4 Questions to Ask Yourself to Avoid Nightmarish Personalization

You can find so many examples of terrible AI emails with ghoulish personalization on the internet. Don’t get me wrong though – Personalizing your emails is important for successful outreach, but doing it wrong will hurt your chances of connecting with leads.

To stop this from happening to you, you’ll want to think carefully about any personalization you add to emails. Whenever I’m adding personalization, I ask myself these 4 questions.

TLDR: 

• The goal: Don’t use bad email personalization
• The tactic: Ask yourself 4 questions to assess personalization quality
• The result: Avoid bad personalization and lay a path for good

Question 1: Is it relevant and correct?

If the personalization is relevant, it shows you’ve done your homework and can anticipate their needs.

But don’t forget to make sure it’s correct. Outdated info will make your message look lazy, and using completely wrong info will leave a bad impression.

This applies even to the greeting of an email.

For instance, sometimes people use their middle initial for their LinkedIn profile to make them easier to find, even though they go by just their first name most of the time. If you’re scraping LinkedIn data, this might cause your email to start “Hi John M,”.

It might seem like a small difference, but it signals to them that you’re not writing the message.

But hey, on the bright side, at least the email didn’t start “Hi [first name].” 🙃

Question 2: Does it add value?

Empty personalization is like empty calories. It seems like a good idea at first, but there’s no value to having it.

Good personalization goes deep, beyond simple mentions of the name or company. While those details are nice, it’s just fluff.

Instead, personalization should offer something that addresses their challenge. This might be ways that your solution treats their problem, or social proof that mirrors their industry or case. However, this approach to deep personalization requires nailing down your buyer persona or customer profile.

Question 3: Am I being too familiar?

With personalization, it’s easy to cross the fine line between friendly and too familiar. Just because you know some snippets about a lead, it doesn’t mean you should act like you know them well.

Overly casual language or making too many assumptions about them can make leads uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out how you should speak with your target audience is through experience. This means running several A/B tests that experiment with different tones, writing styles, and even specific terms.

Also, don’t feel pressured to use all of your lead data, especially website visits. There’s nothing creepier than opening an email that reads, “Hey! I know you were on our website…”. 

Keep this data for lead scoring and qualification.

Question 4: Is it cliche or generic?

There are several pitfalls to watch out for when asking this question.

For example, don’t start your emails with generic, overused lines like:

• I hope this email finds you well.
• How are you? | How are you doing?
• Just following up… | Just touching base…

Likewise, while the P.S. section is a good spot for referencing personal details, don’t mention their school or university. Avoid the temptation of saying, “Roll Tide!”, “How ‘bout them Huskies?”, or “Nice to see another alum from X school!”

Instead, you’ll want to aim for a more genuine and specific approach that gets their attention, especially if you’re adding personalization to the main body, which is prime real estate for any email. 

After all, personalization is about making your message feel tailored like a brand-new tuxedo. Not one-size-fits-all. Generic wording makes an email sound like a huge blast that’s going out to anyone. 

Make sure to stop cliches from creeping into your emails, especially around the holiday period. Readers are probably tired of seeing the same-old Halloween references like “Frightfully good” or “No tricks, just treats”.

And puns. No puns like “Spook-tacular”, “Jingle all the way to more revenue”, “All I want for Christmas is more leads”. At this point, you’re just forcing personalization.

Result

Generally speaking, no personalization is better than bad personalization. 

So while these 4 questions don’t provide a personalization framework, they will keep you in check so you don’t:

• Use outdated or incorrect details
• Rely on empty personalization
• Strike the wrong tone

At AiSDR, we carefully design our AI persona prompts so that (a) personalization never sounds nightmarish or forced, and (b) personalization goes deep and narrow instead of broad and unfocused.