in December and January (we doubled our database in size, remember?).

In February, we added another 2 million B2B profiles sourced from the web.

This means you'll have more success looking for leads, whether you prefer to search by website (Domain Search) or by name (Email Finder.)

You'll also find more relevant companies to contact in Discover.

New Technology data

The Technology filter is my absolute favorite, next to the Keywords filter.

Searching for relevant accounts by technologies, you get close to your prospects' needs.

We completely revamped this data field to give you more granularity: we used to offer some 200 technologies to choose from, and now we offer over 1,800.

You can leverage this in two ways:

• You can search for prospects that need your solution based on a very specific technology they are using.

• You can also segment your existing lead lists using this data.

Both options help you be more relevant, whether in your email outreach or ad targeting.

If your cold emails are used to speaking broadly about CMS technology, you can now focus on specific CMSs (e.g., October or WordPress) to create highly specific messaging that ties their CMS to your product!

Campaigns API endpoint extended

Speaking of cold email campaigns, you can now start campaigns using our API.

While most users prefer using our platform to launch their campaigns, your needs might differ. The extended API endpoint lets you schedule the sending of your drafted campaigns.

We're planning to add more API features for Campaigns users really soon. If you have feedback, please let us know at contact@hunter.io.

What's next

We're about to release a massive piece of research on what makes cold emails successful. We surveyed hundreds of decision-makers and analyzed 11 million emails sent in 2024 to surface some exciting findings that can help you immediately improve your reply rates.

Product-wise, we're continuing our work to help you segment your audience more quickly. You can expect an even closer connection between Discover (our B2B database) and Leads and more enrichment options throughout the platform.

We're also working hard on a new feature to help you create awesome email copy using AI.

For more, join me at our monthly Q&A session on March 12.

What does a great cold email look like? Before you enter Messaging Madness 2025, here are my 5 tips on getting it right.

Messaging Madness is about writing a great email. The crowd decides the champion. Whoever wins moves on. Whoever loses goes home.

But this isn't just about writing any email—it’s about writing an email that stands out, gets attention, and starts conversations.

Follow these 5 tips to give your email the best shot at surviving all six rounds and being crowned the Messaging Madness Champion 2025.

1. Start with a strong subject line

Cold emails are the perfect assist to starting conversations, but if no one opens yours, the play is dead before it starts. A great subject line should spark curiosity, set expectations, and be relevant to the recipient.

Use the information provided in the scenarios to frame your subject lines.

What works

• Personalized subject lines: Mentioning a key detail about the recipient’s company or industry.
• Curiosity-driven lines: Creating intrigue without being clickbaity.
  Example: “A challenge your competitors are solving differently.”
• Be natural: Write a subject line that fits into the inbox.
  Example: “What are your thoughts on Lattice’s update?”
• Straightforward and value-driven: Clearly stating the purpose.
  Example: “Cut payroll costs by 20%—without changing software.”

What to avoid

• Generic openers: “Quick question” or “Can I help you?” lacks differentiation.
• Overused tactics: Excessive urgency (“act now!”) or vague statements.
• Spam triggers: Avoid mentioning money, offers, or other spam words.
• Misleading hooks: If the subject doesn’t match the content, you’ll lose credibility fast.

2. Meaningful personalization

How many emails do you receive that mention the obvious - like your job title - or haven’t populated the personalization field of the email (i.e., “Hi, [NAME]”), or simply use the wrong name at all? 

A relevant, engaging email is a slam-dunk for prospects. But if it feels like a copy-paste job, it’s an instant turnover. Great cold emails go beyond first-name personalization. 

How to personalize effectively

• Reference a specific detail: Mention their company’s recent announcement, a competitor’s strategy, or a challenge they likely face.
• Align with their role: Clarify why this email is relevant to their job and priorities.
• Use insights over placeholders: Instead of just inserting a name, write an opening line that shows you’ve done your homework.

Example:

“Hi [name], I saw your team is heading out to the mid-west market. Many COOs struggle to align OKRs across new teams—here’s how we help leaders like you stay ahead.”

3. Be irresistible

A great cold email is a lay-up for a great conversation. But, if your offer isn’t clear or compelling, no one’s making the shot.

How to make your offer relevant

• Tie it to a specific outcome: Example: “We help law firms cut CRM costs by 30% while improving efficiency.”
• Minimize friction: Make it easy to say yes with a low-commitment ask (e.g., a quick chat, free resource, or exclusive event invite).
• Make it timely: If your offer aligns with an industry shift or competitive change, highlight that urgency.

4. Respect your recipient’s time

A cold email has a shot clock. If your email has any element that feels like an unwarranted sales pitch, you’ll lose your recipient instantly.  

Adding trust signals to your email makes it more likely to get a response and shows you respect every second of the recipient’s time.

Ways to build credibility

• Reference customers or competitors: “Companies like [industry leader] use this approach to double response rates.”
• Use numbers where possible: Hard stats are more compelling than general claims.
• Mention relevant expertise: “After working with 50+ saas founders, I’ve seen this common mistake in outreach.”

Example:

“We recently helped a B2B eCommerce startup increase conversions by 43% using a strategy that Shopify doesn’t tell eCommerce companies about. Here’s how it works…”

5. Keep it readable and actionable

While our research doesn’t indicate that length has a negative or positive impact on success rates, what does matter is that you do all in your power to make copy readable.

How to format for readability

• Keep your paragraphs short (1-3 sentences max).
• Use bullet points when explaining benefits.
• Use Grammarly to check your spelling and grammar
• End it with a clear call-to-action (CTA).

Your CTA should be easy to act on. Instead of “Let me know if you’re interested,” you should try: “Would a quick 15-minute chat next Thursday work to go over this?”

Help us find the one in 64

It's time to vote and see which email comes out on top.

Head over to our bracket hub to see how the action is unfolding, review each email, and place your vote on the ultimate cold email.

How can you chart a course to victory in Messaging Madness 2025? Here's what we're looking for in a "great cold" email.

March is all about brackets, and in Messaging Madness, the power of a cold email decides every matchup. But what makes one email better than another? How do we decide what deserves to advance? 

Like any good tournament, I’m here to share our Messaging Madness bracketology. Read on to learn about your path to victory - from landing on the final 64 entrants in Messaging Madness to helping the public vote over three weeks to crown our champion.

How are we choosing the final 64?

Messaging Madness takes 64 emails - 16 in four different scenario groupings - and puts them against each other to determine the champion. But, you need to be in the competition to win it.

We’re scoring the initial entrants transparently, giving you the information and guidance to write the best emails. Here’s what you need to know.

The Scenarios

We’ve created four different scenarios for you to choose from. Because outreach is about relevancy, it was necessary to give you specific details to keep your email focused. 

You are given information in each scenario that could and should be used in your email. Everything is relevant, whether it’s the name of the target recipient, their current solutions, or what you’re offering. 

Internally, we’ll assign a Hunter team member to each scenario based on their experience:

• Matt Tharp: Our CEO and long-time founder
• Ziemek Bucko: Our Senior Content Manager who knows cold email inside out
• Antonio Gabric: Our Outreach Manager who runs SEO outreach every day
• James Milsom: Our Head of Marketing who has managed multiple outreach teams

What makes a great, good, or bad cold email?

With the team set, it’s time to look at how we’ll review entries. We measure 5 factors:

1. Clarity and transparency: Does the recipient instantly know why they’re being contacted and what the sender wants?
2. Personalization: Is the email written for the recipient beyond their name and company?
3. Relevancy: Does the email present something valuable to the recipient based on their role and business needs?
4. Trustworthiness: Does the email use references (customers, competitors, social proof) to build credibility?
5. Readability – Is the email easy to scan, well-formatted, and free of unnecessary fluff?

We’ll score these factors on a scale of 1-3, with 3 being the highest score per factor. As we go through each, it becomes evident what a great, good, and bad email is.

Why did we land on these factors?

These factors come from our collective time in the outreach world, but are also informed by our State of Email Outreach 2025 research.

For instance, personalization is a factor because we found that 73% of decision-makers feel it is crucial to a good email.

Likewise, 71% of decision-makers named lack of relevancy as the primary reason they don't reply to an email.

And when it comes to trustworthiness, 36% of decision-makers need to feel that you're clear in your intentions.

How will these factors be scored?

To help you see how those factors will come to life, we've created the below.

You'll be rated 1-3 on each factor, with a max score of 15 overall. The emails with the highest ratings in each scenario will form the 16 per group and the final 64.

Great emails (3s across the board)

• The message is crystal clear from the first sentence.
• Personalization is sharp—showing real research and relevance.
• The offer directly aligns with the recipient’s pain points and role.
• The sender builds credibility by referencing companies or results.
• The structure makes reading effortless, with natural spacing and tight writing.

Good emails (Mostly 2s)

• The intent is somewhat clear, but some sentences could be sharper.
• Some level of personalization exists, but it could go deeper.
• The offer is relevant but may not be framed as compellingly.
• There’s an attempt to build trust, but it’s generic (e.g., “We work with companies like yours” instead of specifics).
• Readability is decent, but there’s room for improvement in formatting or conciseness.

Bad emails (1s across the board)

• It’s unclear what the sender wants.
• Personalization is nonexistent or purely token-based.
• The offer is irrelevant to the recipient’s role or business.
• There’s no credibility or proof.
• The email is dense, hard to read, or visually unappealing.

How we’re encouraging the public to vote

Public voting for the final 64 is simple: We’ll take it to LinkedIn and ask, "Which email would you respond to?"

Every round, your email will be placed against a competitor’s in our Bracket Hub. 

Anyone can vote on your email. The only guidance to voting is this: your gut. 

No complex scoring is needed. This is a gut check on which email works better. Our instinct often guides whether we enjoy or reject a cold email.

How can you win your round?

You made it to the final 64 because you earned it. Now, it’s time to promote it.

Want to make sure your email advances? Campaign. Share. Get loud.

• Post your email on LinkedIn using #MessagingMadness25 and ask your network to vote.
• On March 18, the Bracket Hub will be live. Point your audience to it: hunter.io/messaging-madness-bracket 
• Tell people why you deserve to win
• The more engagement you have, the better your chances are.

Messaging Madness isn’t just about great writing—it’s about getting buy-in. Because in cold outreach, the best email doesn’t always win. The email that gets attention and drives action does.

Does your email have what it takes? It's time to prove it.

Ready to see who comes out on top?

It's time to vote and see which email comes out on top.

Head over to our bracket hub to see how the action is unfolding, review each email, and place your vote on the ultimate cold email.

Cold email is a viable way to grow nearly any business, from a multi-billion enterprise to a local photography studio.

But at the same time, some business leaders hesitate to use cold email for growth.

I have personal experience with companies that didn't think cold email could help them grow because their sales process was (supposedly) so different that it was impossible to make it work.

One other major reason for neglecting email outreach is that many cold emails are… bad. Take a look at your own inbox. Whether you don’t mind receiving cold emails or you hate them, you’ll find many irrelevant or even obnoxious emails.

This is a cold fact that the sales industry should acknowledge for our own good.

But just because others are sending bad emails doesn’t mean you should overlook email outreach entirely. There’s a better world out there where sending great email outreach at scale is possible, and it’s possible today.

Let’s discuss some of the myths surrounding cold emails, some legitimate reasons why they don’t always work, and how to overcome both.

Myth 1: Cold email is illegal

It’s simply not true that cold email is illegal. As long as you adhere to a set of best practices, cold email is legal under GDPR, CCPA, CAN-SPAM, and various other privacy regulations.

However, if you’re not careful, you can easily violate your recipients’ privacy or break privacy laws outright. 

Here’s a list of best practices to help you stay compliant:

• Clear sender identification: Always use a truthful and clear sender name and email address in the "From" field.
• Honest subject lines: Ensure your email subject lines accurately reflect the content of the email to avoid misleading recipients.
• Opt-out mechanism: Always include a clear and easy-to-find unsubscribe link or a way for recipients to opt out of further emails. You also need to promptly honor opt-out requests.
• Data transparency and security: Be transparent about how you obtained recipients' email addresses and the purpose of the email. And store recipients' personal data securely.
• Regular list cleaning: Keep your email list up to date by removing invalid or bounced email addresses and ensuring unsubscribed recipients are not emailed again.
• Respect recipient privacy: Always ensure that your emails are relevant to the recipient's business or professional needs and do not infringe upon their privacy.

For more, read our deep dive on how to send cold emails and stay compliant.

Myth 2: Cold email is spam

If you look in your spam folder, you’ll likely find some cold emails there that may have just as well landed in your primary inbox. 

However, there is a fine line between cold email and spam, which isn’t always obvious when automated spam filters are used. From a human perspective, the difference lies in consent and relevance. 

Cold emails are unsolicited but targeted. They’re sent with a legitimate business interest, wanting to reach people who may benefit from a product or service. They have a clear and harmless purpose and an option to opt out. 

Spam, on the other hand, involves unsolicited, irrelevant emails sent in bulk, often without an opt-out mechanism or personalized content. 

Here is how you ensure your cold emails are not spam (and don’t land in spam):

• Personalize and contextualize your emails. Based on what you know about your recipients, make a business case for why you decided to reach out.
• Check your message for spam-related words with an automated spam checker.
• Make your cold email look like an organic message you would send to someone you know. Use unstructured text; avoid images and unnecessary formatting.
• Keep the length of your message appropriate to the context.
• Keep your content professional.
• Use follow-up emails respectfully, and don’t follow up too often.
• Provide an unsubscribe link to make the recipients unsubscribe instead of reporting spam.

For more, review our article on how to avoid landing in spam.

Myth 3: Cold email is a sales tool

This myth can be easily debunked by looking at the Hunter userbase, for example, by reviewing our customer stories.

We have countless users who successfully leverage cold email for anything but sales:

• Link-building for SEO,
• Validating startup ideas,
• Recruitment,
• User research (e.g., surveys),
• Influencer marketing, and more.

In fact, these different use cases often see greater success than sales-related emails.

While email outreach, together with cold calling and LinkedIn, is a sales staple, it has its place in almost every business.

Any time you want to reach a group of people you haven’t interacted with before—whatever the purpose—cold email is your best bet.

Myth 4: Cold email is just for outbound leads

Cold email can be leveraged with your inbound leads, too. 

Needless to say, if someone contacts your business and you reply, that’s not a cold email.

But think about the lost opportunities or former customers who haven’t heard from you in years. These leads aren’t hot, yet contacting them with an email campaign can work wonders for your sales pipeline.

Myth 5: Cold email is a numbers game

The term “numbers game” is often thrown around when talking about cold emails. And the idea behind it is that you need to send lots of emails to get results.

But while cold email is a highly scalable channel, it’s not a numbers game—especially if you’re just starting out. 

My experience suggests that successful campaigns start small and only scale after gaining traction.

There are two reasons why:

• Sending volume: If you start sending hundreds of emails per day all of a sudden, email service providers (like Gmail or Outlook) may assume you’re a spammer. Your emails will start landing in spam and bouncing, and you might even get your email account suspended by your own ESP. This is why you need to start slow and scale after you generate lots of positive engagement, validating yourself as a legitimate sender.
• Segmentation: Cold emails are most successful if they can accurately talk to an urgent, unavoidable, unworkable, and underserved problem. This means that even if you’re able to solve various problems for various people, you should enrich your leads and segment them so that you can reach out with smaller campaigns that speak directly to the needs of those smaller segments.

Myth 6: The more personal, the better

Personalization is important because it can be used to demonstrate you understand your recipient’s needs.

“Can be,” because personalization is actually often used without a clear purpose. 

Using your recipient’s first name won’t impress anyone. At this point, most recipients understand how easy it is to automate basic personalization using cold email tools. 

More importantly, knowing someone’s name doesn’t prove you know their problems and priorities, so it doesn’t get you closer to getting a positive reply.

I believe that great personalization means adjusting each email you send to the specific needs of your recipient and their company.

With this mindset, you don’t need to know intimate details about your recipient to get their attention. What you need is relevant data about their business situation. This is where lead enrichment enables contextualized emails at scale.

Using a tool like Hunter to source and enrich your B2B leads, you can learn enough about your leads to divide them into manageable segments, and then reach out with very specific messaging. That will move the needle far more than looking up where your lead went to school and injecting that into your email.

To avoid errors when personalizing your cold emails, use a cold email tool to automate injecting recipient-specific data into your messages.

Myth 7: Nobody even opens cold emails

This is not true. If your cold emails are targeted and relevant and you’re not struggling with email deliverability, you can get very high open rates.

Poorly executed cold email campaigns can have abysmal open rates (think 5-10%, which means most of your emails will land in spam.)

But if your data is solid and you’re segmenting your audience, you can quite easily reach open rates similar to opt-in email marketing.

The chart above visualizes the open rates for one of our accounts over the last six months: the average is just above 41%. And with very narrow targeting and a deep understanding of your customer’s pains, you can definitely get an even higher open rate. 

This goes to show that well-executed cold email campaigns get solid open rates and put your solution in front of the right people. Just like with other growth channels, it’s the execution that determines your success.

Myth 8: Short emails are better than long emails

There's probably a fall-off point after 300+ words, and I'm sure it's very tricky to compose a legitimate cold email with 10 words or less.

Other than that, I've seen emails of all lengths perform very well and very poorly.

That's because your recipients don't count words when deciding to reply.

What they care about is how quickly you can demonstrate that you have a relevant offer, not how many words your email contains in total.

So, instead of looking at email word count, I suggest using a metric we might call "Time To Value." Optimize for how long it takes to show that you understand your recipient's needs and that you have an appropriate solution.

Myth 9: Cold email takes too long to see results

Cold email is a very scalable channel. When you realize its potential, it’s natural to want to reach out to your entire Total Addressable Market.

However, just like no truly successful company can serve its entire market within a year, you shouldn’t try to reach your entire TAM within a year.

Cold email takes time. You should plan for it to be an ongoing process, not a one-off activity.

Think you can write the perfect cold email? Prove it!
Compete in Hunter's Messaging Madness this March and April.

Are you tired of opening lines that say, "I hope this finds you well," are poorly written, take forever to read, and never get to the point?

Messaging Madness is your chance to re-write what's in your inbox and win $1,000.

March is the month of college sports competition, and you can get in on the action with our ultimate cold email tournament. Open to all, we’ll pit 64 emails against one another over three weeks, and the public decides who advances.

Do you have what it takes to be the last one standing? With sign-ups closing on 13 March, here’s how you can enter before the buzzer rings!

What is Messaging Madness?

Messaging Madness is a cold email competition where effective messaging wins.

Why? Because it's time for outreach to focus on the quality of the message.

Relevant messaging may not be the only element for sending successful outreach, but it's definitely the most important element.

Messaging Madness is six rounds to determine the best cold email of 2025, with the last four winning a year’s Starter plan subscription with Hunter. But, the real bragging rights go to the champion, who pockets a cool $1,000 too. 

Getting into the final 64

Choose from one of four scenarios, write an email, and submit it. Your entry will be judged by an internal Hunter panel based on criteria rating effectiveness.

If you make it into the final 64, you’ll compete in public polls against 16 other emails from your scenario grouping until the Follow-Up 4.

Will you campaign your network to gain votes or ask friends, family, and colleagues to get involved? It’s all fair game and ready for you to promote on LinkedIn with #MessagingMadness25. Show off your copy and build your cheer squad.

The Follow-Up 4

If you come out of your scenario group with the best email, you’ll be one of four to win 12 months of Hunter's Starter plan.

But that doesn't mean your challenge is over. To take the championship, you’ll need to write two more emails based on your original entry:

1. A follow-up to your first message
2. A final message to drive action

Once you have submitted your two final emails, the first email will be used in the Follow-Up Four. If you advance to the championship game, you’ll both be judged on the final message's ability to drive action.

The last email standing is the Messaging Madness Champion 2025.

Why are we doing this?

Email is half art, half science. Some land—but most are effectively spam, and I know you have plenty in your inbox.

Messaging Madness is about you showing how a cold email should read, helping you to:

• Sharpen (and focus) your writing
• Learn what works in cold outreach by getting the public to vote on your words
• Celebrate great messaging and highlight what makes an email stand out

And, of course, it’s about showing you’re the best email copywriter of 2025!

The scenarios

Entrants will choose one of these scenarios to write an intro outreach email.

Scenario 1: Growth Manager

• You are: A Growth Manager in an HR software start-up 
• Target companies: Construction businesses of 11-50 heads, Benelux, using BambooHR, Employment Hero, or Lattice
• Target recipient: Director of Finance
• Your offer: A 15-minute conversation to show the persona how they can cut costs and find a better system for construction companies than BambooHR, Employment Hero, or Lattice.

Scenario 2: Pre-Revenue Founder

• You are: A Pre-Revenue Founder of a law firm CRM 
• Target companies: UK law firms with 11-100 lawyers using Salesforce Legal
• Target recipient: Managing Partner
• Your offer: To meet up with the Managing Partner at the annual UK law firm event LawCon to buy them coffee and discuss how your time at Salesforce inspired a better way to build and use a legal CRM.

Scenario 3: Business Strategy Consultant

• You are: A Business Strategy Consultant.
• Target companies: B2B business of 201-500 heads, SaaS vendors, Mid-West, USA
• Target recipient: Chief Operating Officer
• Your offer: A free OKRs certification course / OKRs health check for every Continuous Improvement Lead within the organization.

Scenario 4: SEO Manager

• You are: An SEO manager for a B2B eCommerce site.
• Target companies: Start-up news sites in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland
• Target recipient: Marketing Director
• Your offer: Exchange of links to drive traffic to a new landing page comparing Shopify and your business, which focuses on Shopify’s promises to B2B eCommerce companies, your research across competitors on abandon cart monetization, and how you’re (i.e., removing costs of using Shopify Plus and 3rd party integrations.)

The rules

You have complete creative control—everything is up to you:

• Subject lines
• Email length
• Links & attachments
• Emojis & images
• Signatures and unsubscription copy/links

What happens after you enter?

Once entries close on March 13, the bracket will be announced on March 18. The first round kicks off March 19. 

Public polls will decide each round. You're absolutely encouraged to promote yourself to secure votes using #MessagingMadness25 on LinkedIn!

Circle these dates on your calendar:

📅 Entry Deadline: March 13

1️⃣ First Round: March 19-21

2️⃣ Second Round: March 22-24

🏀 Super 16: March 25-28

📖 Open-Rate 8: March 29-April 1

🔥 Follow-Up 4: April 2-6

🏆 Championship: April 7-8

Watch the tournament unfold

It's time to vote and see which email comes out on top.

Head over to our bracket hub to see how the action is unfolding, review each email, and place your vote on the ultimate cold email.

In 2024, deliverability was a major problem for email outreach. Avoiding spam folders or bounces took more than verifying your mailing lists. New restrictions from email providers added another layer of technical complexity. But staying relevant continued to be the main success factor.

Relevant, engaging email outreach relies on audience segmentation, and segmentation is only possible with accurate data.

While many enrichment solutions rely on LinkedIn’s B2B database, Hunter is different. Hunter sources fresh, accurate, and GDPR-compliant data from the open web. This web-first approach to data uncovers leads you won’t find on LinkedIn, leading to deeper, more complete data to fuel your outreach and workflows.

In this article, I'll discuss your options for B2B lead enrichment, touching on LinkedIn's limitations as a data source but ultimately showing why web-based data—like Hunter's—will improve your lead segmentation.

Benefits of using web data as a primary source

Not everyone is on LinkedIn, but most databases depend on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a behemoth, boasting over 1 billion users in over 200 countries,which would make it the largest B2B database in the world. But there are still many B2B profiles it’s missing.

LinkedIn’s dataset is biased toward English speakers in the Western hemisphere working in digitalized industries where not having an online presence means not being in business. 

So, if North America is your main target market and you use LinkedIn or a LinkedIn-powered B2B database, you may never notice, but you're missing tens of thousands of companies and professionals. Having an online presence is less common in many industries–heavy industry, construction, or logistics, to name a few. 

In fact, I have friends running thriving businesses, even in tech-related fields, who think LinkedIn is just for recruiters and job seekers.

That’s why relying on LinkedIn for your B2B data can be limiting for your growth, both:

• Outside the Western Hemisphere, and
• In more traditional industries.

Little to no LinkedIn presence doesn’t mean professionals working in those industries don’t have email addresses to find and use for email outreach.

That’s why the open web is crucial for lead enrichment.

Those hard-to-find markets can be tapped into at scale because they:

• Have websites, 
• Own Google My Business profiles, and 
• Get listed in local or industry directories.

This is why Hunter is a great tool for lead enrichment.

How Hunter goes beyond LinkedIn

Hunter’s primary data source is the web, meaning we find information about companies and people absent from LinkedIn. 

Here’s an example: Michael Kasang, Director of Administration at education company, Catalyst. 

Michael is not on LinkedIn–you wouldn’t find any information about him by searching there. However, Hunter found an associated email address and job title via Catalyst's website.

And the best part is you can find that out in multiple ways:

1. Domain Search

If you use the Domain Search, you can find Michael and 44 colleagues by looking up catalystschools.org. This also provides additional information about the company.

2. Email Finder

Using the Email Finder with Michael’s name and company name, you’d find his email address and job title.

3. Discover

Using Discover, you can find Catalyst and similar companies, and then find the associated email addresses.

4. Hunter’s Enrichment API

Using Hunter’s Enrichment API, you can get the Director’s information or all available data on Catalyst within seconds. 

This is just one example from one of the millions of websites that we crawl to provide data for your email outreach. 

The open web is a unique dataset

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a table stake in a salesperson’s toolset. Even if they use other B2B databases, they likely use LinkedIn as their primary data source.

This leads to an oversaturation problem for the people that can be found in those databases. 

For example, I can estimate when my email address became available in Apollo.io (which, as far as I can tell, is using LinkedIn heavily to find new people leads) - when the sales emails in my inbox rocketed overnight.

This made me become desensitized to sales emails–there’s only so much attention I can pay to my inbox daily. 

On the flipside, people who can’t be found in the most popular databases receive less email outreach, so your odds of grabbing their attention are higher. 

That’s why Hunter users love our data. Building a B2B database sourced from the open web requires more attention to accuracy, so a portion of the companies and profiles you can find with Hunter are relatively untapped by your competitors because they aren't represented on LinkedIn or other databases.

LinkedIn data can be inaccurate

LinkedIn data is unique in that it’s self-reported. Every piece of information on company and people profiles on LinkedIn was declared by their owners. It’s logical to see it as the most accurate data source when compared to other sources.

But, much like Wikipedia,  the user-generated LinkedIn database is prone to more inaccurate information.

Here is an example.

There are multiple LinkedIn users reportedly working at Hunter that… aren’t actually working at Hunter. And there is no feasible way for us to disclaim this inaccurate information. 

Worse, LinkedIn-reported job titles can be incomplete, outdated, or just inaccurate. For example, Marianne Buckley is an attorney and that’s the title on the associated LinkedIn profile. 

However, thanks to Hunter’s web crawling paired with natural language processing, we can enrich her job title as “patent attorney” based on just one web page. 

Details like this one can be the difference between your emails standing - or fading - out. 

It is worth noting that websites can house outdated or incomplete information compared to LinkedIn, even though that’s less frequent in my experience. A website is the digital home of the company. Great efforts are made to keep it accurate–this is especially true for larger companies. 

Company websites provide more context about their product and/or services

Companies run LinkedIn profiles to promote themselves. They want to expose their products or services to potential leads, look trustworthy to prospects, and stay top of mind for existing or former clients.

They often present themselves in a way disconnected from who they are and what they do. Consider recruitment companies claiming to be in the software industry because they primarily work with software companies. It makes sense, but they’re still recruitment companies. 

On the other hand, it’s difficult to get confused when sifting through a company website. It’s in the company's best interest to clearly state what they do because it helps potential customers understand the benefits.

Why Hunter’s data is more accurate

The open web is why Hunter’s data can be more accurate when it comes to company-related keywords and industries. It also helps you access additional metadata from their websites, like technologies used.

For companies via our Enrichment API, we show descriptions generated by AI based on company websites. I love using those descriptions to understand what a given company does. 

The same is true for Discover, which can be a better choice than the API if you just want to browse a list of companies and look for matches manually.

Wrapping up

Not all B2B databases are accurate. Simply relying on LinkedIn for your data - directly or indirectly - is not an automatic recipe for success.

By using Hunter for lead enrichment, you access a wider range of potential contacts—many of whom aren't on other B2B databases or are already overwhelmed with outreach.

Hunter’s web-based data helps you find untapped leads with accurate, up-to-date info that goes beyond what LinkedIn offers. This makes it easier to segment your audience, personalize your outreach, and boost engagement.

A lead list contains information about the people and companies you want to reach. How you create it will impact the outcome of your outreach process. The table below breaks down the possible methods of finding leads for your list.

For more on these options, read on!

Step one in email outreach is creating a lead list by finding the right people to contact. How you create that list matters. Building your lead list with high-quality, targeted lead data is the difference between sending spam and helping prospects.

From using B2B databases to content marketing, there are many ways to source B2B leads. Your approach should be informed by data depth & quality, ease of use, cost, and more factors.

Here are your options for compiling a great lead list for outreach in 2025.

What is a lead list?

A lead list is a living dataset of people or companies you want to reach. Sourced using inbound and/or outbound tactics, it contains names and contact details.

But, a truly useful list has more:

• Firmographics: Company headcount, industry, description of products and services, HQ location, etc.
• Demographics: Job title, location, etc.
• Technographics: Software stack, technologies used on a website, etc.
• Intent data: Data indicating buying needs, e.g., job postings, funding news, job changes, etc.

Your lead list is the starting point before reaching out via email, phone, or LinkedIn.

Best practices for B2B lead list building

Before we look at methods to build a list, it’s best to keep these things in mind:

1. Save all relevant data

For outreach to land, you need more than a name and an email address. Enriching your B2B lead data makes it easier to reach out with relevancy.

If you find target companies with Discover (Hunter’s B2B database), leverage our firmographic data: headcount, HQ location, industry, keywords, and more. 

If you’re sourcing leads elsewhere, I still recommend that you load them into Hunter to use our enrichment capabilities.

2. Verify the contact information

Even inbound lead email addresses can be wrong - at the point of entry or over time. That’s why you should verify lead information before reaching out. 

If you’re using Hunter to source your B2B leads, email addresses found using the Email Finder are auto-verified. For all other email addresses, make sure you use your verification credits to filter out all invalid recipients.

3. Respect privacy regulations

Don’t hold anyone’s personal information without legitimate business interest. Safeguard all personal information and use it in compliance with data protection laws (e.g., GDPR, CCPA). 

For more, read our guide to sending privacy-minded cold emails.

How to build a lead list for B2B outreach

Let’s take a look at the options you have for building your leads list:

• B2B databases
• Inbound leads
• LinkedIn
• Online directories
• Paid-for pre-built lists

Feed your ideal customer profile to a B2B database 

If you’re looking for B2B leads based on your ideal customer profile (ICP), a B2B database is perfect. These help you find relevant leads at scale. They contain millions of companies you can filter using your ICP's attributes (location, headcount, industry, etc.)

A B2B database is the simplest way to create your lead list, as long as you have a thorough understanding of your ICP. Our web-sourced B2B database, Discover, makes it even easier, is available to every user, and helps you find 1000s of ICP email addresses in seconds.

From there, you can use the data in multiple ways:

• Eyeball each company to ensure they’re a good fit for your outreach.
• Quickly find email addresses for the ICPs, and save them as Leads.
• Save companies you find as Company Leads, segment further, and send cold emails.
• Export the results, e.g., for further enrichment using your data.

Data in Discover is fresh, accurate (we’re among the most accurate data providers, according to a benchmark by Clay), and data-protection friendly. It can be used to map the buying committee of your ICP—from just CEOs to larger companies where you need other decision-makers through to junior employees.

Hunter Discover can also be used to find similar companies based on examples. It's great when you’re not 100% on your ICP, but have a list of your best customers.

While I mostly rely on filtering to find prospects, I really like supplementing list building with lookalikes. It helps me find leads I hadn’t necessarily considered.

Tip: Save every relevant company you find in Discover as a Company Lead in Hunter. It doesn’t cost anything and saves you time.

Capture inbound leads

Inbound lead generation is about creating content that your ideal customers care about enough to share their email. 

It takes time and effort to create a website and content. A misguided inbound lead generation strategy can flood your lead list with low-quality prospects.

But, providing you qualify inbound leads with enriched data, you’re more likely to convert inbound vs. outbound leads. That’s because they actively sought out your business and entrusted you with their contact information. 

Needless to say, getting back to your inbound leads doesn’t qualify as an outbound activity. But there are some outbound tactics you can use with inbound leads, too.

Some of the lowest-hanging fruit is found in outreach for lost opportunities. While it can be time-consuming, there are effective ways to get this done. 

The same goes for former customers. Use cold email to re-engage them!

Finally, there are marketing- and sales-qualified leads (MQLs and SQLs) that you’ve generated via marketing. You can create relevant outreach sequences by combining a CRM showing content engagement with data enrichment via Hunter.

Tip: Regularly review and verify your database —email addresses get stale and invalid over time. If you create a large outreach campaign and add multiple invalid recipients, the high bounce rate will inevitably break your campaign.

Leverage LinkedIn activity

LinkedIn is a great source of B2B leads, and you can use the platform to build your lead list based on the LinkedIn activity of your potential prospects in several ways.

With Sales Navigator, you can find people who recently viewed your profile.

You can also source leads based on their interactions with you by joining webinars, posting regularly, and creating polls. 

You can even interact with a given post, using a LinkedIn scraper like Phantombuster.

For example, you can scrape and engage people who comment or like your post, a post that mentions you or a competitor, or even your competitor’s post.

Tip: As software makes it easier—and more popular— to scrape LinkedIn activity for sales purposes, using this approach is becoming increasingly unpopular with LinkedIn users who may see it as a violation of privacy. To mitigate, enrich your leads, and make sure your email is truly relevant to them.

Use online directories

Depending on your ICP, online directories may be a good source for your lead list.

Some examples include:

• Clutch.co
• G2.com
• Capterra.com
• Google My Business (more difficult to leverage at scale)

These websites list companies or products (Clutch.co is great for finding service agencies, and G2/Capterra are directories listing software companies), and they can be filtered for specific verticals—both manually and using their APIs to automate lead generation.

From there, you still need a tool like Hunter to enrich their email addresses and additional data points.

Tip: Directories typically let users review the listed companies -a goldmine for email outreach. This user feedback can contextualize your messages, using strengths or weaknesses from reviews and using them for unique positioning.

Get a pre-built lead list

While the norm is to avoid pre-built lead lists, the truth is the devil is in the detail.

The creation of a pre-built list isn’t necessarily too dissimilar to a B2B database. But, there are some factors to keep in mind:

• Be sure of the owner of the list and their reputation 
• Understand how the data was sourced
• Be wary of the need to refresh the list 

If you trust the source, understand how the list was compiled, and are confident that you aren’t breaking any laws, acquiring a pre-built lead list may work.

I recommend taking full control of your outreach process. That means building your own lead lists using a platform like Hunter and its Discover tool. It’s easy to use, with the quality, data depth, and targeting that are vital factors to success.

How to prioritize your choice

Given all these tactics, what is the best way to build your lead list?

The short answer is: use a B2B database. It’s the best starting point because it will find thousands of leads in seconds, and you can continuously refine your search to ensure reaching out to them will make sense.

In the long term, you should also supplement your lead list with inbound leads generated from content marketing & social media.

Directories like G2 can also give you a specific set of leads in specific scenarios.

For more, here’s a deeper dive into the various tools for finding leads.

Welcome to 2025! Ziemek from Hunter here, kicking this year off with a host of exciting changes and news:

• A colossal update to our database,
• Powerful new segmentation features,
• New API endpoints for enrichment, and
• A brief look back at what we achieved together in 2024.

Let’s dive in!

Our B2B database doubled in size

I am only slightly exaggerating here—compared to early December 2024, you can now find 90% more B2B profiles in Hunter. 

We now have 20 million profiles to find via Discover, the Email Finder, or the Domain Search.

To put this in context:

• facebook.com: We've added 51 C-level profiles. 
• microsoft.com: We've added 101 profiles ranging from C-level to department managers.
• reuters.com: We've added 19 C-level profiles.

Worry not, this update isn’t just about big companies like Facebook. You’ll now find more leads whether you’re targeting enterprises or smaller businesses.

Give it a try—think of companies you couldn’t contact before due to a lack of verified email addresses, or jump into Discover to find hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of people profiles to choose from.

New segmentation features

With it being harder than ever to connect with leads, we’re introducing features to increase your chances of standing out.

Enriching and sorting your lead lists into manageable segments is the shortcut to more replies—nothing makes outreach more powerful than creating smaller lists that let you get hyper-specific in your messaging!

Visit or create a Leads list in Hunter, and at the top of the page, you’ll now see three panels that do the analytical heavy lifting for you.

Choose from filters like “Country”, “Industry”, and “Position” to quickly spot pockets of opportunity to tailor your lists in ways you’ve yet to see!

Hunter’s Enrichment API

Segmentation is impossible if you only know your leads’ names and email addresses.

Hunter’s B2B dataset offers rich insight into your leads and their companies, and we’ve added one more option to expose our lead data for your outreach purposes.

You can now use Hunter’s Enrichment API in three modes:

• Contact enrichment: You provide an email address, and we give you ~100 data points we have on the associated profile.
• Company enrichment: You provide a website address, and we give you ~100 data points we have on the associated company.
• Combined enrichment: You provide an email address, and we give you everything we know about the associated profile and company.

Every API call costs 1 Search credit, meaning that if you already have a Hunter account, you don’t need to do anything to set it up.

If you’ve used Clearbit for enrichment before and found yourself without a viable enrichment solution after HubSpot acquired Clearbit, you need to try our API.

We offer a like-for-like dataset, and our internal benchmark showed that Hunter can find more decision-maker profiles than Clearbit, so it's a superior alternative to the Clearbit Enrichment API.

User survey results

Back in December, we ran a survey to learn from our users how they approach email outreach and how it worked for them in 2024. 

We’ve learned that:

• 85% of you work in SMBs,
• 52% of you are daily users of Hunter, and
• 58% managed to achieve their outreach goals in 2024.

We’ve also learned about your needs, including:

• The need to consolidate your tech stack to cut costs, and
• The struggle to find email copy that leads to more conversions.

Fortunately, addressing both points is secured on our 2025 roadmap. 

Soon, the platform will offer even more features to make outreach easier inside Hunter—including a solution for writing better emails at scale.

A huge thank you to everyone who participated!

What’s next

In 2025, Hunter will grow to meet even more of your needs. If you want to have your say and be the first to know about upcoming releases, make sure you attend our monthly Q&A sessions for paying users.

And if you’re new to Hunter or on a free plan, sign up for a live demo with our Customer Success team.

Last but not least, here's a message from Matt Tharp, Hunter's CEO. Matt briefly covers what happened last year, but more importantly, provides a sneak peek into 2025.

REsimpli is the only all-in-one real estate investor CRM software with a goal of helping real estate investors close more deals.

With a focus on technical innovation and deep real estate expertise, REsimpli’s Founder and CEO, Sharad Mehta is regularly featured on industry podcasts, which helps spread awareness about the company.

The outreach process at REsimpli

Given the impact podcast appearances have on the bottom line, REsimpli’s marketing team is actively looking for opportunities to get featured. The goal for their email outreach is to book appearances on reputable and relevant podcasts.

Once relevant opportunities are identified, the team needs to find the decision makers and their contact information and reach out with confidence.

To generate a steady stream of opportunities for their CEO, the REsimpli team needed a tool that’s reliable and streamlined. In their search for an appropriate solution, quality of data and ease of use were paramount factors.

That’s why they chose Hunter.

How Hunter helps REsimpli

“Thanks to Hunter, we’ve been able to secure 2-3 new podcast appearances every week, significantly increasing our exposure in the real estate investing & SaaS community,” says Ehsan, REsimpli’s Head of Marketing.

Hunter helps Ehsan run the entire outreach process from start to finish, using:

• The Domain Search to turn podcast names into email addresses,
• The Email Verifier to avoid email bounces, 
• Leads to store the data of all prospects, and
• Campaigns to reach out in an automated way.

“Using Hunter, we search for the domains of these podcasts to find the contact details of decision-makers. We then upload the contact information into Hunter’s campaign section, and set up drip emails to invite podcast hosts to feature Sharad.”

Why REsimpli chose Hunter

The REsimpli team is continuously impressed with how accurate and easy to use Hunter is compared to alternative solutions. 

“The key benefits that drew us in were the simple, intuitive interface and the ability to quickly find accurate contact emails. It also allowed us to streamline our outreach process with minimal technical effort or email marketing experience. I’ve used several other tools for email finding and campaign management, but none match Hunter’s combination of simplicity, accuracy, and ease of use. The integration process with my email was also incredibly smooth.”

Results

According to Ehsan, Hunter has been instrumental in making REsimpli the #1 software in the vertical by helping boosting and sustaining its visibility. Turning to Hunter has helped cut costs, too.

“My experience with Hunter has been nothing short of excellent. In the past, we paid $300 per podcast booking through an agency for every feature with our CEO. Now, thanks to Hunter, we handle them in-house, saving us thousands of dollars each month.”