Generate Personalized Cold InMail Messages at Scale with AI

Cold InMail is a part of the strategy for many sales teams, and for good reason: 78% of companies that use social selling outperform those who don’t.

However, finding success with cold InMails isn’t as easy as blasting hundreds of LinkedIn users with generic, cookie-cutter messages. Every week, professionals receive dozens—if not hundreds—of cold messages on LinkedIn. In most cases, when people look at their LinkedIn inbox, here’s how they’re feeling:

Cutting through the noise requires salespeople to craft personalized, clear messages for the people they’re selling to. Your cold outreach does not have to end up being ignored.

In this article, we’ll walk through how you can make your InMail messages stand out, why personalization matters, and how you can use artificial intelligence (AI) automation to produce personalized and engaging InMails at scale.

What makes a great InMail message?

Chances are, you could take a look at your LinkedIn inbox today and identify a handful of terrible cold emails. Maybe they got your company name or your name wrong (or addressed you simply as “Sir and/or Madam”) or sent you a pitch that’s completely irrelevant to your role or industry. They probably made use of templates to craft those messages. Instant delete.

But, if you think back to a LinkedIn Cold message that did prompt you to respond or book a call, can you think of what made it stand out?

Often, it’s harder to pinpoint the elements that make up a strong outreach message than it is to find the glaring errors in those that aren’t effective. However, if you look closely, you’ll find that effective cold emails generally nail these four elements.

Personalization

According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized experiences, and 76% get frustrated when they don’t. This goes beyond product recommendations on a website or an email. People want to feel like they’re at the center of a brand’s universe, not just one of the masses. They also need to know that beyond the first message, a follow-up personal call or email outreach is part of the deal. It makes them feel special.

That’s why LinkedIn outreach InMails that are sent individually also see response rates that are 15% higher than InMails blasted en masse.

Personalization matters. But how you personalize your cold email message also matters.

To get the best results from your cold InMail messages, you’ll want to go beyond simply addressing a recipient by name or using cold message templates. You’ll also want to tailor your pitch to their specific business or the prospect’s role at an organization (and the challenges they’re likely facing). You can also mention something specific and interesting about their profile or background to show that you’ve done your research and find a common ground, which will help create a mutual connection between you and your target.

When using any generative AI platform, the way in which you write prompts will make a big difference. Let’s have a look:

Non-personalized pitch

Prompt used: “Write me a generic email for a food and beverage brand selling [platform].”

Personalized pitch (generated by Copy.ai)

Now, let’s look at that same pitch but give the following prompt to Chat by Copy.ai:

"Write a personalized email to [LinkedIn profile] selling [platform] to them as a brand.

Keep the email under 200 words. Mention that demand for keto brands has increased on our platform recently and that similar brands have received 50+ orders a month."

At first glance, the two cold outreach pitches above don’t look dramatically different. They’re a similar length, briefly explain the solution being sold, and ask the prospect for 15 minutes of their time.

However, in the personalized pitch, the sender:

• Addresses the recipient by name
• Mentions specific traits about the recipient’s brand
• Tailors their pitch to suit the recipient’s brand

It’s a slight switch—and it does require more effort on the sender’s part—but it makes the reader far more likely to book a call or be open to a follow-up message to learn more.

Clarity

It’s much harder to get your message across in a clear, concise way than it is in a longer format. However, today, people’s attention spans are shorter than ever—especially when it comes to reading unsolicited LinkedIn cold messages in their inbox.

To increase the chances of a prospect responding to your LinkedIn outreach message, keep it short and sweet. Explain who you are and what you’re offering, and avoid using any jargon (our brains naturally skip over complex sentences).

Based on the prior results, we entered this prompt: “Make the pitch under 300 words.”

Busy professionals don’t have the time to read lengthy pitches, so keep it condensed. According to LinkedIn, you’ll likely be rewarded with better results, as InMail messages that are 400 words or less see a 22% higher response rate than longer messages.

Value proposition

As someone familiar with your business, you probably have a strong idea as to why the target audience you’re reaching out to could use your products or services. However, for the prospect—who may have never heard of your company before—that’s less obvious.

In your LinkedIn cold message, clearly state the value proposition, whether you’re offering a networking opportunity, a job offer, or a service. Most importantly, your subject line and the body of your message should make it clear how your solution relates to a pain point they’re facing. Your connection request should clearly be beneficial to your prospect.

Call-to-action

End your message with a clear call-to-action (CTA), such as requesting a meeting, a phone call, or a response to your message. Your connection request must be written in a way that will make the target audience take an action.

To improve this cold connection request, we added the prompt: “End the email by asking if Marcia has 15 minutes to chat this week.”

Your call-to-action should be clear, direct, and time-bound. The CTA in the case study above is vague and open-ended. The CTA below, however, is both specific (requesting a 15-minute phone call) and time-bound (this week).

The benefit of a clear CTA is two-fold:

• It makes it clear exactly what you’re looking for, so prospects aren’t left uncertain (and wary!) about your intentions. Prospects are more likely to say yes when they know exactly what they’re saying yes to.
• It gives them a time limit to respond. That way, if the prospect doesn’t respond this week, you can now follow-up next week to propose a new time to chat.

Why does personalization matter?

When SalesLoft recently analyzed over 6 million sales emails, one trend was shockingly clear: Personalization nearly doubled the average sales team’s response rates. For high-performing teams, personalization had even more of an impact, increasing reply rates by more than 5x.

So, if personalization is so effective, why are so many teams still sending generic sales pitches?

This is often because sales teams need to balance quality with quantity. Sales development representatives (SDRs) are often tasked with lead generation targets of hundreds of prospects a month, and personalization, unfortunately, takes time. And for most SDRs, spending anything over 3.5 to 5 minutes on personalizing an email cancels out the return on investment on personalization since the lost time means they’re not sending out enough connection requests in a day.

Fortunately, advances in AI and lead generation mean that salespeople no longer need to choose between quality and quantity when sending direct messages to LinkedIn inboxes. Using AI, you can send personalized, engaging cold outreach messages at scale—with each cold LinkedIn message taking less than 30 seconds to generate.

To learn more, check out this conversation with Samantha McKenna.

How to use AI to scale your sales team’s LinkedIn InMail outbound strategy

Companies like Okta, Salesforce, Zoom, and HubSpot have already adopted Copy.ai to supercharge their sales and marketing teams. To join them and thousands of others adopting AI for growth, follow the steps below.

1. Give Chat context for your InMail message

To create a custom InMail message using Chat by Copy.ai, all you have to do is provide the tool with some context.

To test our Chat’s abilities, you can start by browsing our Prompt Library or creating your own prompt.

For instance, for the message examples below, I based my prompt on Chat by Copy.ai’s “Personalized Cold Email from LinkedIn Profile” prompt and then modified it to suit my needs:

After entering the prompt, I got the following copy:

Of course, you can endlessly edit your prompts so that they suit different tones (such as more casual or more professional), mention specific product details, or zero in on certain aspects of a potential client’s experience.

For instance, if I modify my prompt even just slightly—to embrace a “casual” tone and target a prospect’s freelance writing experience—Chat by Copy.ai will produce the following:

If you want to edit the copy produced by Chat, no problem. Chat by Copy.ai has a built-in document editor that lets you edit and expand the responses you want. Then, just copy/paste the result into a LinkedIn InMail and send it away.

Important call-out:

Generative AI software like Chat by Copy.ai isn’t meant to do 100% of the work for you, but it will take you 75% of the way there. Automation can only take you so far, you’ll still have to go in and add your own flare to the copy. You should also remember to follow-up. It is important to create a good first impression for your potential customers.

However, Copy.ai is building AI-powered automation to help you scale your execution efforts and do 100% of the work for you. Find out more about Workflows by Copy.ai.

2. Generate several prompts that your SDRs and salespeople can scale

If you want to streamline your InMail outreach strategy and personalization process, create a few prompts that your team can copy and paste into Chat. It can then generate unique personalized messages for their prospects and professional network.

For instance, you may want to create several different prompts that take into account:

• Prospects’ job titles at target organizations (i.e., decision makers like VP of Sales, Operations Lead, etc.)
• Different industry verticals your team targets (such as startups, banking, and insurance companies)
• Specific products, services, value propositions, or solutions that you pitch to different personas

3. Train your team and measure your success

Now that you’ve got a process in place, invite your sales team to join you in Copy.ai and train them to use the tool as part of their outreach campaigns.

To ensure that AI automation is scaling your processes (and results!), take note of your team’s current output and results. Then, a month or a quarter from now, revisit those metrics to see how AI has improved them.

This process of optimization and setting up a LinkedIn automation tool has the potential to help sales teams immensely. It produces better results than using templates and helps your prospects to warm up to the idea of trying out your product/services.

Ready to get started?

Thanks to AI, you no longer have to choose between quality and quantity when it comes to sending prospects personalized, engaging messages. Sign up for a free Copy.ai account today to start using Chat by Copy.ai to scale your personalized outreach and improve your follow-up.

You can also explore our suite of AI products that can be useful for your company. GTM AI is invaluable for keeping your go-to-market strategy on track by gaining GTM Velocity and breaking away from GTM Bloat. Also, our GTM AI Platform provides you with free tool integrations.

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