Email prospecting is a common practice used by salespeople to schedule appointments. Inexpensive, email marketing is affordable for most businesses . It is also perceived as less intrusive than telemarketing by decision-makers. Indeed, they can check an email at a time of their choosing without necessarily interrupting their current activity.

However, the success of email as a marketing channel has led to inbox saturation for customers. In B2B, a decision-maker receives up to 100 prospecting messages daily.

Therefore, if you want your messages to be opened, read, and generate engagement, you must optimize every element of your email campaign. Recipients quickly detect mass emails that offer no real added value. These will be deleted or marked as spam.

To achieve your goals, you need to create emails that stand out. And to do that, you should focus on personalizing each email.

Segment your contact lists

The email prospecting file you have created likely contains different types of target customers. 

Indeed, they can differ in their job title, type of company, or industry sector. Beyond socio-demographic data, behavioral data can also reveal divergent interests. But above all, they don't all have the same level of awareness regarding your offering. For some, the intention to buy is strong, while for others, it's not yet evident.

In your prospecting campaigns, you won't send the same message to a mature prospect as to a prospect who barely knows you. Similarly, you'll create distinct messages for recipients with different profiles.

To do this, you need to define relevant segmentation criteria based on your offering and objectives. Then, you will create messages tailored to each segment. A segment is defined as a homogeneous group of individuals with similar characteristics.

Segmentation allows us to:

• Select the most qualified prospects for a sales contact
• Personalize your messages based on the chosen segmentation criteria

Sending automated emails to segmented lists is useful when prospects are still relatively young, as part of a lead nurturing strategy. However, further along the buyer's journey, during a sales contact, personalization needs to be refined.

Conduct preliminary research on your target prospect

Segmentation allows you to group prospects with common characteristics. It is therefore a good marketing starting point for building a sales pitch that addresses shared problems. 

However, this alone is not enough to guarantee high performance for your marketing emails. Indeed, the competition in inboxes is so fierce that only the most engaging messages will deliver results.

To stand out from the crowd, you need to create emails perfectly aligned with your recipients' needs. That's why it's essential to conduct preliminary research before sending a prospecting email.

First, you can view their prospect record in your CRM tool to see their profile information and history. Then, you'll also find relevant information on LinkedIn in various places:

• His recent activity
• Recent news or events from his company

By doing this research, you'll have a better chance of finding an engaging hook for your message. You could, for example, build on one of their recent posts, a recent company success, or important industry news.

For example, if you are an international management consultant and discover on LinkedIn that your prospect's company will soon be opening new offices in England, you have an ideal angle of attack.

Tailor your message to the contact's position in the buyer's journey

Prospecting marketing emails work well when they provide value to the prospect. That's why personalization is essential. But personalizing a message doesn't just mean adding a "first name" field to an email template. It's far from enough.

More than personalization, we should really be talking about contextualization. An email is effective when the right message is sent to the right person at the right time. The performance level of an email campaign depends largely on the sender's ability to understand and use context.

To do this, it is necessary to:

• Know your target audience (profile and history)
• Do some preliminary research to find a relevant hook
• Knowing your position in the buyer's journey

Indeed, you must adapt your messages, providing value at each stage of the sales cycle. Email marketing is built in sequences. Most contacts won't respond to the first message but only after several interactions. With each new message, you must focus on providing value and avoiding rejection. The initial contact email isn't about making a sale. It's about creating opportunities to engage the prospect and encourage them to continue the conversation.