Stand Out in the Inbox: 6 Steps to Effective Sales Email Personalization

Sales email personalization is no longer optional for sales managers and their teams when communicating with incoming leads and promising prospects.

With about 333 billion emails being sent and received daily, your emails face stiff competition. According to the Harvard Business Review, the average full-time employee spends 28% of their workday reading and replying to emails. That works out to 2.6 hours per day and roughly 120 emails received daily.

Ready to position your team for success? Let's dive into the benefits and challenges of sales email personalization, and then explore six proven steps to make your emails stand out. We'll also provide five customizable templates to help you implement these practices effectively.

Key Benefits of Sales Email Personalization

By personalizing each part of sales emails, you can expect to:

• Stand out from the crowd. One-size-fits-all emails rarely get read. Try grabbing prospects’ attention by adapting your messaging uniquely to them.
• Encourage better engagement. Personalized content resonates with recipients, inspiring higher rates of engagement, such as clicks, replies, and even shares.
• Build stronger relationships. Prospects can spot a mass email from a mile away. By personalizing your approach, it’s possible to earn their trust and foster a sense of genuine connection.
• Encourage future conversion. When you show a clear understanding of your audience’s needs and challenges, they’re more likely to move through the sales funnel.

Ultimately, the best sales email personalization often follows core principles of adaptive selling. 

Adaptive selling is a client-focused approach, where sales teams modify their techniques to fit the prospect's needs, industry, and role within the company. This strategy allows reps to connect with potential buyers on a deeper level, foster trust, and increase the odds of a successful sale.

Challenges of Sales Email Personalization

For sales reps, the challenge is emailing their prospects at scale while ensuring their emails are personal enough to stand out. A common pain point we hear from Sales Development Reps and Account Executives is the constant need to switch between their email platform and Salesforce CRM. This back-and-forth disrupts their workflow, reducing productivity and potentially leading to data inconsistencies.

The best email personalization not only combines automation efficiency with tailored personalization, but it should also seamlessly integrate email and CRM functionalities, allowing reps to personalize communications without leaving their primary workspace. This integration eliminates constant platform switching, boosting productivity and ensuring consistent data across systems.

Six Steps to Set your Sales Team up to Master Email Personalization

To create an effective segmentation strategy for sales email personalization, start by analyzing your customer base and developing core templates. This foundational step sets the stage for more targeted and effective outreach.

Step 1: Analyze Your Segments

Your emails risk sounding generic if you don’t have a true awareness of your customer base. Audience segmentation can help here. 

Begin by diving deep into your customer data to identify and build a list of different prospect groups, otherwise known as segments. 

During this process, consider distinguishing factors and characteristics, such as:

• Industry verticals: Identify which industries your prospects belong to. This helps tailor your messaging to industry-specific pain points.
• Company size: Differentiate between enterprise, mid-market, and small businesses to adjust your messaging accordingly.
• Job roles: Understand the decision-making authority of your contacts. A CEO will have different concerns compared to a Marketing Director.
• Geographic location: Consider regional differences that might affect your approach.
• Specific pain points: Identify common challenges faced by different segments.
• Buying stage: Tailor your messaging based on where the prospect is in the sales funnel.

Step 2: Think About Your Core Offering

Once you’ve segmented your audience, the next step is identifying how your product or service addresses their specific needs. The success of sales email personalization hinges on your ability to convey the right value propositions to each group.

Ask yourself these questions and reflect on how to best align your messaging by segment:

• What value does our core offering provide to each industry? Consider how what you’re selling alleviates challenges in different sectors.
• How does it solve problems for different job roles? Think about the stakeholders involved in the buying process and which roles you plan on emailing. 
• What features are most relevant to companies of different sizes? Highlight the benefits that will resonate with small businesses versus enterprise-level prospects. Focus on what’s most meaningful to each.

Step 3: Build Your Personalized Sales Template Library

Next, it’s time to develop a library of customizable templates that your sales team can leverage to engage prospects and drive conversions.

If your company uses Salesforce CRM, make the most of Salesforce Lightning Email Templates functionality. With a simple drag-and-drop builder, you can create fully responsive emails—no coding required. Add images, CTA buttons, and merge fields to automatically pull in prospect data, which we’ll explore in Step 5.

Need inspiration on what to write? Scroll down for five customizable email templates to help shape your sales outreach. 

Industry-specific templates

Build a set of templates that highlight the use cases and benefits relevant to each major industry served by your company.

Role-based templates

Craft email templates that speak directly to the concerns of different stakeholders, based on their role such as the C-suite and director-level decision makers.

Company size templates

Adjust your email messaging to focus on unique challenges faced by large enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Pain point-focused templates

Develop email templates that show awareness of common obstacles faced by prospects and indicate how your company could help resolve them.

Buyer’s journey templates

Address every stage of the sales funnel–from awareness and consideration to decision–with corresponding email templates.

Step 4: Identify Moments for Trigger Emails

Building out trigger emails can help you send the right emails—at the right time. 

Trigger emails are deployed in response to certain behaviors, events, or changes in the prospect’s status. The messaging used is tailored to reflect the prospect’s exact spot in the sales funnel, making the received email feel more timely and relevant.

Possible trigger moments could include:

• Signing up or creating an account
• Attending or canceling a call with Sales
• Visiting key webpages, downloading gated content, or registering for events

Creating templates for your company’s most frequently encountered triggers can help save time and keep messaging relevant when engaging with leads.

Step 5: Ensure Flexibility for Personalization

When creating your core email templates, always leave room for easy personalization. Taking this approach ensures your messages feel tailored to its recipient — even when you are sending email blasts to larger audiences.

Salesforce email templates offer merge field capabilities. Using automation, sales reps can pull data directly from the Salesforce CRM to insert it into their email templates, saving time and boosting efficiency.

Fields you can personalize through Salesforce include:

• First and last name
• Job title
• Company name
• Phone number
• Custom fields, such as industry, recent activity, and sales funnel stage

Design your templates with modular content blocks for quick and streamlined personalization. These blocks can be swapped in and out based on your prospect’s segment, role, or interests, making the email appear highly customized while being easy to automate.

Here are examples of email blocks you can personalize:

• Introduction: Align your greeting with the recipient’s job role and stakeholder capacity.
• Industry: Focus your content on the specific challenges and trends in the recipient’s sector to avoid sounding generic.
• Solutions and services: Highlight the most relevant offerings and their benefits based on the recipient’s needs.
• Pain points: Customize how you address different obstacles and frustrations faced by different segments.
• Call-to-action (CTA): Adjust the CTA based on where the prospect is in the sales journey and what action you want them to take.

Step 6: Send Your Personalized Emails at Scale

Once you’ve created your customizable templates in Salesforce, the next step is deploying them to your segmented audiences. But how do you do that effectively at scale?

One solution is Cirrus Insight’s Email Blast feature, a powerful tools for sales teams looking to scale their personalized outreach. Without ever leaving your Gmail or Outlook inbox, you are able to deploy personalized Salesforce email templates to their intended recipients. 

Using CRM data, Email Blast supports segmentation by automatically pulling in custom fields from Salesforce, making it possible to keep a personal touch while building and sending emails to large groups.

Start sending better emails to prospects

Standing out in your prospects’ crowded inboxes starts with enhancing your sales email personalization.

By building an email template library, curated to your audience segments and their needs, you can empower your team to craft messages that resonate. Take these outreach efforts further by timing your emails with trigger-based actions, leveraging Salesforce’s fields merging and modular content blocks for better personalization, and using tools like Cirrus Insight’s Email Blast to send from your Gmail or Outlook inbox at scale.

Cirrus Insight can help you strike the ideal balance between automation and personalization to drive real impact from your sales efforts. Book a demo today and start transforming your approach.