4 Steps To Great AI-Crafted Emails In Hunter

James Milsom -

You sit down to write a cold email.

But wait—who exactly are you writing to? What matters to them right now? Why would they care?

If you’ve ever been there, feeling unclear on who you’re writing to or why they’d reply - this guide, and Hunter’s AI Writing Assistant, will change that.

You’ll define a one-line Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), pinpoint the right buyers inside those accounts, and then turn that clarity into a high-signal, AI-powered campaign—without second-guessing your messaging.

Here’s how.

TL;DR

  • Knowing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), Buyer Personas, and smaller segments of your targets (trenches) is crucial for any campaign
  • Use the basic ICP formula to articulate your audience
  • Pair down the ICP into smaller groups to help with better campaign messaging
  • Don't be afraid to trial different campaign goals like thought leadership to create trust and familiarity with leads
  • Use the AI Writing Assistant to turn your lead knowledge into great emails
  • You can edit and optimize your AI generated cold emails inside Hunter Campaigns
  • Test and scale the winning campaigns over four weeks
  • The AI Writing Assistant is live in Campaigns for all paid Hunter users

Step 1: Write Your ICP In One Sentence

Start small. Say it plainly.

The beginning of every great campaign is knowing who you're reaching out to.

This is commonly referred to as an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

That doesn't require a long winded process, just a basic formula:

We help [company type] with [defining attributes] who need [job to be done] to [core outcome].

A few examples

  • We help B2B SaaS startups with fewer than 50 employees who need more pipeline without a sales team to consistently book meetings.
  • We help UK consultancies serving FinTech who need case-study proof to win Series A clients and shorten sales cycles.
  • We help boutique tech recruiters placing first RevOps hires at seed-stage SaaS to make three strategic placements per quarter.

Do this (not that)

  • Use plain, human language (pretend your Mom is reading it).
  • Be specific—add attributes like size, industry, location, or tech used.
  • Skip vague phrases like “anyone who” or “fast-growing businesses.”

Use this fill-in-the-blanks cheat sheet:

  • Company type:
  • Attributes that define a good fit:
  • Core need:
  • Outcome you enable:
  • One-sentence ICP:

Keep it to one sentence. If it needs a comma, great. If it needs a paragraph, it’s too broad.

Shortcut: Use Hunter

Once you have your ICP defined, you can use Hunter’s Discover B2B database filters to find companies that match the ICP.

Identify your total ICP (everyone who could buy your solution)

This will give you a broad view of everyone that fits your target (but note, this isn't everyone you should contact...)

Step 2: Trench Your ICP

Don’t go broad.

Go small and sharp by finding ICP trenches - narrow groupings of your ideal customers.

💡
Hunter's State of Cold Email 2025 shows that emails sent to up to 5o recipients receive a 6% reply rate, vs. 1,000+ recipients earning 2%.


Back in Discover, use the filters to apply 2–3 more —industry, funding, tech stack, or location—to slice your ICP into a trench you can rapidly test.

This is where scale starts.

Example “trenches”

  • SaaS, Series A, using HubSpot, in North America
  • UK consultancies, bootstrapped, using Salesforce
  • Seed-stage SaaS, EMEA, using Intercom

Here's how that looks in Discover:

Build hyper-targeted ICP trenches with extra filters around technologies

Next step: build a 50-contact, verified list inside Hunter.

Step 3: Find The Buyer

Let’s find the people you need to contact - the "buyer persona."

Ask yourself, within your ICP:

  • Who holds the purse strings?
  • Who feels the pain?
  • Who’s itching to solve it?

List 2–3 ideal roles. For each, write down:

  • Role and Title
  • Responsibilities and Goals
  • Trigger Events (what’s happening in their world that opens a window?)

When you find these relevant roles, you unlock further opportunities to outreach campaigns, with messaging tailored to each type of buyer persona.

Example buyers

SaaS

  • Head of Growth, Marketing Director, Founder
  • Responsible for pipeline, product adoption, and proving ROI
  • Triggered by: new funding, first SDR hire, product launch

Professional Services

  • Managing Director, Practice Lead, Partnerships Manager
  • Goal: win retainers, expand accounts, secure case studies
  • Triggered by: big client win, RFPs, awards

Recruitment

  • Talent Lead, RevOps Manager, Founder
  • Responsible for hiring speed and cost
  • Triggered by: org changes, region launches, new rounds

Shortcut: Use Hunter

Back in Hunter, in the Companies section of Leads, you can now use your list of trench companies to find the email addresses of the decision makers.

You can do that by selecting the departments that your decision makers sit in, and choosing "personal" email addresses.

You can save the contacts you find from here into a list for your campaign or they'll be automatically saved into your Leads.

Build hyper-targeted ICP trenches and supporting contacts in Hunter's Leads

Once you have your lists of contacts, you're ready to generate your campaign.

Step 4: Create Emails

Now that you have your ICP, trench, and contacts, you can use Hunter's new AI Writing Assistant, which sits inside Campaigns, for premium users.

The AI Writing Assistant will take your list of contacts and help you generate copy for your campaign in seconds.

The copy is fully editable and, crucially, personalized to each lead (so you keep out of spam and stand out from your competitors using email templates.)

Here's how to get started.

What to provide

  • Persona pains and jobs to be done
  • Who you are, what you offer, and how you help
  • Your unique value (in your own words)

Settings to choose

  • Goal: Book a meeting? Share content? Build awareness?
  • Tone + Style: Friendly? Curious? Problem-solving?
  • Length + Language: Short, long, punchy, plainspoken—your choice

These settings let you stay human—just faster.

Let's show you how that looks inside the AI Writing Assistant.

Example: From ICP to Email

The campaign

We want to send a campaign to our ICP trench of British SaaS companies that have less than 50 employees and use Salesforce as their CRM.

The goal

The goal is to invite the Founder to a thought leadership interview where we hear their challenges and share ideas from our users, and our experience on how to overcome them.

This campaign will help build trust with this persona ahead of traditional pitching.

About your recipient

UK B2B founders of SaaS startups with fewer than 50 employees who need more pipeline without a sales team to consistently book meetings, who are seeing that trials aren’t converting; outbound isn’t systematic.

About your business

  • Problems you're addressing: Hitting pipeline targets, improving trial-to-paid conversion, and want to scale outbound without a hire.
  • What solution do you offer?: We are running 30 minute thought leadership interviews where we hear their challenges, share the best practices we've seen, and some solutions to overcome them.
  • What is your Unique Selling Proposition?: The thought leadership interviews result in a whitepaper where we share the very best advice from SaaS founders on how to creatively scale their outbound without hiring an SDR.

Settings
Within the AI Writing Assistant, we can customize our settings to achieve our goal.

  • Goal: Book a meeting
  • Tone: Curious
  • Writing style: CTA focused
  • Length: Short
  • Language: English


Draft Email

With the information added to the AI we receive this copy:

The first AI generated email based on our ICP trench

Optimizing The Email

The AI Writing Assistant helped us get 95% of the way there, and now we want to make small changes to match our tone of voice 100%.

You can click into any element of the email that is generated and make changes. For us, those changes are:

  • Adding a reference to Q4 being on the horizon
  • Being more explicit in the output from the interview
  • Adjusting the subject line to be linked to our CTA

That's it. Three small changes that took 60 seconds to apply. Next we'll preview the emails for a handful of recipients.

Previewing Unique Emails

The last step is to view each of the emails for our send list.

The great thing about the AI Writing Assistant is that you're not using an email template - nor agencies to run outbound email.

💡
The AI Writing Assistant gives your campaigns that 1:1 element which increase your chances of getting into your recipient's inbox.


When you click "Review" in the Campaign builder, you'll see unique emails for each recipient.

0:00
/0:14

Use this opportunity to review and ensure you're happy with the content of your campaigns.


Bonus: Follow-Ups & Next Steps

The AI Writing Assistant can also generate follow ups for any leads who don't reply to your messages.

Adding follow-ups ensures that you provide value in your campaigns, which research shows can increase replies from 3% to 5%.

Once you've set your follow-ups, run through this check list:

  • Schedule emails for high-reply windows
  • Use a custom tracking domain
  • Track positive replies

Once your campaign is up and running, use the other trenches to run parallel experiments for each across a four week period of testing:

  • Week 1: Subject line tests
  • Weeks 2–3: Body copy experiments
  • Week 4: Scale the winner

Turn Your ICP Into Great Emails

Hunter's AI Writing Assistant gives everyone the ability to send high-performing emails.

With this guide to articulating your ICP and finding trenches to run targeted campaigns, plus the AI Writing Assistant, you have everything you'll need to go from contact discovery to high-performing cold emails inside Hunter.

Your best cold emails yet are just a few clicks away.