Why using personalization is crucial:
Personalizing your email outreach messaging is essential to the return on your efforts. Using strong personalization will take your campaigns from lackluster to impressive. When a contact receives a message with his or her name, addressing pain points, establishing mutual connections, or giving a compliment or praise, a cold email is perceived as warm.
In order to create and foster meaningful relationships with your prospects, you must connect with them on a human level, not just their position or title. Also, you can connect with these people on different levels by identifying data on the industry, persona, and individual levels. Identifying these points will drastically improve your outreach.
- Industry – Revenue, location, industry, recent events and news, winning awards or achievements, technology platforms used, company size, receiving funding
- Individual – contacts details, job title, recent social media activity, authored content, interests, etc
- Persona – current goals in role, position/industry challenges, motivations, daily duties, common skills in position, software/platforms/tools they use, publications online and relevant content
Additionally, addressing concerns, fears, or plans of your potential prospects creates a sense of trust and familiarity through your emails. If you’re sending to a list of 1000 people, only about 3% of those people are actively looking to buy. So looking at your list, do they identify that pain point you’re speaking to? Are they the right person for your message? Rather than sending the same message to 1000 people, it is much more effective to send your message after being contextualized and personalized: Is this a trouble they face or something they deal with? Then follow up. It may not be a pain point for them at this time, but they could say that they anticipate dealing with this in the future, perhaps next quarter.
What tools you can use to help personalize your messaging:
There are innumerable ways to utilize personalization in your email outreach. These range from least effort (using merge tags to address a contact by name) to more effort (crafting an email specifically for an individual detailing your rapport). When developing cold email messaging, each contact deserves a different level of personalization. With all the approaches, here are a few of the most common and effective ways and tools to use for cold email personalization.
- Refine your searches by buyer persona with company type with LinkedIn. Use more detailed search filters to focus the results. Then use tools like GetProspect, FindthatLead, or Snov.io to locate more contact details.
- Find your competitor’s social channels and groups to identify potentially interested contacts. If a prospect is engaging with posts about marketing, for example, and you are a marketing company, this prospect is likely interested in your service. You could use a tool like Phantombuster to pull data from these channels/groups and then enrich them with data from LinkedIn or hunter.io.
- Look for competing or complementary products to yours and identify those that are likely to be interested in your product. You can use TexAu to gather the information and then use LinkedIn to develop more contact information and buyer persona points. The list won’t all be people actively interested in your product; perhaps some of these may be family and friends of the program developers supporting. But the majority of this list will be. This campaign will yield significantly higher positive responses compared to sending to simply sales directors.
- People who have recently started in a new job role are more likely to make new purchasing decisions. Use LinkedIn to save searches for prospects who have started a new position. You could also use seamless.ai to locate their contact information. Then you can start a conversation based on the fact that they have recently started a new job. They may be more likely to be searching for new technology solutions, for example, and may not be loyal to the company’s current setup or tools.
- Use an intent data platform like LeadSift to identify prospects talking to your competitors or who have given signals that they’re ready to buy. If you reach out to contacts who have given social signals that indicate buying interest, then you can begin to position yourself as a trusted advisor adding value and education to people who you know are interested. Rather than just someone pitching to them, start conversations with prospects at their best time.
What happens after you’ve performed all this research:
After doing all this research, now what? Now it’s time to organize your data/results:
- Collate (organize by groups)
- Clean (remove out any contacts whose information indicates they are not a good match for your target persona)
- Verify (use a tool like Anymailfinder to be sure your contacts’ emails are legitimate
- Segment (use different campaigns with a personalized copy to each targeted audience)
- Further personalize (use merge tags like in email automation platforms like Mailshake or Wavo).
Now you are ready to start your campaigns with accurate, effective, personalized messaging! You’ve learned a key strategy to successful email outreach.
