What is the best email finder in 2021? [Research]
In order to answer this question, we decided to conduct independent research. We tested the six most popular tools...
The number of tools that search for leads' email addresses is growing from year to year.
Today, there are hundreds of them. So, there is a reasonable question:
Which is the best tool to choose in 2021?
Of course, you should choose the one that finds the most valid emails, but that's easier said than done.
What tool is it? In order to answer this question, we decided to conduct independent research. As part of the research, we tested the six most popular tools:
To test the effectiveness of each tool, we took a list of 2,000 contacts of company owners (the list contained just company domains and full names). Then we divided the list into 4 segments (500 in each segment):
USA (company size of up to 200 people)
USA (company size from 201 to 5000 people)
Europe (company size of up to 200 people)
Europe (company size from 201 to 5000 people)
In the next step, we started searching for emails by FirstName+LastName+CompanyURL combination using each of the above-listed tools (for each segment separately).
The next important step we did was the validation of all the emails that we got. We chose Clearout as a tool that has the highest quality validation. We decided not to test which verifier works better on our own; we simply used the results of a recent experiment by our friends from Lemlist. You can read more about how this research was doneĀ here.
The results of our research:
The best email search tool isĀ Snov.ioĀ (it found an average of 69% of valid emails ā 1381 emails out of 2000).
FindThatLead and Aeroleads shared second place with a 13% difference in the number of valid emails found (both tools have the same result: 56%, or 1117 emails out of 2000).
Hunter.ioĀ (44%, or 882 out of 2000), Anyleads (35%, or 708 out of 2000), and Dropcontact (34%, or 682 out of 2000) found less than 50% of the valid emails.
More details about the email address validation results (Valid, Catch-All, Invalid, and Unknown) for each segment are presented in the table below:
You can also see a comparative table of the prices of the tools. We focused just on the plans that include the optimal number of credits for effective work:
As for the differences between segments, we found a correlation between email search results and geolocation.
As you can see below, we got more valid emails for contacts from the USA than from Europe, although the difference is not that big (just 4%).
Even more obvious was the difference between the segments based on the company size. The fewer employees there are in a company, the easier it is to find their email addresses. We found 16% less valid emails of leads in companies with more than 200 employees.
*All the data in the tables show the percentage of valid emails that were found (the average results of all the tools).
By the way, once again I would like to draw your attention to the fact that you should only use email addresses that have a valid status for your cold outreach campaigns. Why you can't use emails with a catch-all status, I have explained in detailĀ here.
Another important point that I want to highlight is the necessity of email verification.
Although most email search tools that we tested have a built-in validation function, I recommend verifying emails additionally using third-party tools. They can help you to get up to 4% more via emails.
For example, if you compare the number of valid emails detected withĀ Clearout.ioĀ andĀ Snov.io, you can see that Clearout finds a few percent more valid emails for each segment. As a result, if you do not do this additional verification step, you can lose up to 4% of valid emails, which in our sample is 80 potential lids.
Findings (summary):