In today’s hyper-connected world, businesses have to fight harder than ever to capture the attention of their target audience. One powerful way to break through the noise is through personalized outreach strategies that tailor messages and experiences to individual customers. Not only does personalization make customers feel valued and understood, but it can also drive higher engagement, conversions, and loyalty.
But how can you effectively personalize your outreach without overwhelming your customers with too much information? In this article, we’ll dive into three specific personalized outreach strategies that have proven to be highly effective for us. let’s explore the power of personalization and how it can help your business stand out in a crowded market.
Understanding the Importance of Personalization
Personalization is a powerful tool that can make all the difference in your outreach efforts. It can help you stand out in a crowded marketplace, build stronger relationships with your audience, and increase your response rates. When you take the time to personalize your outreach, you are showing your audience that you care about them as individuals and that you are interested in building a genuine relationship.
Personalizing content has emerged as a prominent marketing trend in recent years. According to B2B marketing surveys, marketers consider it a key factor in effectively engaging their audience.
Harvard Business Review recommends that offering transparent advertisements based on website activity can lead to revenue growth of up to 38%. Additionally, Salesforce has discovered that personalized messages are perceived as twice as important by users compared to non-personalized ones.
How to Personalize Your Outreach Efforts
LinkedIn is a powerful platform for professionals to connect with each other, build relationships, and grow their networks. Personalization is essential when it comes to LinkedIn outreach.
Here are a few tips for personalizing your LinkedIn outreach:
1. Research your prospect
Before you reach out to someone on LinkedIn, take the time to research them. Look at their profile, their company, and their industry. This will help you understand their interests, goals, and pain points, which will enable you to personalize your outreach.
You can search for people in the LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your services or check LinkedIn events that might be interesting for your prospects. In addition, if you create content on LinkedIn, one of the best ways to get your prospects would be to see who interacts with your content or follows your account. Make sure that there is something mutual and interesting for your prospects before reaching out to them.
Here are some bad examples of targeting that you should avoid:
- Lack of understanding of the target audience: Targeting a broad audience without a clear understanding of their needs and preferences can result in ineffective marketing campaigns.
- Targeting based solely on demographics: Focusing solely on demographics, such as age or gender, without considering psychographic or behavioural factors can lead to a lack of personalization and ineffective targeting.
- Over-targeting: Over-targeting your audience by bombarding them with too many ads or messages can result in fatigue and negative brand perception.
- Under-targeting: Under-targeting can result in missed opportunities to reach potential customers who may be interested in your products or services.
Continue reading to see our proven personalized outreach strategies that will help you research and reach out to your prospects effectively.
2. Use a personalized message
When you send a connection request on LinkedIn, use a personalized message. Instead of using the default message, craft a message that is tailored to the recipient. This will help you stand out from the crowd and increase the chances of them accepting your request.
Here is the structure that we use to contact people on LinkedIn:
1. Connection request
The first message should have friendly content aiming to connect with the person and never include anything promotional.
2. Follow-up message after connecting
The second LinkedIn message is intended to initiate a conversation and inquire whether the recipient would be interested in discussing the matter further. The message is usually not too pushy and does not include any links or additional information.
Personalized messages will increase the likelihood of getting a reply from your prospects. But don’t just stop at the text – consider using personalized images as well. At Axellerato, we’ve found that including personalized images in our outreach can be incredibly effective in getting more responses and positive feedback from our prospects.
An example of our personalized image:
3.2nd follow-up message
In another follow-up message, we give more details and include links to some videos or case studies (Just select 1 maximum 2 links). At this point, we check if the timing is better for the prospect to discuss the current question. They might be more available or interested after all the details we provide.
3. Engage with their content
Engage with the recipient’s content before you reach out to them. Like and comment on their posts, share their content and engage with them in groups. This will help you build a relationship with them and make them more likely to respond to your outreach.
It is also a great practice to engage with your prospect’s content after reaching out to them. For example, if you send the first message but don’t get an answer it is a perfect time to like their posts, give an endorsement or comment on their content and send another follow-up message.
4. Use a personalized subject line for emails
If people did not accept your connection request on LinkedIn or did not respond to your messages, it is a great way to contact them via Email. In addition, the personalized practices that we shared could be also used in Email.
Your subject line is the first thing that your recipient will see, so make it count. Use a personalized subject line that mentions their name, their company, or something specific to them. This will grab their attention and make them more likely to open your email. For more information read our article about crafting Irresistible Email subject lines to boost open rates and generate more leads.
5. Mention something specific to them
In your email, mention something specific to the recipient. This could be something you found on their website, a recent blog post they wrote, or a project they are working on. This will show them that you have taken the time to research them and that you are genuinely interested in what they do.
However, this strategy takes time and effort and it is not a scalable approach.
To solve this issues you need to split your huge targeting segment into sub-segments and create specific messages for them. The trick is to find common practices and apply this to specific subgroups of your prospects. For example, if you see that companies that you want to approach are currently hiring, you can mention this to make the interaction more personalized.
Top 3 personalized outreach strategies to use
1. Reach out to people who voted on your polls
It is possible to scrape all the people who have voted on your LinkedIn poll or engaged with your content on LinkedIn. If you don’t have your own content, you can use others’ content.
After you gather all the people who have shown interest in your poll you can send them a personalized connection request:
- Thanks for voting on my poll first_name, I’d love to connect to share with you my secrets!
- Thanks for supporting my post! Let’s connect!
- Looks like you also like {Author}’s post about {post topic}. Let’s connect as I am also passionate about this and try to connect with like-minded people.
If people accept your connection request, send them a follow-up message which could be with a personalized image or video. After this send them 2nd follow-up message with more information and details, you can also add links.
But remember, try to provide value in the first place and sell in the last!
2. Reach out to the companies that are hiring
The primary goal is to contact companies that are actively seeking specialists in your particular field. For instance:
- If your company specializes in Python software, you should connect with firms that are currently recruiting Python developers.
- If your company specializes in SEO services, you should contact companies that are looking for SEO or marketing experts.
These companies are ready to pay, so there are sales-ready opportunities:
- If they are hiring specialists, they have allocated a budget and have a genuine need for the expertise.
- If they are doing it right now, they are ready to spend their budget on the right candidate.
- Your next step should be to communicate with them.
By reaching out to your target audience at the most appropriate time, you can maximize your chances of success. Also, your connection message will be relevant and personalized for them, as you will suggest helping with the exact same service they are looking for.
3. Find super-specific companies via LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a robust platform that enables you to conduct highly efficient prospecting and outreach activities.
One of our clients was looking for investors. With the sales navigator, we went and searched specific companies that invest in series B. We have got 170 companies that have actually invested and would be a perfect match for our outreach campaign. We managed to find decision makers and their contact information to reach out with personalized messages.
Here is how we reached out to them:
After connecting we followed up with 3 LinkedIn messages providing additional information about the company and introducing the investment opportunities. If we did not get answers from some people, we would send them 2-3 additional emails. This whole strategy gave us the opportunity to reach out to the right audience for our client and get better results.
Conclusion
By taking the time to research your prospects and split them into subgroups, use personalized messages, and engage with their content, you can build stronger relationships and increase your response rates. Remember, personalization is about making a connection that resonates with the recipient and encourages them to respond positively.
At Axellerato, we specialize in helping businesses to create personalized outreach campaigns that drive results. Our team of experts can work with you to identify the right messaging, images, and targeting to ensure your outreach is as effective as possible.
Schedule here a FREE brainstorming session with us and get new ideas on how to get more leads, appointments and clients!