What are your thoughts on this personalization approach for outreach emails?
The goal with personalization is to keep it informal and incidental—basically as human as possible. You don’t want a long, generic intro like “Hello, I’ve been following your agency for a while…”. Instead, keep it super short: a one‑liner that mentions you’ve been following them for a hot minute, a quick compliment, and a reference to a specific post that resonated with you. Combine that with a subject line that feels like a personal teaser, e.g., “Nick, how’s it going?” or “Nick, loved your post on paraphrase”. The idea is to make the email feel like a casual, familiar note so the recipient is compelled to click, even if they get hundreds of pitches a day. In short, aim for ultra‑casual, concise, and context‑specific personalization.
Even with zero credibility you can still get traction by using a conversational tone in your outreach. Write longer, personalized emails that give context about who you are, what you’re building, and why you’re reaching out. Make it sound like a genuine conversation rather than a sales pitch. This approach works well for beginners because it feels authentic and helps you stand out from the generic offers flooding inboxes. Give it a try – the personal, story‑driven style often lands the first leads when you don’t have a brand reputation yet.
First, a 2 % reply rate isn’t terrible, but there’s room for improvement. Personalizing only the first line of an email is no longer enough—everyone does that now. Think of personalization as a foundational strategy rather than a tactical tweak. The core idea is to build an icebreaker that shows you’ve actually researched the prospect, not just scraped their name.
Start with an icebreaker that combines a genuine compliment with a paraphrased reference to something they posted on LinkedIn, Facebook, or their website. For example, “Hey Nick, I deeply respect your work, especially your recent post about AI‑driven marketing.” To create the paraphrased part, pull a specific detail from their content, feed it to AI, and ask it to rewrite it in your own voice. This makes the prospect feel you took the extra step to understand them.
Next, add an identification line that tells who you are and why you’re reaching out. Keep it short: “I’m a marketer who helps agencies like yours generate $1‑5 k of monthly revenue using AI‑enhanced outreach.” Mention a concrete credential or past success—e.g., “When I ran PR campaigns for Forbes‑level publications, I saw 20 % reply rates.”
Follow the icebreaker and ID with social proof: cite a recent win that’s relevant to the prospect’s industry. For instance, “Last week I delivered $8,390 in revenue in two months for a Sydney‑based marketing agency similar to yours.”
Finally, present a clear offer: “I’m confident I can replicate—or even improve—those results for you.”
Test multiple variations. Write at least ten different icebreakers and identification lines, then pit them against each other to see which combination yields the highest response. By focusing on deep research, personalized paraphrasing, concise self‑identification, and strong social proof, you’ll move well beyond the 2 % baseline and achieve much higher reply rates.
Both approaches have value, so you should do them simultaneously. If you’re planning to send 30‑40 emails a day, aim for 30 rather than 40 to stay sustainable. Start with a manageable number—20 emails per day for the first week, then increase to 30. Build systems that let you work faster: split your daily volume between two types of outreach. Send about half of the emails (15) with deep personalization and the other half (15) with a custom asset, like a sample or a strategy document. Create two or three reusable custom‑asset templates so you can quickly generate them for each prospect, and also develop two or three deep‑personalized email templates where you can swap in variables. This hybrid approach lets you showcase value up front while still tailoring each message, increasing the chances of landing a call and eventually a client.
The lowercase writing style implies he actually wrote it himself, which is a good sign if he's pitching copywriting services, but the line itself is grammatically off ('this is unoutreach' isn't a real phrase) — something like 'unlike everyone else in your DMs, I'm not here to steal your time and money to prove that' reads much better. I also like framing like 'I know the way to get ahead in this industry is to provide value upfront, so here's a bunch of value' before linking the asset. Using a Google Doc for the asset is smart — you can pack in extra links inside the doc without hurting your email deliverability the way multiple links in the email body itself would. And to go further with personalization, reference specific things about the person to prove you actually researched them, not just their business — I had someone build me an entire SaaS app in Lovable based on the principles from one of my videos and then reach out with it as their outreach, which is an extreme but very effective example if you genuinely like the person you're reaching out to.