Email campaigns and sales targets involving your outreach efforts are troubling at times. People seem to think that just sending an email is enough to make a difference. When you actually care about your results you notice that this isn’t so. And just like that, you might be wondering how you can hit the mark with most, if not all, your sales targets.
The answer is simple, personalization. If you’re tired of writing countless outreach emails and get little to none reply, then stick around to find more about how to use email personalization to crush your sales targets. Personalization holds the power to get you a decent reply rate and more engagement from your recipients.
To try and make this more educational let’s look at the differences between a basic cold email and a personalized one. While they both serve as a way to contact prospects and reach out to potential customers. Only the personalized cold email will provide the engagement needed from the recipient to actually make them get in touch with you.
Basic cold emails are the most commonly sent and provide little to no result in most cases. They’re impersonal, void of real emotion and human contact. Sent in large numbers regardless of the recipients. These certainly provide a good way to fail in your outreach endeavours. Again, this is how most people do outreach, it doesn’t mean is the best way.
Now that we’ve established that personalized emails are the best course of action. Let us give you some tips on how you can create and send personalized emails in your outreach campaigns.
Table of Contents
Your outreach emails are meant to serve as a connection between you and your prospects. So, take an interest, make sure that you care about who are your prospects. This means do your research about them and understand their situation.
Think of it as if you were making friends, except that it’s your brand looking for business partners or clients. Speak about their latest victory, about their interest and even about the problems they’re facing. This shows interest and commitment from your part, no to mention that makes the recipient more inclined to follow your call to action.
At the same time, this serves as a form of human contact and interaction. The more you personalize your cold emails with the way that you want to relate to others, the more personal and real they will feel.
You can most likely find information about a person or a brand in almost any social media platform. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are all good options from where to start your research. This should be done without raising any alarms of course. Go incognito and find out as much as you can from their situation.
More often than you might think people share insights about their work and company status in their personal pages. You can even contact customers to see if they would recommend services from your prospects and see what others think about them.
Remember that this is all just a way to get to your prospects. If you don’t have too much information about them ask yourself if maybe what you have is enough. Another good idea is to actually become a client in order to explore their business first hand.
As the bare minimum to actually have a chance you should know the name of your recipient. This is one of the key points from where personalization starts from. The first name of your recipient in the initial greeting. However, most email templates will recommend the same, the question becomes, how can I stand out from the rest?
What you want to do is to actually put the first name of your recipient in different places in the email. Let’s say the beginning and end of the email, for instances. Use the name in key sentences as this will help you make a stronger point and create a deeper engagement with your ideas.
What fuels connections is empathy so you want to sound as caring and organic as possible. This is one of the reasons that doing your research on your prospects is so important. You have to know what they’re going trough if you can expect to empathize with them.
Let’s say you’re an SEO agency and you’re reaching out to offer your services to a prospect. Ideally you would use their first name at the beginning of the sentence in which you offer advice on a problem and how to improve the SEO on their website.
The sentence would go along the lines of:
“Well {First name of the recipient}, I’ve looked at your website, you’ve done a great job with the graphics, but I have some advice on ways you can take the SEO on your front page to the next level.
It’s pretty simple, start by utilizing the H1 Tag and optimizing your meta descriptions with relevant keywords so you have a higher chance of ranking in search for those specific keywords.”
See how in the example above you can get the prospect to focus on your advice by using their name in the right place. Taking the cold email from a simple reach out to an actual valuable piece of information that will benefit their company, therefore adding more value to you.
Now, this is actually pretty important to understand. You know your prospect and know how to get their attention, but the main thing is knowing how to do the ask. Basically, what you want to do in your first emails is to ask questions that would provide you with more information about them and potential issues in which you can help.
Remember that one of the main things that you want to do is help them solve a problem, this adds value to you. Their success is your success.
This should be done as humane and as real as possible. Meaning, your recipients are human too. Think of the way that you would be inclined to answer a question if you were in their shoes. The way you ask for any information is also critical.
Look for information about what’s going on in their lives and businesses. What sort of challenges are they facing at the moment and what worries them at the moment. Use personalized outreach emails to create a connection and develop an interest in their lives. This will provide multiple opportunities to show your value later on.
The more precise the solution you offer the better. This shows that you understand their problems and genuinely care about solving them. Provided that you give an accurate solution, of course. In the case that you’re handling your outreach campaign with an automated delivery system, then this will make the prospect less likely to think that they’re receiving an automated email.
Keep in mind that automated emails and messages should be used after making the initial connection with the prospect. Once you’ve established a connection with them you can automatize part of your process. Before that, you have to get an idea of their issues and problems, or at least the most likely ones. Create different personalized emails that can accommodate various scenarios. This way you’ll have an answer for which ever problem your recipient has.
Sometimes you’ll come across some issues that will require your immediate attention and a manual answer. But nevertheless, the most likely scenario is that you and your recipient will be dealing with an issue that you have previously foreseen.
You can automatize most of your outreach effort without dehumanizing your emails. This is due to your prospect identifying with the person that sent the initial messages, you. This also makes it much more likely for your recipients to have similar problems or at least problems to which you can provide a similar solution.
You can cover all the main points of a sales email using a personalized call to action. So far, you’ve seen the wonders that personalization has to offer regarding your emails, the call to action can also benefit from this. Your call to action is the last push your prospect needs to get in touch with you, or do what your pitch intends them to do. In a recent study from HubSpot, it was found that personalized calls to action perform better than standard calls to action by 202%.
Much the same as writing the main body of an email, you can try different variants of personalized calls to action. Use them to accommodate to each stage of the prospecting process and their journey through your sales funnel. Base them on locations, interests, problems or issues and don’t forget to mention the prospect’s name.
Provide all that the prospect would need to follow your personalized call to action. Such as hyperlinks, references and more. Make sure to minimize the friction so that all your recipients have an easy time following your call.
Personalizing your signature can help you ease some of the tension an outreach email can carry. This is an easy yet powerful way to show your human and most organic side. You can disregard the standard corporate signature and use something a little bit more attuned to your style and your email. Sometimes your signature can even have a cool phrase or quote that would make you more memorable to your recipients.
Play a little with your job title and put a little humour into it. This does count as personalization and sometimes it’s a very welcomed one. Don’t forget that even in personalization you want to stand out and make your recipients notice you. One way to do this is by being funny, nothing speaks more about you than your sense of humour.
If you have a shared hobby, or other personal activity, with your recipients feel free to add it in a funny way to your job title. If you’re into working out try something like “Gym chief of bulk ups” or something of the like. Anything that brings people together in real life works too in the virtual world.
By showing a good attitude even at your work you’re positioning yourself as a nice person. One that is confident and other people like be around, this is a major bonus when doing outreach. Just take it easy for this part and let yourself go with the flow.
Everybody has high efficiency and low efficiency times, it’s just part of being human. Sometimes it does pay off in a great way to time your outreach in a way that gets you the attention of your intended recipient.
Most people think about sending emails when people are working or when they’re free. The reality is that neither of these times is ideal for you to send your outreach emails. Your efforts should be directed towards the time in which you know your recipient will be the most receptive. Use geolocation, work schedule and personal commitments to get an idea of what that time might be for your prospects.
Again, this is done using the data you’ve collected about your recipients. This also counts as personalization since your aim is to send the outreach email at the time you know your recipient will pay attention to it. Since the process can be automatized then you have little to worry about in that front. Use different metrics such as open rate and reply rate to get an idea of the success of your efforts.
If you need more help with this you can always visit our article about the best time of day to send an email.
Personalization can offer a lot more advantages than people seem to think. Most email marketers think of it as more work while in reality it’s a powerful tool to help you increase your reply rate and the engagement of your prospects. It’s not just about leaving your print is about the same thing as outreach emails, making a connection.
Make sure to employ the tips provided here and show the value you can offer your prospects. It’s always important to make a good impression, using personalization you’re guarantee that at the very least your recipients will take notice of your email.
Building an email list from scratch takes a lot of effort and time. Nothing is more frustrating than discovering that spam traps have infiltrated your email address. It is not unusual for spam traps to occur even if you follow email best practices. But if you communicate with your subscribers with the best intentions, care […]
Do you ever wonder whether an email address is a legitimate or a false email address when it bounces back? Probably the easiest method to handle this is to ping an email address, and in this article, we will demonstrate how to ping and validate an email address. Validating emails by pinging different addresses is […]
With everything becoming tech-based around us, it only makes sense that we turn to the internet for required services and needs. However, that is also when we truly feel the importance of "Emails." Today, an email account is the one thing that can help you sign up for any service or platform. It is one […]
Following the creation of your email lead list, email verification is one of the most critical phases in any email marketing campaign. If you don't verify your emails - all the hard work you put into your email marketing campaign essentially becomes worthless. Now you, along with many others, might be scared of your email […]
