Spam in a Can – Yuck!
Anyone who deals with mass communication via email knows the pains of trying to run a targeted outreach campaign at scale. Recruiters, salespeople and marketers alike want to connect and build relationships with people. It can be very difficult to do this when approaching cold through email. In our modern world, people have become adept at spotting mass generated and poorly automated content – and they HATE it.
The value of customized messaging, even just slightly tailored to the individual, can have a huge impact on the kind of engagement that follows. Let’s look at the most common problems and get a feel for how tailored content can relieve some pain:
What does customization accomplish?
People won’t waste time on you if you don’t spend time on them…
Poorly automated mistakes indicate you couldn’t take the time to reach out personally. Even people who understand the need to scale operations and automate certain parts of your outreach process still want you to take a couple minutes to evaluate them. Any relationship must be reciprocal – and this means that a prospect who feels you are not spending time on them will not bother spending time listening to you.
People want to feel like you care.
Often, automated mailing is impersonal and has to be generic to make sure the message can be broadcast to a large pool of prospects. In addition to showing that you couldn’t be bothered to spend a little time on that person, it also shows you don’t really care enough to. Calling someone by their name, mentioning the company they’re with and some of their accomplishments, demonstrates both care and research and this attention is easier to reciprocate.
Research demonstrates salience!
A little care and forethought can go a long way. These details show that you’ve done your homework and demonstrate that you have evaluated the person. The relationship you’d like to build is not a shot in the dark but rather, a carefully contemplated approach.
Yet, we need to build relationships NOW and we are very short on TIME!
We have a solution unlike anything else.
There are many options on the market that attempt to address the problems identified above. Dynamic variables that populate things like names and companies into a pre-formatted template can certainly go a long way to alleviating some of these issues. Teamable makes use of these as well. Teamable has also created a better solution to this problem by using a mixture of intricate NLP trained models and human eyes in the loop to generate a couple sentences about things such as tenure, current AND past company experience, special projects or skills that are worthy of note, and internships or involvement with interesting organizations.
The response rates speak for themselves:
The above chart shows the response rates by role type for campaigns with and without custom messaging. As we can see, the campaigns that include custom messaging (represented by the navy bars) will get more responses across almost every role type. Ok, great. But the big question is how will this translate to positive response rate?
Let’s look at the same breakdown but by positive response rates this time. We again see the power of custom messaging. Campaigns that contain custom messages outperform those without across almost every role type and in some cases by a large margin.
Custom messaging is a crucial and often overlooked detail, but at the end of the day, that customization gets you more responses, more interviews, and quicker, better hires.