If you're part of a sales or growth team doing outreach, finding email addresses is only the first step in turning prospects into customers. With a tool like Hunter.io, you can easily discover contacts based on your ideal customer profile. But after finding those email addresses, you still need to verify them, move the data into your other tools, and kick off outreach immediately to maximize your chances of success.
By connecting Hunter with Zapier using Zaps (our word for automated workflows), you can build end-to-end systems that handle those next steps securely and automatically, keeping your prospecting efforts fast, organized, and efficient. Here are five ways to get started.
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Table of contents
Auto-add leads to your email campaign
Once you've gathered the email addresses of potential prospects, your next step is to launch your outreach cadence right away. You could manually copy those addresses from Hunter into your email marketing tool, add them to the right segments, and then start sending emails—but that slows you down and leaves room for error. A better approach is to set up an automated system that triggers outreach for you the moment a new lead is identified in Hunter.
For instance, the workflows below can connect Hunter to your email marketing platform and automatically subscribe new leads to a Mailchimp, MailerLite, or ActiveCampaign list, so they start receiving your campaigns immediately. The automation can also update existing contacts with new details to keep your prospecting database clean and accurate. That way, your outreach remains timely and consistent, giving you the brain space to focus on engaging leads (instead of managing lists).
Create campaigns in MailerLite for new leads in Hunter
Add new Hunter leads to ActiveCampaign as contacts or update existing ones
Pro tip: If you're adding hundreds of leads at once, add a delay step to space out the additions to your email platform. Many email tools have rate limits, but a delay step prevents your workflow from hitting those limits and failing. Read our guide to using Delay by Zapier.
Send leads from other tools to Hunter
Leads can come from everywhere: social media campaigns, subscription purchases, even your CRM. Wherever they originate, you want to send them into Hunter as fast as possible, snag their verified email addresses, and start prospecting. But for most teams, this means hopping between tools, exporting CSVs, and manually uploading data—a slow, repetitive process that puts you at risk of missing potential prospects along the way.
With Zapier, you can skip the manual process by auto-routing new contacts into Hunter, no matter where they come from. Use the Zaps below to connect Hunter to your lead generation tools like Facebook Lead Ads or TikTok Lead Generation. This way, whenever a potential customer interacts with your ads, a corresponding lead is instantly created in Hunter. Similarly, if a contact comes from a subscription via Stripe or a new entry in your HubSpot CRM, Zapier makes sure that lead is automatically added to Hunter.
Create leads in Hunter from new subscriptions in Stripe
Back up leads to a spreadsheet or database
Database tools like Google Sheets and Airtable are essential for keeping business data organized and accessible. While they're not always the easiest to manage, they give you an accurate, up-to-date backup of your prospecting data at any time. They also give your team a single source of truth, making it easier for everyone to track who you've contacted—even if they don't have access to Hunter. But if you're relying on manual exports to move data from Hunter into your database, keeping those records in sync quickly gets tedious.
Thankfully, a Zap can handle the task. By connecting Hunter to your database tool, you can put the process of adding new records on autopilot. The moment there's an update in Hunter, Zapier automatically creates a corresponding record in Google Sheets, Airtable, or wherever you store your data. No downloads, no uploads, no manual entry. Your new leads will flow seamlessly into your database while you focus on engaging prospects.
Create records in Airtable for every new lead in Hunter
Pro tip: Want to get notified about new leads without receiving constant pings? Use Digest by Zapier to compile daily or weekly summaries of new leads added to your database. On your chosen schedule, you'll receive one organized message with a list of your newest prospects. Read our guide to using Digest by Zapier.
Auto-verify your contacts
When it comes to email outreach, a clean and reliable contact list is everything. Sending campaigns to invalid or outdated addresses hurts your deliverability. Plus, it can damage your sender reputation. The only problem? Manually verifying each email address on your list eats into the time you could spend engaging prospects and closing deals.
Instead of trying to juggle things, use Zapier to automate the entire verification process. You can set up an automated workflow that sends every new email you add to a Google Sheet straight to Hunter for verification. The workflow can even update the email's deliverability status right in the same spreadsheet—no manual checks required.
This automation also works seamlessly with tools like Mailchimp. So whenever a new subscriber joins your list, Zapier can send their address to Hunter for instant verification. From there, you can define what happens next—for example, automatically removing undeliverable contacts from Mailchimp to keep your list healthy. This setup keeps your list clean and your campaigns more effective without the burden of manual contact management.
Verify email addresses added to new Google Sheets rows with Hunter
Verify new Mailchimp subscribers with Hunter and unsubscribe or delete undeliverable Mailchimp contacts
Send notifications and emails on autopilot
Speed matters in prospecting. The faster you respond to a lead or coordinate with your team, the more likely you are to convert that opportunity. But if you're manually checking Hunter for replies, drafting welcome emails, or sending follow-ups one by one, you risk delays that can cost you valuable connections.
Instead, delegate communication to Zapier, so nothing important gets delayed. For instance, you can set up a workflow that instantly sends a Slack channel message the moment you receive a reply in Hunter, keeping your team informed and ready to act in real time. You can also trigger custom welcome emails for new Hunter leads as soon as they're added to your prospecting list, to start relationships on a positive note.
And if you want to engage prospects right away, you can use Email by Zapier to automatically send personalized outbound emails to new leads the moment they're created in Hunter. This means no waiting and no missed opportunities: just seamless, timely communication that keeps prospects warm and your team in sync—all without lifting a finger.
Send Slack messages when emails are replied to in Hunter
Send outbound emails for new Hunter leads with Email by Zapier
Streamline prospecting with Hunter.io and Zapier
Hunter makes it easy to source and verify prospects, but pairing it with automation helps you scale your outreach efforts without increasing your workload. With Zapier, you can connect Hunter to your marketing, CRM, and collaboration tools to eliminate repetitive tasks, act on leads faster, and keep your databases accurate and up-to-date.
And that's just the start of what you can do with Zapier and Hunter. What will you automate first?
