Last week I received a cold email that wanted to prove just how “personalized” they could make their message with a bunch of obscure facts scraped from my website. (I guess those podcast transcripts are good for something)
But the problem wasn’t the personalization, it was the complete lack of a relevant offer.
Honestly, I think most people would be better off with a well written templated message instead of trying to use AI to write their personalized slop.
Here’s why.
When you’re writing a template, you can really spend some time on every single word.
I can look at the word “the” in a sentence for five minutes and decide, does that belong there? Can I take that out?
But if you’re writing everything off the top of your head, fresh and brand new every time, a lot of the time you’re gonna get a worse message. (And AI won’t help you here)
I ran an experiment on this back in my car dealership days.
I’d just left the sales floor for my first marketing role, and we had just switched CRMs. So there was a bunch of emails we wanted to get into a sequence.
Management’s thought was that the salespeople should be writing custom emails every time, because, right, that’s gonna be better.
I said we should be templating these, because they’re salespeople. They’re not writers.
So I ran an experiment.
I took some messages where we were already getting a good percentage of replies back, and I put templates in there.
And here’s the thing – the salespeople could edit them any time they wanted. But what was there didn’t make them look dumb if they didn’t customize it or personalize it.
By putting the templates in place, responses to those emails went from about 24% to about 42%.
Just because the salespeople could stop worrying about “oh, what do I write?”
I mean, one of them only wrote in lowercase and didn’t know where the period was on the keyboard.
This made his writing look really good.
There was one guy who always put his own in. He was a good writer, and he did well with it.
The other 10 people that worked there used the templates, because they got better performance from them.
I think the same thing applies to a lot of people I see, especially when you’re doing a lot of repetitive work.
Even my own team gets templates for the messages they send out. Every word in them has been thought about – is it in the right place?
A follow-up message without one is… who knows. Kind of a YOLO. We’ll see what happens, good luck everybody.
So use more templates. You’ll probably find you get a better result.
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