How To Personalize Your Cold Emails At Scale (2024)

Manually writing cold emails is a waste of time.

If you have thousands of leads to contact, then you simply don’t have time to manually personalize each email.

In this article, I show you the four-step process that allows me to contact thousands of leads, and make each prospect think that the email was written just for them:

1. Build your lead list around an event/trigger/action
2. Write your copy around this event/trigger/action
3. Add a custom variable
4. Launch campaign

1. Build your lead list around an event/trigger/action

The way that you add relevance to your cold emails is by contacting people that already need your product or service.

Personalization does not increase your response rate.

Relevance increases your response rate.

Personalization does not equal relevance.

For example, if I mention an irrelevant piece of information about a prospect, it does not increase the likelihood that the prospect will respond to my cold email.

Whereas, if I send an email to someone that already needs my product or service, then my email will be perceived as relevant, and they are likely to respond.

You need to create a list of people that have already performed an action that implies that they need your product or service.

For example, I launched a cold email campaign for Emailchaser that targeted people that already use one of our competitor’s warm up tool.

If someone already uses one of our competitor’s warm up tool, then they need/use cold email software.

This means that when I reach out to them, they are more likely to respond, since my offer (Emailchaser) is relevant to them.

Another example of an event/trigger/action is when a company posts a job ad.

If I am launching a cold email campaign for a recruitment agency, then the best time to reach out to a company about helping them find people is when they post a job ad, as this implies they already need to hire someone.

I recommend that you read my article How To Create An Evergreen Cold Email Campaign. In this article, I go into detail about how you can build a list of people around an event/trigger/action.

2. Write your copy around this event/trigger/action

Now that you have a list of people that need your product or service, you need to write your email copy around the event/trigger/action.

It is the event/trigger/action that shows that these people need your product or service, and in order for you to make your email seem “personalized” for them, you need to mention this event/trigger/action.

When a lead receives your email, and it mentions a very specific action or event that affects them, they will think that you wrote the email just for them, and they are more likely to respond.

Remember, the reason they are responding is because this event/trigger/action implies that they need your product or service.

It cannot be a random event/trigger/action that has no relevance to your offer.

I recommend that you read my article How To Write A Cold Email. In this article, I show you how to write an email that is centered around a relevant event/trigger/action.

3. Add a custom variable

In order to make your emails seem personalized for each prospect, you can use a custom variable to automatically insert their names.

This means that you don’t need to manually change the name of each prospect, but instead, you can launch one campaign, and it will automatically update the name for each person.

When you are writing your email sequence in Emailchaser, you can click the “Add custom variable” button, which allows you to add any variable that you want.

4. Launch campaign

The final step is to launch your campaign.

The main benefit of cold email automation software (like Emailchaser) is that it allows you to upload a list of leads to a single campaign.

This means that you can launch just one campaign, and it will send your emails without you needing to manually edit each email. This makes a huge difference when you have thousands of leads to contact.

I still recommend that you launch multiple smaller campaigns, and only scale when you’ve established which campaign is performing best.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

You should not manually write each cold email that you send, as this is inefficient.

Instead, you should upload your lead list to a campaign in a specialized cold email software (like Emailchaser), and write your copy around an event/trigger/action that is relevant to your leads.

If you do this, then your leads will respond, as they will think that your email was written just for them.

On a related note, I recommend that you check out my article Should You Use AI Personalized First Lines When Sending Cold Emails?

I also recommend that you read my article How To Build A Lead List For Cold Email.