How to personalize sales emails at scale

Picture the perfect sales email. You know, the kind where you tie in a prospect’s recent LinkedIn post or echo their company’s latest triumph. It feels great to hit send on something so tailored, but scaling that effort for hundreds of emails? That’s where it gets tricky.

Don’t worry — you’re not alone in this. Let’s explore how you can keep it personal while still keeping up with your inbox — without missing a beat.

Use highly-customizable templates

Using templates for your sales emails is a great starting point for ramping up personalization efforts. With high-quality templates at your disposal, you can maintain consistency across your campaigns while still adding a personal touch — just make sure you’re prioritizing customizability. At the very least, personalized sales emails should be tweaked to suit different customer segments and personas.

Outreach’s Blueprints feature strikes a balance between being customizable and efficient. It provides a framework for creating baseline email sequences that can be cloned and adapted as needed, depending on a variety of factors. With Blueprints to streamline the process, you’re able to maintain a high degree of personalization while building connections with prospects at scale — even with cold emails.

Pay special attention to subject lines

Subject lines are crucial as they often determine whether an email is opened or ignored. Personalizing subject lines to reflect the recipient’s specific interests or recent interactions can dramatically increase open rates. Effective subject lines are concise, relevant, and directly tied to the recipient's needs or pain points.

Consider using the prospect’s name, referencing a recent event they attended, or touching on a specific pain point. Either way, it’s important to vary your automated emails with different subject lines and first paragraphs, but make sure you’re A/B testing and gathering data on what resonates most with your audience. With Outreach's insights and tools, you can boost your personalized sales email strategy by crafting and testing subject lines to engage and convert.

Leverage account-based selling & persona-based messaging

Account-based selling (ABS) and persona-based messaging are more than useful sales engagement tactics — they’re strategies that drive personalization at scale. 

Account-based selling and persona-based messaging are sales engagement strategies that leverage personalized content. By understanding and segmenting your audience into distinct personas or accounts, you can craft messages that speak directly to the concerns and preferences of each group — which increase relevance and effectiveness of your communications.

Account-based selling treats a group of select accounts as individual markets. ABS has the highest ROI go-to-market strategy, driving close to a 75% increase in ACV (average contract value) on average and over 150% in LTV (long-term value). For every five accounts targeted, a new opportunity in a target account is created — that’s uptick in new opportunities to the tune of 20%

So, how does this all fit into personalized sales emails? By focusing on an ABS and persona-based approach, your sales emails can be crafted to resonate deeply with the specific needs and interests of the personas in each market.

Crafting high-touch and low-touch email sequences

When implementing an ABS and persona-based strategies, you need to differentiate between high-touch and low-touch tactics to tailor interactions to different segments. For example, high-value prospects (say, the head of marketing at your target account) warrant a high-touch approach, with a greater volume of in-depth, personalized engagement. Whereas lower-value prospects (say, a digital marketing lead), while still relevant, aren’t as high of a priority. 

Here's how you can structure your email sequences for each.

High-touch email tactics

• Personalize emails for each high-value prospect.
• Include targeted thought leadership content that aligns with goals and challenges.
• Schedule calls and engage on social media for a more comprehensive experience.

Low-touch email tactics

• Make initial emails semi-personalized based on role or industry.
• Use automated follow-ups to engage consistently.
• Keep the conversation going with a mix of emails, calls, and social media interactions. 

Consider A/B testing

A/B testing is for more than just your subject lines. You need to conduct A/B testing to fine-tune all the strategies underpinning your personalized sales emails to make decisions based on real data. If you don’t know which personalization tactics are engaging your prospects and driving your sales pipeline, you might as well be walking through a maze blindfolded.

Outreach’s A/B testing tool replaces guesswork with certainty. It delivers precise, data-driven insights by allowing you to test and analyze your emails in a variety of ways, from subject lines to content personalization. The tool can also isolate and test single variables, allowing you to get methodical about driving actionable results. 

Reuse content that works

Creating dynamic content is a worthwhile investment. At the same time, you don’t want to sacrifice efficiency for quality. As you’ve been monitoring, tracking, and A/B testing, put all that data to good use by reusing content that struck a chord with your personas. 

Cloning content (or sequences in Outreach) allows you to repeat the success of your best-performing emails, templates, and strategies — saving you time and creating overall consistency in your messaging. When a specific sequence proves to be effective in terms of engagement, open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and more, you can quickly duplicate it and apply it to other campaigns. 

By reusing proven-to-work content, you optimize your sales process and compound your successes instead of starting from scratch each time. With Outreach, you’re empowered to upcycle your best content to give it a new life and create new opportunities to make your personalized sales emails more impactful.

Schedule emails strategically 

Frequency and timing are as critical as the content of your emails. Consider scheduling emails based on when recipients are most likely to read them, based on time zones and typical behavior for your target persona or industry. 

Most importantly, avoid bulk emails sent from the same domain with the same content in a short window of time. Platforms like Outreach allow organizations to place limits on the number of emails a domain can be sent in one day, to avoid being labeled as spam. Sequence throttles also help limit bulk email sends and prevent prospects from receiving similar messaging in a 24-hour window. This acts as a drip-release, sending content every 24 hours so that your reps’ workflows won’t be impacted, but you can control the total output.

Outreach’s personalized approach to sales prospecting

If you want to improve how your sales teams prospect and manage accounts, schedule a free workflow audit with the Outreach team. We help team design, measure, and improve the way teams approach account planning, inbound and outbound prospecting, and account development workflows — so that every rep can sell like a top performer.