Should You Use AI Personalization In Your Cold Emails?

You should not use AI personalization in your cold emails.

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

In this article, I will cover everything that you need to know about using AI with your cold emails:

- What is an "AI personalized" first line?
- Why you shouldn’t use AI personalized first lines
- What should you do instead?
- Final thoughts

What is an "AI personalized" first line?

An AI first line is when you generate the first sentence of your cold email with AI based on information you scraped from the lead's LinkedIn profile or website.

For example, you might say something like:

"I noticed that you posted about increasing insurance rates recently, great post!"

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 LinkedIn post from Eric Nowoslawski shows that AI personalized lines cause a lower response rate:

What should you do instead?

Instead of using AI tools, you should write your copy around an event or trigger that is relevant to your prospect.

Eric's post above mentions that writing your copy around a signal is the most effective way to reach out to people. I explain how you can do this in my article How To Create An Evergreen Cold Email Campaign.

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 AI generated, and will cause your leads to ignore you or mark your emails as spam.

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