You’re probably familiar with adding personalisation to your email outreach, such as using merge tags to automatically pull through someone’s name, job title or email.

But, studies have shown that hyper-personalisation improves open rates, click-through rates and overall engagement. So…what is hyper-personalisation, and how can you start using it to improve your outreach?

When you hyper-personalise your messages, you include nuggets of information completely unique to the individual you are contacting.

Through hyper-personalisation, you can demonstrate to prospects that you've done your research instead of simply sending generic messages to everyone. This will also make your messages stand out from the crowd.

The sweet spot you should aim for is customising 5-10% of the email content for your prospect at the time of sending - rather than creating fully bespoke emails for every prospect. This is how you can personalise at scale.

Let’s say you’re emailing John Barnes, the CEO of a large bank in London. The bold parts are extra personalisation we’ve added on top of the existing template.

Subject Line: What you said on “FT: Leaders In Money.”

Hi John,

I listened to your recent appearance on the “FT: Leaders in Money” podcast, and what you said about taxing top earners more, resonated with me; I agree strongly, so thank you for mentioning that.

I’ve been speaking to CTOs at banks like TSB, Natwest and Santander. Their biggest pain point is that IR35 has led to inflated salary requirements and a lack of talent. This is making it harder for them to hire quality candidates quickly. What is the impact? It means their projects are being severely delayed!

Are you experiencing a similar problem in your technology team at Bank?

Regards,

Harry

We personalised the subject line and the first sentence in the example above. We were able to reference John’s recent podcast appearance, but you can use any information readily available to you to make it personal and special.

Here are some examples you can use to hyper-personalise your messaging at scale:

LinkedIn holds a wealth of basic information about your prospect that you can use to personalise your messaging.

These include:

And there are plenty of others, including recommendations, languages, organisations they’re a part of, their interests and the causes they support.

You can also scroll to the activity tab on a prospect’s LinkedIn profile, click “Show all activity”, and then check out Articles, Posts and Documents. If the person is active on LinkedIn, you’ll also see any comments they’ve made and posts they’ve liked.

You can find something interesting to comment on from a quick scan. For example, someone might have posted a picture of their office dog, and you could mention that you hope they get promoted to Chief Happiness Officer asap!

For higher profile prospects, you can search for their name and current company on google and be presented with a wealth of personalisation options! These could be articles they’ve written, podcasts they’ve been on or, in some cases, their own personal social media channels.

Use this one wisely; if someone is incredibly active on social media (perhaps they tweet multiple times a day), you could comment on this; however, avoid commenting on personal photos outside of LinkedIn as it’s not professional.

According to Experian, personalisation increases open rates by 29.3% and dramatically increases the click-through rate. This alone should get buy-in from your team, as more engagement generally results in more leads.

However, if they need some extra help; you can take advantage of SuperReach’s personalisation snippets.

You can leave these prompts in a sequence using the following format: [[PERSONALISE_HERE]] or [[GIVE_EXAMPLE_OF_STATS]].

Ensure you use the double square brackets [[example]].

Once the team starts to see results, the prompts can go. The habits should last a lifetime!

Good luck, and remember to test, measure and learn to maximise your outreach and unlock your full potential!