Heather Morgan

Also known as “the economist who bitches about cold emails,” Heather is the CEO and founder of SalesFolk, a consultancy that helps B2B organizations create highly scalable email campaigns that still sound like one-on-one conversations.

SalesFolk has helped 490+ companies optimize their response rates, adding millions of dollars to their sales revenue.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Heather’s success

Personalizing cold emails

Result if you follow the steps in Heather’s session

Learn to personalize your emails and increase positive response rates

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

The lower your numbers are as far as positive response goes, the more you probably want to think about personalization to increase those numbers. Although personalization doesn’t always increased numbers.

In fact, it can sometimes not increase anything at all or even decrease, because it might come across as like creepy or just ingenuine, depending on what the information you’re saying is how you’re saying it, and the context.

So let me give you an example. If I say, like I saw on LinkedIn that you do Title X, that company, why that doesn’t actually show me anything other than you were stalking me on LinkedIn, and you probably want to sell me something. So that’s not that useful.

And if you see that one of my skills is some specific software tool on LinkedIn. Just saying that on its own might not be helpful. But if you know that I have Salesfolk, let’s say is one of my skills.

And then you know that all the people that have this title is me or like me, have a specific complaint about Salesfolk, and whatever you’re selling, solves a problem or makes it a lot easier, better, faster, cheaper, whatever. Now, if we know that, then we can bring up that information.

And we’re not even referencing necessarily the actual specific piece of information, but leveraging it to be relevant to that person’s pain point, or need in a way that it is personal. But we don’t necessarily have to spell everything out.

We don’t have to say, Oh, I was looking on LinkedIn, or crunchbase, or whatever. And I saw, a lot of times, it’s actually better if you can infer information.

But if you’re you’re trying to say, Hey, I read your blog post on whatever, love blah, blah, blah. That might be good, but it’s not always necessary.

So as far as determining how much personalization or what personalized to use, usually what I recommend is kind of going with what I consider to be the bare minimum, which would be thinking about a specific buyer persona.

So ideally like title, maybe industry, maybe company size, something like that. Having specific criteria, having first name having company name, writing targeted, relevant emails that focus on pain points and priorities, you know, they care about.

Once you’ve done that, then you use those numbers as your baseline. So you say, Okay, I have a 50% open rate on my emails, and I’m getting a total of 18% positive response for my campaign. Good, but I want to do better, how can I do better? Let’s see if I can do better.

So that’s where you take the same campaign and then maybe you see, okay, well, if in this email, I test, maybe adding their competitor’s name or the name of their product plus the compliment, or whatever is relevant in the case of what you’re selling and that person’s needs.

If you take that, and then you look and see, okay, compared to the email with zero or very minimal personalization, and then compared to this other email that has whatever personalization, I’m testing, how much lifts do I get? And sometimes, you know, you’ll get a lot, sometimes very little, sometimes none sometimes negative.

And then you just need to take those results and then see, okay, like, is it is it enough? Because you also have to factor how long it’s taking you. So if you’re getting like 1% more response, but it’s taking you an hour for each one, probably not worth it unless you’re selling really big things in a very small market.