#1. Start personalising from the greeting

One of my favorite topics in sales development is email outreach personalization at scale. So every time I create a new email template, I think:

1. Which Template Variables beside {{FirstName}} and {{Company}} I can use

2. Are those Variables scalable (meaning can we find the required information for each prospect}?

3. Would those variables increase email "warmness" and the likelihood to respond?

4. How long would it take to implement this experiment (and would it be possible to automate the approach in the future)?

Finding a common language with the prospects

A few years ago, as I was rewriting our outbound sequences, it got me thinking: there should be a way to start personalizing the emails from the very beginning - from the greeting 👋

This idea seemed to tick all of the boxes I mentioned earlier. So I decided to dig a little deeper.

As many other teams, we typically use Hi {{FirstName}}, Hey {{FirstName}} or even just {{FirstName}} as a greeting line.

But since we’ve been collecting prospects' location they specify on Linkedin like City, State, and Country, I thought - what if we started using Country field to replace Hi or Hey with a greeting in the prospect’s native language?

For example, if a prospect lives in the US, we could still say "Hi", but if a prospect lives in Spain, we would say "Hola". That could potentially help us increase reply rates 🤔

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How to do that?

So we rolled our sleeves and got straight to work.

To start with, we downloaded the list of all countries that our prospects come from.

Next, we googled for the word "Hi" in different languages.

After that, we built a custom formula in Airtable that matches "Hi" based on prospects' location.

Finally, we created a new custom variable in Reply (our sales engagement platform) called {{Greeting}} to store that greeting.

Thus, each prospect in our sequence would get a slightly more personalized and more human email.

And though I haven't specifically measured the results of this experiment, we've been using this tactic for the last couple of years and have received many positive responses complimenting it 🙌

P.S. You can also take this approach a step further and personalize a few more lines in your email templates using the Country filed, e.g.:

• an opening question "How are you doing?"

• a sign-off or P.S. line wishing them a great day

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Can I help you?

Do you want me to help you with this outreach tactic? Leave a comment and I will contact you.