Automated vs. personalized email response rates?

March 18, 2021

by a searcher from University of California, Berkeley - Haas School of Business in Albany, CA, USA

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

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Reply by a professional
from University of Southern California in North Palm Beach, FL, USA

Here’s what’s worked well, for decades, worldwide, for my searcher/buyer clients: Highly personalized for the targets (and adequately identifying the searcher); mailed directly from the searcher to the correct contact at the targeted companies. And, sometimes, the searcher’s outreach is preceded or supplemented by search letters (and other kinds of outreach) to the targets using my letterhead and other kinds of representations. This has been especially useful for first-time buyers, because (naturally) owners, brokers and others are leery of revealing situations to people who might not be sufficiently motivated or qualified to achieve a fair done deal within a reasonable time.

Keep in mind that you only get once chance to make the best first impression. It is not a good idea to practice your search techniques on owners/sellers/brokers.

Especially today, thanks to an increasing amount of buyer competition.

DM me with your email address if you want details to continue our conversation.

Reply by a searcher
from University of Illinois at Chicago in Montague, MI, USA

Personalized is always better. I've been getting 50-60% response rates using templates but personalizing them before sending out. It works well with small batches... large ones will need automation, but you can use email and marketing automation tools to sequence and customize the emails before sending them out.

One thing with customization that works well is to go beyond the company name. I like to add some details to show I have gone through their website or products, such as a reference to a specific post and how I connected or liked it, or something along those lines. The key is to be as chill as possible and less salesy.

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