How To Personalize Your Cold Emails At Scale (2024)

Personalizing cold emails can be time consuming.

However, it is possible to personalize your cold emails at scale, even if you are sending hundreds or thousands each day.

In this article, I will show you how to personalize your cold emails at scale:

• What is cold email personalization?
• Different types of personalization
• How to implement personalization at scale
• Is mass personalization a good idea?

What is cold email personalization?

Cold email personalization is when you write an email that is tailored for a specific person.

The reason why it is important to personalize your cold emails is because your response rate will be much higher.

If the person that you are emailing does not believe that your email was specifically written just for them, then they will not respond. If they think that you sent the same email to thousands of people, then they will not respond to you.

However, personalization alone is not enough. Your personalization needs to still be relevant to your offer. Simply stating that you know which university your lead went to, or which city he/she lives in, has no relevance to your offer, and will not get you a response.

The best personalization in a cold email is not:

A compliment
Ai generated bs
Pointing out their reviews

It’s:

A case study from one of their competitors where you got massive results.

Do everything you can to get that before you scale.

— Alex Berman 👑 Cold Email, omni.us (@alxberman) September 20, 2023

An example of personalization that is relevant to your offer would be mentioning that you are reaching out to this specific person because you know that they are the Chief Marketing Officer in {company_name}, and so you thought that they would be the best person to speak to (if you are selling something related to marketing/growth).

Different types of personalization

You can add personalization to your cold emails by mentioning the following things:

1. First name
This is the most important type of personalization, and you need to include this in all of your cold emails.

You should always address your leads by their first name when reaching out to them.

If you don’t mention their first name, then they will think that you are sending the same spam email to thousands of people, and they won’t respond.

For example, you can start your email with:

“Hi {first_name},” or “Hey {first_name},”.

If you write just “Hi” or “Hey”, without mentioning the lead’s first name, then you will not receive a response.

2. Company name
You can mention the lead’s company name to show additional personalization.

For example, you might say something like:

“I wanted to know if you are potentially interested in implementing our booking software into your company’s website so that your customers can make reservations without needing to contact you first? This would increase conversion rates for {company_name}.”

3. Job title
Another form of personalization is to mention the lead’s job title.

For example, if you are reaching out to Chief Marketing Officers, then you could write something like:

“Since you’re the {job_title} at {company_name}, I thought you’d be the best person to reach out to. If you are not the right person, then I’d appreciate it if you could please forward this email to the correct person :)”

I recommend that you use Emailchaser's "LinkedIn Email Finder" Google Chrome extension to export leads and their email addresses from LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You can search for leads based on their job title, location and industry, and then export these leads as a .csv file and import them to Emailchaser.

4. Location
Location is a powerful way to show that you are tailoring your email to a specific lead.

You could divide your leads by location, and then write something that is relevant only to that location, so that your leads know you aren’t sending the same email to others.

For example, you might say something like:

“I saw that you’re based in London. We have an office there too, so wanted to see if you’d be open to scheduling a meeting next month when I’m in town?”

5. Industry
You can personalize your cold emails by mentioning the lead’s industry.

For example, if you are selling a booking software to tour companies, then you could write something like:

“Our booking software is specifically designed for tour companies, so thought that {company_name} would be a good fit.”

6. Funding status
Mentioning the funding status of a lead’s company is a good way to show that you’ve done your research.

If a company recently raised funding, such as a Series A, then you can write something like:

“I read on LinkedIn that {company_name} recently raised its Series A. Congrats!”

7. Lead source
Finally, you can personalize your cold email by mentioning where you heard about the lead.

The strongest type of lead source to mention is a mutual contact. For example, you could say something like:

“I saw that our mutual contact Jeff Ross joined {company_name}, so I wanted to reach out.”

If you don’t have a mutual contact, then you can mention something slightly more generic such as:

“I saw your comment on Twitter when reading Sam Parr’s tweet.”

How to implement personalization at scale

There is only one way to implement personalization at scale when sending hundreds or thousands of cold emails per day.

You need to use a special cold email software such as Emailchaser.

Emailchaser allows you to add custom variables into your cold email copy. These custom variables will automatically update key pieces of information specific to each lead.

For example, if you want to automatically update the {first_name}, {company_name} or {job_title} for each lead, then you can use Emailchaser’s custom variables to do this.

The most common example of personalization at scale is to use the {first_name} custom variable.

If you have a list of 1,000 leads that you want to email, you can start your email as:

“Hi {first_name},”

And Emailchaser will automatically insert each leads’ first name.

Emailchaser also has a feature that will automatically rewrite each email slightly so that no lead receives the exact same email. If you send the exact same email copy to too many leads, then email service providers will send your emails to spam. Emailchaser has integrated with OpenAI’s GPT API so that each email that you send will be slightly different (whilst still maintaining the original message). Although this feature isn’t directly related to personalization, it is helpful as it prevents your emails from going to spam.

You can learn more about why it’s a good idea to make each email slightly different in our article Does Sending The Same Cold Email Multiple Times Decrease Deliverability?

Is mass personalization a good idea?

In general, the more you can personalize your cold emails, the higher your response rate will be.

If you manually write each email for each lead, then this allows for full personalization, and will get you the highest response rate.

However, this is very time consuming, meaning that although your response rate may be higher, if you send a higher volume of cold emails, and use mass personalization (custom variables), then you may receive a higher overall number of responses (despite a lower response rate).

The answer to this question depends on what you are selling, and how many companies are real opportunities for you.

For example, if there are only 300 potential companies that can be your customers, then you do NOT want to use mass personalization (custom variables). Instead, you should manually customize each email for each lead. Below is an example of the ex-Chief Revenue Officer at Brex talking about his most successful outbound sales campaign ever, which only targeted 300 companies:

1/ The best outbound campaign we ever ran at Brex (75% demo rate, 75% demo to close):

Brex launched in 2018 as the first corporate card for startups. After launch, when we were still ~30 employees and near 0 rev, we ran the most successful outbound campaign I've ever seen.

— Sam Blond (@samdblond) January 9, 2023

If you are selling a product or service that could benefit thousands or hundreds of thousands of businesses, then mass personalization is a good idea.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

There are two main ways to personalize your cold emails at scale:

1. Use custom variables to automatically insert relevant lead information such as: {first_name}, {company_name} and {job_title}.

2. Segment your leads by location, industry, funding status and lead source to further personalize your cold emails.

You can use Emailchaser to send thousands of cold emails each day while still adding personalization.

Although personalization is important, it isn’t the only factor. If your offer is not good, your copy is bad, or you are not credible, then personalization alone is not going to make people respond to your cold emails.

If you decide to try to personalize your cold emails at scale, then I recommend that you first read my other article How Many Cold Emails Can You Send Per Day Before Going To Spam?