Automated Vs. Personalized Email Response Rates?

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03/18/2021 Redacted Redacted

searcher University of California, Berkeley - Haas School of Business

AUTOMATED VS. PERSONALIZED EMAIL RESPONSE RATES?

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

6 likes 129 views 7 comments

searcher Jaipur National University - 03/19/2021

I have done something like this but for a client. My client asked me to find a piece of information which was unique to only the person that we are sending emails to.

So I prepared the email database, then used LinkedIn to find information about each lead then entered it in a separate column. Though it looked good, but I am unaware of the results it brought as I have done list building not actual campaign.

I can show you how it looked like and you can try something similar, let me

like reply | 0 likes

professional Villanova University - Villanova School of Business - 03/19/2021

Hi Henrique. I do a lot of this in my work, obviously there is a high degree of risk reward here (how much time do I spend researching and personalizing a message vs. the potential outcome). My findings are that personalized emails definitely do have higher response rates, although I am unsure of an exact number. A big part of the equation is getting the email opened in the first place (timing, subject line, greeting).

My recommendation would be the following: prioritize your targets, an

like reply | 0 likes

searcher Harvard University - Harvard Business School Northeastern University - 03/20/2021

Depending on the source of your leads, you might already have additional personalization points that can be easily added, like the year founded / age of the business, city, state and industry (industry can be tough though, since getting it wrong is a big hit to credibility). The next level down is of course truly individualized points like noticing recent certifications, milestones, achievements etc. I would test both types separately and together to understand the payoff vs. the effort.

like reply | 1 like

searcher University of California, Berkeley - Haas School of Business - 03/21/2021

Thanks Kevin and Dan, extremely helpul! I will post my results here as soon as I have a meaningful data set.

like reply | 0 likes

searcher Lafayette College - 03/21/2021

Anecdotal only, but highly-personalized is a 3-4x response rate in my experience to what you’re getting from less personalized.

like reply | 1 like

searcher University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School Yale University - 03/21/2021

Agree with Michael. Anecdotal information here as well, but at least 2x response rates. There are probably additional benefits to personalizing and offering a clear value proposition that extend beyond whether or not the prospective seller simply responds, e.g. how likely are they to continue the conversation?

like reply | 2 likes

searcher École Centrale Paris - 05/12/2021

Hi Henrique, we experienced a twice bigger response rate when taking on average[redacted]minutes to personalize the reach-out rather than just putting company industry generic phrases. Nonetheless, we bear in mind that our samples are quite small and might not be representative, so even for us it's still not clear whether it's the most optimized way to reach out, nonetheless, we are for the time being very happy with the results and pain/ gain balance so we continue personalizing :)

like reply | 0 likes

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