As you build your outbound strategy, Hunter's Outreach Planner is there to guide you through every step. This accompanying glossary is your A-Z of all things email outreach, written in plain English.
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Deliverability and sending
Cold domain: A sending domain that hasn't been used recently, or at all. Inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook trust domains with a record, but cold domains have none, making emails go to spam.
Deliverability: Whether your emails actually reach an inbox or get sent to spam.
DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signs each email so the recipient can verify it, ensuring that inbox providers know that your email was sent as intended and not tampered with.
DMARC: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) tells receivers what to do if either SPF or DKIM fails, helping prevent someone from impersonating your domain.
Domain reputation: How inbox providers rate your sending domain. Built from your send volume, engagement rates, bounce rates, and how often recipients mark you as spam. A weak reputation sends your emails to junk no matter how good the copy is.
Inbox provider: The company that delivers email to a recipient (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo). Each one has its own rules for what gets through. You're trying to convince all of them you're legitimate.
MailExchange: MailExchange (MX) routes incoming email, and must be configured for outbound-only sending domains. If this isn’t set up, it could explain your lack of replies.
Ramp-up: The process by which you gradually increase email sends for any one email sending account to a maximum of 30-40 emails a day to help you keep out of spam.
Sender reputation: Similar to domain reputation but tied to a specific email address (e.g., jane@yourdomain.com), not the whole domain. This can be damaged by sending to unverified email address data.
Sending domain: The web address your outreach emails come from. Often a separate domain from your main company website, so problems on one don't damage the other.
SPF: Sender Policy Framework (SPF) lists which servers can send on your behalf, ensuring that your emails look like they're coming from a stranger's account, even when they're not.
Warm-up: The process of indicating to inbox providers that your domain and email account are legitimate by earning opens and replies through 10–20 emails/day, increasing by 5–10 per day. This can be manual or automated, but it is not the same as ramp-up.
List quality and email accuracy
Accept-all email: An email address where the company's server says "this mailbox exists" but won't confirm a specific person. It could be a real address or capture, all emails to the domain.
Bounce rate: The percentage of emails that didn't reach the inbox. Re-verify emails if 2+%.
Bouncers/bounced contacts: Contacts whose emails came back as undeliverable. Remove them before sending the next email in a sequence. Leaving them in damages your sender reputation.
Enrichment: Adding missing data to a company or contact you already have.
Open rate: The percentage of recipients who opened your email. Mostly a deliverability signal (low opens often mean the spam folder), not a measure of how good the message is.
Re-verify: Put a list through re-verification to find addresses that have decayed since you built it. This happens automatically with any email addresses you find via Hunter.
Reply rate: The percentage of recipients who wrote back - the real measure of whether a campaign worked.
Verified email: An email address Hunter has confirmed against a live source at the moment you checked. Different from "an email someone gave you 6 months ago" or "an email a scraper found."
Sequence mechanics
A/B test: Two versions of an email (same audience, different variable) to measure opens or replies, testing one variable at a time. At least 50 contacts per variant are needed for statistical significance.
CTA: A call to action is a specific question at the end of an email.
Follow-up: A subsequent email in a sequence that picks up the thread from the last one. 3 follow-ups nearly double your reply rate compared to a 1-email send.
Plain text email: An email with no images, links, or HTML formatting. Sent the same way you'd email from Gmail. Test using plain text for your first email, and then consider links.
Sequence: A series of emails sent on a schedule to the same contact, with built-in stops. In Hunter, "Sequences" capitalized is the name of the tool that runs them.
Stop-on-reply: A setting that pauses the sequence automatically the moment a contact replies, so you don't keep emailing someone who's already responded. Should be on for every sequence.
Touchpoint: The number of emails in a sequence.
Audience and targeting
Carryover: A lead from a previous quarter who didn't close but stayed engaged.
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile): Also known as your target companies or audience. The kind of company you sell to, defined by attributes like size, location, industry, technology, budget, and funding. Always ask: which companies have the pain my solution solves?
Lookalike list: A new list built to resemble an existing engaged list. Same industry, similar size, similar role. Useful for experiments because you have a reasonable expectation of how it should perform.
Outbound: Outreach you initiate, as opposed to inbound interest from people who found you. This entire planner is about outbound. This is also referred to as cold email.
Prospect (verb): The act of finding new contacts to add to your lists. "I prospected 50 contacts today" means you found 50 new people to reach.
Segment: A subset of a list filtered by attribute or behavior. "Q1 contacts who opened the third email" is a segment.
Switcher list: A list of contacts at companies currently using a competitor, where the aim is to get them to switch to you. Usually targeting unhappy or recent users of that competitor.
TAM (Total Addressable Market): The full size of the market you could realistically sell to.
Target audience: The specific decision-makers inside your ICP companies. Not "marketing leaders at SaaS companies" but the actual list of names you can reach.
Warm lead: A contact who has engaged with you (opened, clicked, replied) without becoming a customer yet. The opposite of a contact who has never responded.
Buying behavior
Account expansion: Finding a second, third, or fourth contact at a company you've already reached, sequentially, with a different angle for each role.
Buying committee: The group of people inside a company who can influence a B2B purchase. Most decisions involve three or more.
Buying mode: Where a buyer's head is at when your email lands. Different sequence types match different modes. Direct outreach to someone in problem identification mode lands flat.
Buyer personas: The roles inside a company you'll need to reach. Four to know:
- Pain feeler. The end user who is living with the problem but has no budget or authority to fix it.
- Budget holder. The decision maker who cares about outcomes, not features.
- Blocker. Legal, IT, finance, or a competing internal voice.
- Champion. The inside person who benefits when your solution wins.
At a 1-50 head company, these can be the same person, the founder.
Buying signal: A real-world event that suggests a company is more likely to buy soon. Funding announcement, new VP hire, layoffs, product launch, renewal window. Layer these into your lists for higher reply rates than a generic ICP filter delivers.
Decision maker: The role with the budget and authority to actually say yes. The first person you find at any target company.
Hunter tools
AI Writing Assistant: Sits inside Sequences for generating personalized email copy with AI.
Browser Extensions: Hunter inside Chrome, Edge, or Firefox.
Discover: Hunter's tool for finding target companies by size, location, industry, technology, funding, and other filters. The Discover AI Assistant in Discover lets you describe your search in natural language rather than manually applying filters.
Domain Deliverability Checker: Hunter's deliverability analyzer checks SPF, DKIM, DMARC, domain reputation, and other deliverability factors.
Domain Search/Bulk Domain Search: Find contacts at a company by entering its website address. The bulk version handles a list of companies at once.
Dynamic Lists: Lists inside Leads that auto-updates Companies or Contacts based on filters (e.g. sending status).
Email Finder/Bulk Email Finder: Find someone's verified email address from their name. The bulk version handles a list of names.
Email Verifier/Bulk Email Verifier: Check an email address for accuracy before sending. The bulk version handles a list.
Hunter Claude connector: Lets you find verified contacts through Claude using natural language.
Hunter MCP: A remote MCP (Model Context Protocol) server provides integration between Hunter’s API and any LLM that supports the MCP protocol (e.g., OpenAI's Responses API or Claude for Desktop), allowing you to interact with Hunter B2B data using natural language.
Leads: Hunter's list management area. Where you build, segment, and manage contact lists for outreach. When capitalized in the planner, "Leads" refers to this product, not contacts in general.
Outreach Calculator: A tool for calculating how many leads and emails you need to hit a target.
Sequences: Hunter's email outreach product. Sends scheduled emails with built-in A/B testing, follow-ups, and stop-on-reply.
Signals: Hunter's alerts tool for real-world events at target companies ( such as hiring or funding).
Static Lists: Lists inside Hunter Leads that are a one-time view of filtered Companies or Contacts, or by uploading a CSV.
Subject Line Tester: Hunter's free tool for generating, testing, and improving subject lines.
TAM Calculator: Hunter's tool for sizing your total addressable market using real company data.
General acronyms
B2B: Business to business. Selling to other companies, not consumers.
SMB: Small and medium-sized business. Usually means companies under 250 employees.
SaaS: Software as a service. Software you rent monthly or annually, hosted by the provider.
GTM: Go-to-market. How a company sells. Used in the planner as a role identifier ("first GTM hire") more than as a verb.
Build your outreach engine
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