Should You Use AI Personalized First Lines When Sending Cold Emails?

You should not use AI personalized first lines in your cold emails.

Most people can recognize when AI personalization was used in a cold email. AI first lines usually don’t seem genuine, and will decrease your response rate.

In this article, I will cover everything that you need to know about AI personalized first lines:

• What is a personalized first line?
• Why you shouldn’t use AI personalized first lines
• What should you do instead?
• Final thoughts

What is a personalized first line?

A personalized first line is when you make the first sentence of your cold email mention something that is unique to the prospect that you are emailing.

Personalized first lines are usually a good idea, but the issue with AI personalized first lines is that it is very obvious that AI was used, and it doesn’t seem genuine.

If you are scraping information from a lead’s website or LinkedIn profile, and you use an AI first line tool to write something like “I noticed that you went to the University of Miami, go Hurricanes!”, then you are almost guaranteed to receive no response, as it is very obvious that you used an AI tool to write such a sentence.

The biggest giveaway that someone is using an AI first line tool is when the first line mentions information that is publicly displayed on the prospect's LinkedIn profile or website, and is also completely irrelevant to the offer.

A genuine cold email usually doesn’t begin with an irrelevant sentence about a piece of information found from a lead’s LinkedIn profile.

Why you shouldn’t use AI personalized first lines

You shouldn’t use AI personalized first lines because they will decrease your response rate.

AI personalized first lines almost never look genuine, and are almost always clearly AI generated.

This obvious insincerity reduces your chances of receiving a response because no one wants to respond to an email that wasn’t written just for them.

The below tweet clearly explains why AI personalized first lines are a bad idea:

I see people using ChatGPT to write personalized 1st lines in cold emails.

Usually based off info from a prospect’s website or LinkedIn.

I've never seen it come off as genuine.

And it's more of a turn-off than no "personalized" intro at all.

— Ajay Goel (@PartTimeSnob) October 19, 2023

Personalization for the sake of personalization is not a good idea. Stating some generic fact about a prospect, or a generic description of a lead’s company in your opening line isn’t going to make them want to respond to you.

If your personalization has zero relevance to the problem that you are solving, then it isn’t a good idea.

What should you do instead?

Fortunately, there is a way to personalize your cold emails while still sounding genuine.

Hint: it doesn’t involve the use of an AI first line tool.

I recommend that you read my article How To Personalize Your Cold Emails At Scale.

In this article, I show you how to add personalization to your cold emails while still sounding genuine.

An important thing to remember is that your offer and targeting are much more important than your personalization. I am not saying that personalization isn’t important, but personalization alone will not make your prospects want to respond to you.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

You should not use AI personalized first lines when sending cold emails.

These AI first line tools make your emails sound like they were generated by ChatGPT, and will cause your leads to delete your emails.

You can learn how to add personalization to your cold emails the right way in my article How To Personalize Your Cold Emails At Scale.

I also recommend that you read my article How To Write A Sales Email In 2023 (5-Step Process).