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What Are The Best Email Finders in 2023?

Last update: March 2023

Abstract

We have studied how well 35 email finders perform. Among them, notorious solutions such as Apollo, Lusha, Hunter, etc.

To do so, we have created a test file of 300 prospects, with the following input entries for each prospect: full name and company name.

The file has been processed by all the email finders. Finally, we measured the email discovery rate of each competitor.

Disclaimer: this study has been conducted by Icypeas, a new Email finder. To establish our good faith and prove the solidity of this study, we have fully documented our work. Everything was recorded on video. To know more about this, see the "Open Data" section.

34

benchmarked email finders

300

lines in our test file

120

work hours to complete the study

2438

euros spent to buy credits

Results

We benchmarked 35 email finders. Here is what we found out:
Icypeas is the best email finder. The study benchmarked 35 competitors. Icypeas has the highest email discovery rate (65%). The second best performer is Apollo with 57%, and the third one is Seamless with 56%. The market average performance is 37%.
logo seamless
Icypeas has the lowest bounce rate (9%). The second best performer is Apollo with 10%, and the third one is Salesintel with 10%. The market average performance is 28%.
logo icypeaslogo apollologo salesintel

Methodology

We conducted the benchmark study as follows:
Step 1: Sampling

We created a sample of 300 prospects, randomly, using Linkedin. To get more information on the sample, see this dedicated section. This gave us a list of 300 individuals, identified with their first name, last name and company name. We are well aware that some sales teams are able to collect the company’s domains but we have decided to perform this benchmark on the most difficult input data, i.e. company names instead of domains.

Step 2: Enrichment

We have uploaded this 300-prospect list on the platforms we wanted to assess. Once the file was processed, we downloaded the enriched list. We calculated the “gross email discovery rate”, i.e. the number of found email addresses. We say it is a “gross” rate because at this stage it does not take into account the number of hard bounces. Some addresses given as valid will turn out to be invalid after the deliverability test in Step 3.

Step 3: Deliverability Test

To get the number of hard bounces, we sent an actual message to each email address, and we waited up to 3 days for an error notification. In February 2023, we sent 1333 mails from 27 mailboxes. This gave us a "bounce rate" for each email finder. Good email finders must have a high gross email discovery rate with a small bounce rate. To merge these 2 rates into a final one, we consider the “net email discovery rate” as the ultimate performance indicator. The “net email discovery rate” is the number of email addresses given as valid by an Email Finder minus the number of hard bounces divided by the total number of prospects (in this experiment: 300).

Caveats

It is important to keep in mind that each studied platform is likely to evolve in the future. Its performance can increase or, sometimes, decrease over time. That’s why we repeat our benchmark on a yearly basis, in order to have fresh updated indicators.

This study focuses on email discovery. Obviously, some competitors are more than Email Finders. Several solutions introduce themselves as "all-in-one" salestech platforms. They have a low email discovery rate but they perform well on other features: phone discovery, outreach campaigns, contact management, etc. This benchmark in no way denigrates the overall relevance of these platforms.

5 email finders did not allow to upload a file having as input data the full name and the company name. These are LeadGenius, Kaspr, LeadIQ, Seamless and Skrapp. For these 5 solutions, we made an exception: we carried out the experiment by providing as input data the URLs of the Linkedin profiles of our 300 prospects (via their respective Chrome extension).

Sample Distribution

To create our 300-prospect list, we choose a keyword, randomly. In 2023, it was: "sales". In 2022, it was "communication". We typed this keyword in the Linkedin Sales Navigator search bar. Then, we added both a "Geography" filter and a "Company headcount" filter, to make sure that our sample includes people from different areas (USA, France, Germany, UAE) and from companies of different sizes (1-10, 201-500, +10K employees). Finally, we scrapped these profiles

Here is how our prospects are distributed along these constraints:

USA
France
Germany
UAE
1 to 10 employees
25
25
25
25
201 to 500
employees
25
25
25
25
+10K
employees
25
25
25
25

Also we observe that 215 prospects have more than 10 years of experience.
85 have less than 10 years of experience.

This distribution is not controlled.

Here is the seniority levels of our sample:

Open Data

We share our methodology and findings with full transparency.

You can download our input test file and repeat the experiment to double check the results.

You can download the processed file for each competitor: Aeroleads, Anyleads, Anymailfinder, Apollo, Clearout, Cognism, Datagma, Dropcontact, Emailsearch, Findemails, FindThatLead, GetEmail, GetProspect, Hunter, Kaspr, Leadfuze, LeadGenius, LeadIQ, Lusha, Orbitly, Overloop, PeopleDataLabs, Rocketreach, Salesintel, Seamless, SellHack, SignalHire, Skrapp, Voilanorbert, Wiza, Zoominfo

We screen-recorded our journey as we navigated through each competitor's platform, uploading and then retrieving the processed file: Aeroleads, Anymailfinder, Clearout, Emailsearch, Findemails, GetEmail, Hunter, Kaspr, Leadfuze, Lusha, Orbitly, Overloop, PeopleDataLabs, Rocketreach, Seamless, SellHack, Skrapp, Voilanorbert, Wiza

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

We hope that this study will be useful to you. We intend to repeat this benchmarck every year. FYI, we have conducted a similar experiment with Email Verifiers.