Ever since we launched our feature request page, one request has consistently ranked at the top in terms of overall demand and popularity:
Please (PLEASE) integrate Hunter.io into BuzzStream!
Well, today I am extremely excited to announce that, yes, if you’ve got a BuzzStream group plan or above and a Hunter.io account you will now be able to use all of their contact info data in BuzzStream to help you find emails and people even faster.
Oh, and by the way, we’ve also added contact information filters and updated our “Add Contact” functionality. More on those below!
Hunter.io Integration
To get started all you need to do is add your Hunter API key to BuzzStream through our third party integrations page.
Now, you can add Hunter’s discovered contact information to your contacts while maintaining full control of your Hunter account so you don’t accidentally go over any limits.
To enrich contacts with Hunter.io data, simply navigate to the project you’d like to add those contact details for. From that project, go to either your Research List or Outreach List, highlight the contacts you’d like to enrich, then click Research, then Search Hunter.io for contact info.
Now you’ll be able to choose whether you’d like to use any of Hunter’s deliverability filters to help narrow down the contact info they discover. For full information on these filters, I recommend you check out the documentation available on Hunter’s site.
Once you’ve done that, just click continue and Hunter will begin adding their contact details to your contacts! Now you can access that information in a variety of different ways.
First, you can use Hunter contact information and bylines to populate recipients for your campaign so you know you’re sending emails to the right people. Just click in the recipient field and you’ll see all of the discovered information there, including general website emails as well as a list of the specific people Hunter has discovered belonging to a site, including their roles and email addresses.
You can also access Hunter information when adding contacts individually. Just enter the domain information and in seconds you can access any people and contact info that Hunter discovers and add it to the BuzzStream contact record.
Finally, BuzzStream will send you a CSV download of any contact information found for records in your account. You can then open and review that information in the program of your choice.
New Contact Info Filters
Given all the new ways to gather contact information with the Hunter.io integration, we wanted to give you the flexibility to find and review that as well as other campaign details such as associated people and campaign recipients. That way, you’ll be able to see at a glance where you’ve already got details and assigned recipients and where you need to spend more time researching.
Enter our new contact info filters.
At a high level, these filters will let you filter contacts, discovered contact info, or recipients on email address, name, or role fields. If that sounds a bit dry, let me make it real for you.
For one example, what if you want to just quickly see which of the contacts in your account has a discovered email address so you can quickly approve and assign those? Just set the filter criteria to “Discovered contacts”, the field to “Email address” and the filter to “has any value”. Now, you’ve just got a list of contacts with emails you can send to right away!
What if instead you wanted to send to a list of people working at the websites in your list, but aren’t sure where you still need to find the right info? Just set the criteria to “Project recipient”, the field to “Name” and the filter to “is empty”. Now, you know exactly where you or your team need to spend some time researching and adding the right person to be the recipient for your outreach emails.
Ok, one more that’s just a little more out there! Let’s say you’ve got a huge list of website contacts and you remember you wanted to send a tailored message to one of the people associated with them, but can’t remember the full name. Was it…Kelly something? We’ve got your back. Set the criteria to “Contacts” the field to “Name” and the filter criteria to “contains: Kelly”. Now you’ll see the list of contacts in your account with and associated person named Kelly!
There’s a ton more flexibility here and we’re just scratching the surface, but suffice to say there’s a lot you can do with these new filters.
Updated “Add/Edit Contact” Functionality
We’ve also updated our “Add/Edit contact” forms to better support the Hunter.io data integration, and in the process made some significant updates that offer much more functionality that will save you time and give more granular control over your contact database.
First, we know that sometimes when adding people to reach out to across a variety of projects, sometimes duplicates and creep in. To support managing those better, you now have the ability to merge People contacts. To do that, just click on a Person record that you know has a duplicate, then click the Edit button in the top right corner.
Now, look at the bottom of the field list and you’ll see a yellow button stating how many duplicate contacts exist.
Click that button, and you’ll see the specific duplicate records. From there, just select the duplicates you’d like to merge into the same record, then click Merge and the duplicates will merge into one record.
Related to our quest to eliminate duplicate contacts from the world, we’ve now included much better auto-suggest functionality when adding people to your account. Previously, we only showed the names of people when you entered a contact with the same name. Now, we will show you their name, email address, and any role info you’ve added so you can make a much better decision on the fly.
Previously, it was impossible to associate people to a website directly from the “Add Website” form. This was frustrating and could lead to multiple steps to accommodate that goal. Now, you can add associated people directly from the form (and, as mentioned above, you can populate the People section using discovered Hunter.io data).
Finally, we’ve made it possible to add and edit any data from the edit section of person or website records. Previously the list of fields you could access there was constrained, resulting in extra steps and wasted time. Now you can enter all of the details so there’s no extra clicks or searching for the right place to add info.
Wrap-up
We hope that all of these new improvements give you even more tools to find contact info, manage contacts, and send effective outreach! We covered a lot here, but it’s only touching on the power of these new tools and our Hunter.io integration. As you try them out we’d love to hear from you! Please get in touch with any questions or feedback you have.
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