And How To Send Personalized Emails At Scale With Instantly.ai

In this blog post, we will show you how we doubled our reply rates using personalized first lines in our email campaigns. We will go over everything you need to know to boost your reply rates and get more leads flowing in by using custom-made opening sentences.

What are personalized first lines?

Simply put, personalized first lines are opening sentences that are custom made for the person opening the email, followed by the generic offer you are presenting.

Here’s an example:

The first line is the most important part of any email. This is your chance to captivate the reader and stand out from the crowd. Truth is, people are getting bombarded with cold emails every day and nothing makes them close the email faster than being faced with generic, salesy, and automated emails - you know exactly what we mean.

Show that you have actually taken a look at your target’s business, offer, or product by starting with a personal and relevant first line. An additional benefit of looking at all these different websites, offers and value propositions of your prospects is that you’ll get a much deeper understanding of the market and where they’re at.

You’ll learn their lingo, how they position themselves, what’s important to them…

This will allow you to create more compelling email copy and sales arguments in general. So you can combine your outreach activity with market research of sorts.

How to create personalized first lines?

Personalized lines could be created either manually or using an automated tool. We have found that manually created first lines work the best for improving reply rates and positive reply rates. However, it’s a matter of prioritizing time over quality and vice versa.

Out of all automated tools we’ve used we recommend https://lyne.ai/

The easiest way to manually create personalized first lines is to compliment people or businesses on their recent achievements, blog posts, product releases or experience. Here are examples for each of these categories:

1) Complimenting achievements: “I loved reading your story on Impact Innovation! It is impressive how you've grown from £6m to £19m!”

2) Complimenting blog posts: “I love the blog on your website, especially the post about seasonal skincare tips! I will certainly try a few of them!”

3) Complimenting product release: “Wow! The new Skeleton Band looks amazing, it will certainly be super successful!”

4) Complimenting experience: “Already in business for 35 years? That’s honestly super impressive in such a competitive field!”

5) Complimenting impressive case studies or clients: “Love the campaign you guys did for Nike, looks super fresh.”

It has been shown in studies that 47% of people prefer to open emails based on attractive opening lines, which can be seen under the subject line without even opening the email. This has been proven time and time again by our own data - emails with personalized first lines see a 2x improvement in reply rates and a significant boost in open rates across all industries and offerings.

If you haven’t already, you should definitely incorporate personalized first lines into your cold email outreach strategy!

And Instantly.ai makes it super easy to integrate first lines in your outreach campaigns.

This is how you can send out personalized emails at scale with Instantly.ai

Step 1) Prepare a lead list in Google Sheets or Excel and add a column named Personalization.

Step 2) Write your personalized lines manually or use Lyne.ai

Step 3) Upload the lead list to your Instantly campaign. It will automatically detect the personalization column and attribute the {{Personalization}} tag.

Step 4) Insert the {{Personalization}} variable in your body copy.

And that's it. As simple as 1-2-3.

Ready to scale personalized outreach?

Try Instantly.ai for free :)