Automated vs. personalized email response rates?

by a searcher from University of California, Berkeley - Haas School of Business

Mar 18,2021

Hello searchers,

I am an associate helping a search fund on the West Coast, and we are starting to reach out to prospective sellers. We already have access to a CRM sales tool that will allow us to send automated emails to leads with some degree of personalization - e.g., changing company name and the contact's role from email to email - but we also wanted to test the response rate of writing highly personalized, targeted emails to a few targets.

Has anyone conducted such an experiment and can comment on the effectiveness of each?

Thanks a lot and good luck on your searches,

Henrique

7 likes
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12 comments

professional

Seeing the response on the post, it is sure that the personalizing emails work really well in increasing response rate.

I have done similar project for clients, where I did research on every single leads in their email database, to find some information that would be only relevant to them. It could be something they have shared on LinkedIn posts, their about section, something on their website, etc.

Would like to help doing the personalized research for someone who wants to save some time.

01/12/2022 | like reply | 0 likes

searcher from Indiana University at Bloomington

Yes. I ran an experiment earlier this year. Cold email response rates were 7-10%, with personalization (eg name, co name, industry) whereas personalized emails had a 30-45% response rate in co's with $1-5M EBITDA. Smaller cos in the $500k-1M EBITDA range had higher response rates on personalized email (just wasn't our focus). Data set tested was###-###-#### carefully selected leads. Hope this helps.

12/22/2021 | like reply | 1 like

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