Personalized messages have a 32.7% higher response rate.
And sending mass emails has a 93% higher response rate in comparison to single recipients.
Here comes the problem: Where are you going to find the time to personalize all your emails?
Enter AI cold outreach, the solution to your problems.
In this post, we’ll discuss how you can use AI to scale your cold outreach and help you find the best AI outreach tool for your needs.
How is AI involved in cold outreach?
Outreach AI is a technology that uses artificial intelligence to automate and optimize processes like campaign creation and email personalization.
Needless to say, it can help businesses generate more responses and grow faster.
For example, let’s say you have a business and want to email potential customers. AI tools can help you automatically create hyper-personalized multichannel sequences based on your value proposition, and your recipient’s info.
This saves you hours of manual work, avoids the blank-page anxiety, and increases your reply rates.
AI personalization
AI personalization helps you build ultra-targeted and hyper-personalized outreach sequences at scale.
It allows you to create custom campaigns with personalized icebreakers that resonate with individual prospects.
This level of customization and personalization increases the chances of capturing prospects’ attention, generating higher reply rates, and ultimately driving better outcomes for your outreach efforts.
Why is AI important in cold outreach?
AI can be leveraged to optimize your outreach and increase your reply rates in several ways.
You can use AI-powered outreach tools, such as lemlist, to generate highly personalized multichannel campaigns without the need to be an outreach expert or have any prospecting experience.
By tailoring messages to individual recipients, AI increases the relevance and resonance of outreach efforts, leading to higher engagement and response rates.
With AI, you can save up to 1 hour per campaign creation and focus on other tasks that matter to your business.
According to Gartner, Inc., by 2025, 75% of B2B sales organizations are expected to incorporate AI-guided selling solutions to enhance their traditional sales playbooks.
✅ Pros of AI in Outreach
- Save time
- Save resources
- Save money
- Generate more revenue
- Book more meetings
7 use cases of AI for your business
95% of salespeople would meet their sales goals faster if they could reduce time spent on non-revenue-generating activities like admin, note taking, and updating CRMs.
This is where AI comes into play.
Here are 6 of the most frequent and powerful use cases of AI in sales.
1. Define your target audience with AI
You can use AI to understand who is your target audience, what challenges they face, and how your offering meets their needs.
By honing in on your ICP and buyer personas, you’ll create messages that resonate and forge genuine connections.
You can use ChatGPT to create your buyer personas with this prompt:
You’re a senior consultant with 20+ years of experience.
You’re a master at creating the most unique and unusual growth strategies. You’ve helped the fastest-growing companies in the world skyrocket their growth and customer acquisition.
Your tone of voice should be actionable, no-fluff, approachable, casual, and storyteller.Generate 5 detailed buyer personas for an individual who would be interested in [DESCRIPTION OF YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE].
The buyer personas should include the following information:
1. Name: (insert the name of the persona)
2. Position: (insert position or role of the persona)
3. Professional background: (describe the professional background, experience, or expertise of the persona)
4. Goals and objectives: (specify the goals and objectives that the persona wants to achieve in their professional life)
5. How they heard about [YOUR COMPANY NAME]: (indicate the channels or sources through which the persona became aware of your company)
6. Path to purchase: (describe the typical journey or steps the persona takes when considering and making a purchase related to your product or service)
7. Potential barriers: (identify the factors or concerns that might hold the persona back from buying your product or service)Remember to provide sufficient detail and context to ensure the generated personas are accurate and useful. Please present the buyer personas in the form of a table.
For example, we ran this prompt for lemlist and got 5 detailed buyer personas. Here’s an example of one of them:
To dive deeper into defining your target audience with AI, use this guide on defining ICPs and buyer personas with AI.
2. Define your ICP with AI
You can speed up the process of defining your business’s ideal customer profile with lemlist’s free ICP generator.
You can even try it out for yourself right now ⬇️
All you need is your value proposition and your product or service description.
The ICP generator will create 3 buyer personas that you can download, analyze, and use to personalize your cold outreach.
Use them to customize email copy, increase reply rates, get more LinkedIn connections, and boost your business revenue.
3. Reach your target audience
Once you know who your target audience is, you’ll need to track them down.
Reaching out to your leads on the channel where they are most active, such as LinkedIn, increases your chances of getting replies and accelerates your growth.
But, manually searching for LinkedIn prospects
❌ takes too much time
❌ is an endless back-and-forth
❌ doesn’t always provide your leads’ contact information
With the help of AI, you can get access to databases that contain millions of LinkedIn profiles with easy search and advanced filtering.
You can also use Taplio to connect with individuals based on your specific criteria or preferences.
Check out how to find LinkedIn leads in 3 steps with AI
4. Improve daily outreach tasks with AI email assistants
Imagine having someone dedicated to sorting your emails, writing them, and even reminding you when to send them..
Thanks to the power of AI, it’s possible to save hours of manual work with AI email assistants!
For example, you can
→ Boost teams’ collaboration with Missive→ Organize inbox with SaneBox→ Predict responsiveness with Boomerang for Gmail
and much more!
Wondering which AI email assistant is the best for your business? What tool can help you boost efficiency and let you focus on more revenue-driven tasks?
Get the 7 best AI email assistants on the market and simplify your sales process.
lemlist also offers its AI fully integrated into Gmail, where you simply have to click on the Ask AI button to improve the tone, grammar, and length of your message.
This type of email assistant will ensure that you nail the tone every time and don’t waste time switching tools or reworking messages yourself to fit exactly what you want to say.
5. Create personalized multi-channel outreach sequences
With AI you can create personalized outreach sequences that will increase your response and conversion rates.
For example, lemlist’s AI allows you to create fully custom multi-channel campaigns in seconds.
Simply fill in your
- target audience
- value proposition
- trigger
- language
- tone of voice
… and watch the AI magic happen.
Check out this video to help you create your first lemlist campaign!
Read this step-by-step guide to create an outreach sequence that generates replies X2 faster.
6. Craft engaging outreach messages
If you’re not using AI to speed up your writing processes, you’re already behind.
We know you want to, try out this cold email generator.
Tips: You can also use simple prompts to power your sales pitches, calls, and LinkedIn messages so that you can back to the human side of sales.
For example, you can use AI prompts to improve your CTA, such as:
Write 3 calls to action for the following outreach email. Ensure each CTA directs the recipient to take a specific action or next step. Use a friendly but assertive tone. Keep the writing concise and clear. Each CTA should be up to 5 words.
Outreach email: [Paste]
Or, you want to beat the competition over cold call:
You are an experienced sales representative for [ClickUp]. You are looking to win over a project manager who previously used [Trello] for all their [project management] needs but hated that they couldn’t integrate with Google Drive, or customize their workspaces. Write a list of 5 talking points that would be helpful to convince the customer to move to [ClickUp].
Or, simply network your way to sales via LinkedIn:
Write a short, 50-100 word message to [Graham, the content marketing manager] at [Benevity], congratulating them on their new position. Based on their profile summary, ask how your [Content Marketing Agency] can help in the new company, and list the top 3 ways [Content Marketing Agencies] can help in-house [content marketing managers] look great to their boss.
PROSPECT: [Paste linkedin URL.]
AI prompts like this should give you a massive leg-up when it comes to building yourself the best, automated base to start outreach with. And then, you do what you do best: close those deals.
7. Segment leads
With lemlist’s AI variables, you can segment leads based on industry, location, and much more.
AI variables work with prompts like ChatGPT, so there are endless ways to segment your leads for more targeted outreach.
The prompts work on multiple leads if you wish, saving you hours of manual work.
For example, it’s easy to segment companies by market type:
AI makes it possible to move from intuition to data-driven decisions in prospecting. It accelerates segmentation, optimizes messages and boosts conversion rates.
CEO @ devlo
3 top sales AI tools
Now you know just how useful AI can be in your cold outreach.
But you still need the top tool to help you. We’ll leave you with our three absolute faves!
1. lemlist
Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
G2 4.5/5 (261 reviews) | Capterra 4.6/5 (382 reviews)
Overview
lemlist’s AI sequence generator will help you create ultra-targeted multichannel sequences in seconds.
How can lemlist help you?
- avoid writer’s block with custom copies
- save > 1 hour per campaign with predefined steps
- get 3x more replies with unique sequences
Its AI variables feature lets you turn raw data into insights, quickly segment leads, clean data, and personalize messages based on your leads’ information.
lemlist also offers a +450 lead database with advanced filters to help you find your perfect leads.
Free trial ✅
lemlist offers 4 different paid plans, and a 14-day free trial.
Additionally, you can also access the Freemium plan and scrap up to 100 emails per month.
✅ Pros
- Personalize your texts, images, and videos at scale
- Automate your email warmup
- Full personalizable sequences
- Very helpful support team (and onboarding process)
❌ Cons
- Freemium version does not allow sending campaigns
- High learning curve
2. Setsail.co
Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
G2 4.6/5 (127 reviews) | Capterra 4.7/5 (3 reviews)
Overview
SetSail is a Sales Data Layer that centralizes and interprets sales data across go-to-market teams and tools.
Setsail allows you to:
- use machine learning to detect buying signals and productivity patterns
- access insights in your CRM, data lake, or via SetSail’s dashboard
- improve sales rep performance via performance metrics and improvement suggestions
- get an instant view of all your sales activity
Free trial ✅
Paid plans:
- Custom pricing
✅ Pros
- Custom tracking and metrics
- Works seamlessly for teams
❌ Cons
- Unresponsive customer support
- Limited personalization
- Undisclosed pricing
3. Clay
Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
G2 4.9/5 (144 reviews) | Capterra 4.7/5 (10 reviews)
Overview
Clay is an automated sales prospecting platform that creates personalized messages via data from multiple sources.
What will you be getting from Clay?
- enrich your customer data from 50+ data sources (tech stack, OpenAI GPT-3, Google, etc.)
- identify qualified leads through data about the latest events, such as fundraising
- add contacts to personalized campaigns in Customer.io, your outreach tool, or CRM
Free trial ✅
Aside from a 14-day free trial, Clay also offers a totally free plan.
Starter, Explorer, and Pro plans range from $149 to $800, and increase depending on the amount of monthly credits you choose to purchase. Meaning that pricing can get quite expensive.
The Enterprise plan has custom pricing.
✅ Pros
- API integration
- Easy integration with Google Sheets
❌ Cons
- Credit plan is confusing
- You burn credits very quickly
- Pricing increases exponentially
If you’re not satisfied, we’ll leave you with the 8 best AI sales tools.
The best resources to learn about AI
Hungry for more?
AI is a constantly changing field, so if you want to take full advantage of it, you’ll need to stay up to date with the latest tools and updates.
To help you with that, we did a roundup of the best AI resources to stay on the cutting edge.
Here are our top recommendations:
AI newsletters
#1 The Rundown is a daily newsletter that keeps you up to date with the latest news in AI.
#2 Mindstream provides the most relevant news, insights, tools, and trends involving AI.
AI YouTube Channels
#1 Matt Wolfe will keep you updated about the latest AI news, hottest trends, and tested tools.
#2 AI Andy posts daily AI content that keeps you on top of AI trends while making you laugh.
AI social media channels
#1 Kosherplug is a TikTok channel that shares viral news, life hacks, and tips around AI.
#2 Wgmimedia is an Instagram account that shares sensational clips, updates, and viral moments related to AI.
For a full resource list of newsletters, social media, and videos to help you get the most out of AI in cold outreach, check out these resources to learn about AI.
Use AI in your cold outreach to increase results
Here’s a quick recap of everything you can do to harness the power of AI in your cold outreach:
- Use AI to craft personalized messages for your prospects, addressing their specific needs and interests to create a stronger connection and boost response rates.
- Automate your follow-ups to stay on prospects’ minds, increasing the chances of getting a reply.
- Thoroughly research AI outreach tools to find the perfect match for your needs, considering features, compatibility, and value for investment.
Embrace AI as your digital assistant, helping you connect with prospects on a more personal level, and optimize your sales performance!
Your source of actionable outreach tips and strategies that will help you get replies and grow your business.
