Automation and personalization seem like opposites that can’t work together. Coming up with an email strategy that includes both might feel like trying to combine oil and water.
Thankfully, that’s not actually the case. There’s a way to blend personalized email outreach with the convenience of automated cadences. You can still scale up operations without having to choose between automation and personalization.
Let’s talk about the type of personalization that’s going to make the most impact on your sales – and how you can automate it.
How not to personalize emails
Every sales blog says that personalization is extremely important, but it can be a tricky balance. And what exactly does it mean to personalize an email to a relative stranger?
Let’s start with what effective personalization isn’t.
Some people will think you should reference a prospect’s alma mater or chat about the weather in their city.
The problem with this method? It can be a little creepy, and you don’t even know if the prospect really cares about what you’ve brought up. It’s a transparent attempt to force a connection using information that might not be all that relevant to your prospects’ day to day challenges and interests. And to top it off, when you try to personalize this way, you can come across as a salesperson’s worst fear: desperate.
Personalizing automated email sequences
When it comes to personalization at scale, you’re not going to be able to reference a unique, personalized thing for each recipient. But like we just covered above, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, anyway. When you don’t need to talk about each prospect’s hobbies or personal history, there’s more room for scaling up. So what does it look like?
Are dynamic fields enough?
It’s the first suggestion you see for personalizing your automated emails: “Add a dynamic field for their first name! Everyone responds well to seeing their name!”
This shouldn’t be a controversial statement, but addressing someone by name in an email isn’t exactly revolutionary. It may have been a big deal when the technology to automate dynamic fields was new, but at this point, that kind of detail is standard even for bulk emails. It doesn’t really count as personalization.
What if you add other dynamic fields like, say, the company name? Sure – it’s not a bad thing to include. But what’s the value it adds to your message?
The most effective kind of personalization is when you speak directly to someone’s pain points or goals. If you want it to work, you should offer up value that’s specific to their motivations. Is merely seeing their own name and company in an email really enough to drive them to learn more?
It’s all about segmentation
Personalization at scale is all in how you segment your email lists.
As we just addressed, the right way to personalize is to tailor your messaging based on specific goals, pain points, challenges, and motivators. Luckily, those kinds of details often apply to entire personas, not just individuals.
That means all you need to do to automate personalized emails is get real specific with your segmentation. Combine different elements to make a hyper-specific email list and write emails that match their interests down to the smallest details.
There are a lot of ways you can segment your lists, including:
- Stage in the buyers’ journey/funnel
- Job Function/role
- Industry
- Geography
- Seniority level
- Tech stack
- Revenue
- Recent funding
- Job changes (whether they’re new to a role)
- Intent signals
- Whether they’ve bought from you before
Now combine all the prospects who fit in your categories so you can deliver those relevant, personalized messages. For example, you could create a hyper-segmented list like: IT managers at medium-sized information security companies in the Dallas, TX metropolitan area who use a specific software. Even without doing individual research on these prospects, you can figure out messaging that will resonate personally with all of them.
Using Lusha for personalized email cadences
Now that you know how to personalize your automated cadences with hyper-personalized segmentation, the next step is to build out those lists and craft the accompanying emails.
Luckily, that’s easy to do with sales intelligence platforms like Lusha. Use filters to slice and dice your prospect search based on your specific persona groups. Save those contacts to a list that you can then use for your super-segmented email automation.
With Engage, you can create email cadences for those saved lists from right within the Lusha platform. It’s that simple!
Now that you know it’s this easy, what’s holding you back from trying out personalized emails at scale? Sign up for free and try for yourself.
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