How to personalize at scale without pitch slapping (Email and LinkedIn)

Do you want results like these? 👇

You need personalization that is relevant, resonates, and is scaleable.

So, in this article you’ll get:

• Traditional messages + how you can improve them
• Lead gen tactics that add relevancy to your message
• Personalization tactics that you can use at scale
• Examples of how to make your transitions between channels as smooth as butter
• An extra personalization and relevancy example in action, just for you 😘

Basically, a fully packed tool box for your personalization.

What should a personalized message look like?

If you’ve been on LinkedIn for a while you’ve probably received lots of these messages:

These are the classic messages where someone adds you on LinkedIn and immediately goes in for a pitch or for a thread of messages leading up to the pitch (AKA a pitch slap).

On the other hand, we have a very basic approach to personalization, such as this:

They are personalized messages (and even use some good targeting tactics) but they are missing one key thing - a point that resonates.

None of us are immune to this, and prospecting - especially when social selling is involved - can be really hard, which leads us to the next question:

How to change this?

So how do you create a hyper-personalized LinkedIn message or email that your leads like reading?

The key is:

1. Be relevant
2. Use the right tone + language that resonates
3. Start a friendly conversation

Check out this example:

It’s a super casual message that seems like he is talking to a friend instead of a prospect, he did some research on the lead and lemlist, and he asked a question related to a problem he can solve.

But here’s the real question—how do you make your LinkedIn outreach scalable?

Step 1: Reach out only to the right leads

Reaching out to a smaller number of leads with more personalization will get you better leads that will convert and stay. But by properly segmenting and niche targeting your leads you’re also setting yourself up to scale your prospecting.

And more importantly, without segmenting your leads you won’t be able to do personalization at scale.

It may seem like too much work, but fear not. lemlist has your back with this G-Sheet add-on that will allow you to clean, segment, and enrich your leads!

• Use killer targeting tactics

Here’s how you can do it:

• Pick a targeting tactic that reaches your target audience
• Use this tactic to relate to your audience and make your message relevant

Example: Say I’m a rep for a lead gen agency that's trying to find new clients.

How can I find good prospects for my lead gen agency? I would use a combo of two targeting tactics: companies that recently got funded + are growing their sales teams.

If they just got funding it shows that they are investing in growth and client acquisition.If they are hiring a sales team, this indicates that they might need some help getting lead gen efforts up and running.

And here’s how I would go about finding these leads:

1. Go to LinkedIn Sales Navigator and filter accounts with funding events and department headcount growth

2. Filter this list according to your target audience (company headcount, industry, etc.)

And voilà, I have a list of profiles that could be interested in a service like mine, a (hypothetical) lead gen agency.

3. So the next step would be to find the actual leads and their info to add to my sales automation tool.

Make sure you use the new lemlist Chrome Extension.Select the amount of leads you wish to push to the lemlist campaign of your choice:

It’ll take you less than two minutes to add your leads to your campaign lists.If you want, you can edit any leads’ information directly in the app.Now your leads are ready to start your campaign

Step 2: Humanize automated outreach

The most important part of multichannel outreach is making it all seem natural - like you are really talking to someone.

• Pretend you’re not using automation

‍And the best way to do this is to ask yourself: what would I do if I didn't have automation tools? How would you reach out to these leads?

Well, the first thing you would do is try to get to know them a little better, right?

At first glance, all you know about the person is probably their job title, name, and their company. However, this is not enough information to send them a truly personalized message.

So here's what you should do to make the message something they want to respond to:

1. Click on their name to check out their LinkedIn profile.

Try to dig a little deeper than name and job title.

2. Skim their About and Experience sections.

You can also get a tooon of info from their activity, company page, website, and job ads.

You can also automate this process.

By adding your leads’ LinkedIn URL to your campaign, lemlist will automatically integrate all of your leads’ LinkedIn data and will generate up to 5 hyper-personalized icebreakers.

3. Engage with some of their content.

Just pick one of their latest posts that really resonates with you and leave a good comment.

But note here that you don’t want to make it seem unnatural, if they haven’t posted in a couple of months and the latest one wasn’t something you can leave a good comment on, skip doing this.

Quick tip: Your engagement on their posts will go over even better if you have an established LinkedIn content strategy, so when they click on your profile they can see that you’re a real person with a position in the market.

4. Go in with a message.

But remember we’re acting as if we don’t have any automation tools here, so I would add a completely personalized message according to the research I did.

But in reality, we will automate this process, you just need to add all of them as steps in your campaign.

It would be:

• Step 1: View LinkedIn profile
• Step 2: Send a LinkedIn message (or better yet, a voice message)
• Step 3: Invite LinkedIn profile with a message

And look something like this:

• ‍Add personalization to the automation

So when you’re going to create the Invite, you would add a message to your connection request.

But since we are personalizing it, you’ll use a 100% personalized sentence (the {{icebreaker}} tag for lemlist users) for your entire message.

But let’s make this more actionable, here’s the icebreaker/message I would create for the lead in the example I was using above:

And if you do this while you’re doing the research it takes less than a minute to fill this in.

Quick tip: Try taking advice from 30 minutes to president’s club - type out your message in a text to a friend. This gets you in a better mindset to write something natural.

• Use lemlist’s AI variables

lemlist’s AI variables will scrape all of your leads information and create unique and highly personalized content that is tailored to your leads’ specific data.

Step 3: Personalize your outreach at scale

At this point you’ve done all the research you need, now it’s all about creating your hard touch steps—the personalized emails.

• Repurpose your personalized sentence

Our secret sauce at lemlist is to go in with an email, but use the same icebreaker as you did in the LinkedIn message to start your email.

Check out what I would say if I was a lead gen agency:

So I use the exact same personalized sentence from my LinkedIn message (the icebreaker) but the key here is that once I’m done creating my sequence and adding all my leads I’ll modify the sentence slightly for each lead:

• My original personalized sentence for this lead was: “Hey Gaëtan! Looks like you guys are hiring like crazy rn - I’m guessing part of that plan to expand in your key markets. Anyways, it’s awesome following your guys’ hyper-growth!”
• I would modify it to something like: “You’re probably pumped to be seeing all those applications pour in! I know PayFit has been quite a buzz in the French market, and I’m sure you guys have some cool plans coming up.”

Simply go to “review” and edit the sentence before sending the campaign. Easy peasy.

• Personalize through relevancy

You can personalize according to the targeting tactics you used to find your leads.

This way you aren’t doing any extra research, but you are relating to your leads and creating a message that resonates.

Take a look at that email from above:

Other than the personalized sentence, I didn’t use any other forms of hyper-personalization. Just the basic stuff like first name and company name.

But I’m relating back to the people I targeted—scale-ups that are hiring in their sales teams.

And I’ll use this same tactic in the following steps so I don’t have to add any heavy personalization.

Check it out 👇

• Step 5: follow-up email

Notice the entire email is made as a template, but it feels personalized and relevant for each lead.

• Step 6: LinkedIn profile visit
• Step 7: LinkedIn message

Then go in with a value-added message on LinkedIn.

But the message shouldn't use any crazy personalized tags— just adding value based on the information already known about them.

Do this by sharing a free resource that really helped you in the past (it's important to be sincere). Don't ask for anything at this point, that comes in the close 👇

• Step 8: Closing email

You can finish the sequence off by hitting one last pain point the leads face—making sure the people you hire have everything they need to perform well.

Then include something to help them visualize what their future could look like, and go in for the meeting ask.

Another tip to help create solid messages 👇

• Start a conversation and convert leads

To make your messages seem natural, but also ensure you aren’t being friend-zoned by your prospects you want to go in with a two-step approach:

1. Ask qualifying questions to start up a conversation
2. After talking (or in the next step of the campaign) go in for the meeting ask

Normally your leads have responded at this point so you would be able to talk a bit about your qualifying question and create a real conversation. Then when it feels right, you’ll ask if they are open to a call.

This keeps you far away from the prospecting friend zone.

But there is one last important thing you need to add to your sequence to make your multichannel sequences seem natural and flow well…

Step 4: Connect your automated outreach steps naturally

How often do you recognize the same name in your LinkedIn and email inboxes?

You are most likely getting messages from the same people across several channels, but when you’re caught up in the thick of it your priority is not at all on making this connection.

So then why do we expect our leads to do this?

So here are a couple of tips to avoid this and make sure your messages are remembered:

• Mention the previous “hard” touches in the subject line or first line of your email
• Use phrases like “Remember…” or “Taking our (other channel) here” when you switch channels

This way your leads can go back and read the message if they haven’t already, or they are reminded of your previous message. Plus it gives it a much more natural feel, not like you’re just trying to spam them on any channel possible.

Personalization at scale example

• Pick a relevant lead gen tactic

For this example, I’m going to be a rep for a legal tech company.

First up: find good leads. In this case I’m going to try to use LinkedIn.

Instead of using a Sales Nav feature or even a regular search, I’m going to use the event search. And I’ll specifically look for events related to “legal tech”, “legal innovation”, “law digitalization”, etc.

Why? This gets me leads I know are interested in learning about my subject.

• Find your leads

So after a quick search, I figured out it was better to search a broad keyword since digitalization of the legal sector is quite a niche topic.

Here’s what this search looked like:

‍

Then I went through the results quickly and determined which event would be the best.

I found “Webinar: Roadmap to digital transformation in legal departments”, which is perfect for the audience I want to target and has a solid amount of attendees.

So now I know my leads are present on this channel and that I can find a way to get in touch with them. Which takes us to…

• Getting info about leads

Next, I’ll just click on the event, and then hit “attend”. At this point, it takes you to the event details and you’ll just need to click on “Networking”.

Check it out:

You’ll see a list of the attendees, so just click “see all” and you have everyone attending this event. Then you’ll use the basic LinkedIn filters on top of this to narrow the list down to your target audience (current position, location, industry, etc.). Now you’re ready to roll.

Just launch the lemlist extension and add all these leads to your campaign. You scrape all their data and it automatically adds them to the specific campaign.

• Craft your personalized sequence

Our campaign will lead with relevancy and use some light personalization.

So after we have gone to the event, we’ll use the information discussed to craft our message.

It's a really casual message (while still being professional given the sector), adds a ton of relevancy by relating to leads, and asks a discovery question that seems natural.

Then I would go in with a LinkedIn profile invite + connection message, mentioning I saw they also attended the event and wanted to connect.

After that, the rest of my hard steps would be sure to add value.

For instance, in step 5 I would probably share a guide to modernizing legal teams, then in follow-ups mention a case study, etc.

But keep in mind, I'm never talking about what I'm selling—just trying to start a conversation.

And there you have it! Personalization at scale while adding relevancy and value for leads 😎

Key Takeaways

Your goal is to connect with other humans, so try to be yourself as much as possible. It’s more natural that way, right?

Joke around with your leads a bit and insert little indicators of your personality in your messages.

Oh, and if you’re looking for a sales engagement tool that connects all your channels and gives you multichannel reports, check out our sales engagement features.