Automate Personalization With 7 Best Email Personalization Tools

Highly personalized cold emails have a 17% higher response rate.

However, you don’t always have the time to write emails one by one to tailor them to each of your leads.

But don’t worry. You can automate your personalization with email personalization tools to make your messages stand out while you save your time.

What is automated email personalization?

To personalize an email is essentially to tailor each message to the recipient.

The issue with personalization is that it can be time-consuming to go through email adding names, companies, personal details, or other relevant information. For this reason, outreach tools have implemented an automated personalization system in which you simply have to add tags to indicate where and what elements will be personalized, and your tool will include the information for you automatically.

It is important to invest in a tool that handles powerful personalization features in your emails and follow-ups because simply adding first names or company names won’t cut it anymore.

Here’s an example of poor personalization:

Quite frankly, personalization has gone so far that limiting your personalization to name and company is not enough.

How can you make it better?

Hey, John

I’ve been following your work at {{company}} since 2022 and loved your article on {{topic}}.

However, we’ve noticed that you could benefit from our website visitor identification feature to reach the right leads at the right time making your inbound lead generation more efficient.

If this appeals to you, book a meeting whenever it suits you best. (Don’t forget to link your calendar here)

Cheers.
{{your name}}

Why does this work?

For starters, you’re addressing them directly, but it seems genuine because you’re referencing their job and accomplishment. By referencing them and celebrating their work you’re guaranteed to attract their attention and make them feel like you’re interested in them, not just a sale.

You’ll then link a personalized booking page that will be appealing to your lead, and you’ll offer them the freedom to choose what works for them.

A lot of reps mistrust AI because you can lose quality and too much time spent to personalize, but this is solved with high-quality prompts.

International Growth @lemlist

What elements can be personalized in an email?

As we’ve already mentioned, personalization does not (and should not) be limited to names, location, and job titles. You can personalize almost any element in your email, but the most important ones are:

Text

• Subject line

This is the first thing your lead will see, so you need to make it short and snappy. Adding personalization will avoid making your email seem like spam right off the bat.

However, avoid adding first names at this point as it will not really affect your open rate and it will make your email seem like spam or just another generic marketing email.

Instead, try mentioning a competitor, upcoming event, or any other triggers.

New salesforce feature?

• Name

Basic, yet effective.

While personalizing your leads’ first name alone won’t do the trick, it’s certainly a step in the right direction. It will make your lead feel like there’s a real person behind the screen speaking directly to them.

• Company

You can add your own company, your leads’ company, or a competitor.

Adding your own company will add a layer of social proof and trust to your lead as they will know your email is legitimate and can research your company’s work.

By including your leads’ company, once again you’re ensuring your email is tailored to them, which will make your email relevant.

By adding a competitor’s company name, you can create FOMO and offer your leads a way to get ahead of the competition.

• Topics and achievements

This is the personalization tag that will really set you apart.

These personalization tags will make your email stand out more, as they will show that you really know each of your leads, you admire your work, and your product or service can truly benefit them.

And no, it’s not time-consuming at all if you rely on a powerful automation tool. The tool will scrap the information for you.

Media

Visuals are processed in around 13 milliseconds. Now imagine just how quickly an image would stand out if your lead spots their name or something about themselves in the image.

It will certainly lead them to read the rest of the email.

What kind of visuals can you personalize in your emails?

• Images
• Videos
• Landing pages

Why should you personalize your emails?

There are many benefits to personalizing your emails. Essentially, all roads lead to higher conversion rates, but there are other factors involved, including:

• Increase your open rates
• Helps you stand apart from the crowd
• Engage with your leads on a more personal level so they feel compelled to take the time to read your message
• Prove you have done your research and you care about them and their business
• Avoid coming across as spam
• Resonating with someone’s issues or pain points directly will make them more susceptible to replying and listening to your offer

And there are two main benefits to automating your personalization:

• Save time
• Reach more leads!

How to automate personalization

• Step 1: Clearly define your ICP

Defining a clear buyer persona or customer profile will help your automation tool reduce mistakes and will set a clear path, tone, and method.

→ Research pain points and competitors

• Step 2: Choose your automation tool

This is an important step. To help you out, we’re going to leave you with a list of our favorite tools to help you make your emails personalized.

Some features your automation tool should have are:

→ Enrichment

→ Liquid syntax

→ AI variables

→ Personalized visuals

→ Analytics and reporting

→ A/B testing

• Step 3: Enrich your leads’ data

It’s important to ensure that your automation tool has the most accurate data possible and clean lists to avoid misspellings, missing information, duplicates, and other annoying errors that can hurt your campaigns.

• Step 4: Write your generic email and add personalization tags

Once you have a clear idea for a campaign, you can start writing your generic email and adding the personalization tags you wish to include.

For example:

Hey {{firstName}}

We’ve noticed

With the start of 2025, many teams in {{industry/role}} face challenges like {{painpoint}}.

This often leads to:

• {{impact1}}
• {{impact2}}

Starting Q1 strong is critical, and addressing {{painpoint}} now can make a big difference. By {{solution}}, companies have seen:

• {{benefit1}}
• {{benefit2}}

Would it make sense to share how {{success case}} resolved {{painpoint}} as well?

{{signature}}

PS: I hope you’ll enjoy the holiday season in {{location}}.

• Step 5: Review and send

Don’t forget AI is helpful, but it is not perfect.

Go through your emails and make sure they look exactly how you want them to, and that names and information looks correct and accurate.

Once everything is up to your standards, send out your campaign and wait for the results.

Tools to automate your email personalization

Choosing the perfect tool for your needs is hard, especially when there are so many good tools out there.

We’ve listed our 7 favorite email personalization tools to help you decide.

1. lemlist

Ratings ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

G2 4.5/5 (264 reviews) \ Capterra 4.6/5 (387 reviews)

Overview

lemlist is a comprehensive sales engagement platform that helps sales reps in every step of the lead acquisition process.

lemlist prime features involves personalization in both LinkedIn and email.

First of all, with lemlist’s AI you can generate full sequences by simply answering a few questions. In seconds you will receive a full sequence with personalization tags.

You can also create your campaigns manually or access lemlist’s library of templates and select the template that works best for your campaign.

What can you personalize with lemlist?

• Text variables
• Liquid syntax
• Images
• Videos
• Landing pages

lemlist has also introduced AI variables that will help you create:

• Custom icebreakers
• Personalized and engaging P.S. lines
• Clean and qualified lists of leads
• Spin syntax
• … and much more

As we mentioned earlier, the key in using AI lies heavily on the prompts you use. But learning how to craft appropriate prompts can be tricky. This is why lemlist offers a full prompt library so you can make the most out of AI variables instantly.

Pricing

Aside from a free plan and free trials for every plan, with lemlist you can choose from 3 different plans.

• Email Pro ($55 per month)
• Multichannel Expert ($79 per month)
• Enterprise (with custom pricing)

With every plan you can also purchase additional sending emails for 9$ per month each.

Personalization at scale, AI variables and custom icebreakers are included in every paid plan. However, if you’re looking to include dynamic landing pages in your emails, you will have to start with the Multichannel Expert plan.

✅ Pros

• Custom icebreakers for each lead
• Prompt library available for AI variables

❌ Cons

• AI email copywriter is not included in the free plan
• Limited sending emails

2. Saleshandy

Ratings ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

G2 4.6/5 (653 reviews) \ Capterra 4.5/5 (125 reviews)

Overview

Saleshandy is an outreach tool with several features including a database, sender rotation, email warmup, and email personalization.

Saleshandy offers a Merge Tags feature, which essentially allows you to add an advanced personalization to your emails. Merge tags are variables that will be replaced with the information previously filled in your CSV files. These tags include data such as:

• First and last names
• Company
• Job title
• Industry
• Experience
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Website
• City
• … and other relevant data

Saleshandy also offers Spintax to create variations in your personalization tags so that all your emails can be different.

• {spin} Hi, | Hello, | Good day, {endspin} {{First Name}}

Pricing

Saleshandy offers 4 pricing plans ranging from $25 per month to $219 when billed annually and all plans offer a free trial.

Email personalization and Spintax feature is included in all plans.

However, is it important to take into account that the database is not included and you’d have to purchase a separate subscription.

✅ Pros

• Sequence scores
• Sender rotation feature

❌ Cons

• Data is often inaccurate
• Merge tags tend to fail
• Only works for email outreach

3. Customer.io

Ratings ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

G2 4.5/5 (408 reviews) \ Capterra 4.7/5 (81 reviews)

Overview

Customer.io is a marketing automation platform that allows you to send personalized messages on several channels including emails and SMS.

Customer.io has an automated personalization feature: Real-Time Personalization. What this means is that with customer.io you can instantly access customer data to personalize your messages based on 3 main triggers:

• Someone signs up for your service
• A customer uses a new feature
• Someone leaves an item in their cart

These personalization triggers will allow you to reach your leads automatically while they’re warm.

Pricing

Customer.io offers 3 pricing plans, that are pretty comprehensive (including 1 million emails per month for the cheapest plan), however, they can be considered expensive with pricing starting at $100 per month.

✅ Pros

• It is a very scaleable tool
• Offers a workflow builder

❌ Cons

• Not ideal for small businesses
• Limited reports

4. Humantic.ai

Ratings ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

G2 4.8/5 (440 reviews) | Product Hunt 4.9/5 (24 reviews)

Overview

Humantic.ai is a buyer intelligence and personality AI platform that also acts as a sales engagement platform.

By taking data from behavioral analysis, Humantic can offer highly personalized templates for your email outreach.

Humantic offers an automatic personalized email generation feature, where you simply have to click on the prospects file, and choose the “Write for me” option. The tool will then ask for several prompts and then offer a completely personalized email.

However you can feed the tool the same prompts for several prospects and you’ll receive different emails as they are personalized through personality types.

Pricing

Pricing starts at $180 per month when billed annually. Although pricing is steep, personality insights are available on all plans.

You can also add extra users to your plan for $36 per month each.

✅ Pros

• Natively integrates with Salesloft, Outreach, and Gmail
• Highly targeted emails

❌ Cons

• Does not work in bulk
• Some profiles are inaccurate

5. Woodpecker

Ratings ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

G2 4.3/5 (75 reviews) | Capterra 4.7/5 (35 reviews)

Overview

Woodpecker is SaaS platform designed to assist B2B companies in automating and personalizing email outreach.

With woodpecker you can add personalized snippets with dynamic custom fields and snippet-based conditions.

Snippet-based conditions will allow you to contact two segments of prospects in one campaign.

You can also include personalized videos, by simply recording a generic video and then include your customized merge tags.

Woodpecker will then access your data and include names, company name, job title, etc and it will appear on your video’s thumbnail.

Pricing

Woodpecker offers free trials and a free plan, after that pricing ranger from $20 to $6,666 per month when billed annually.

Some of the features related to personalization you can find include:

• Spintax
• Snippets
• Snippet-based conditions
• AI email writer

✅ Pros

• Free email warm-up
• Dynamic follow-ups based on recipients’ actions

❌ Cons

• Limited customization
• Lacks personalized icebreakers

6. Reply.io

Ratings ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

G2 4.6/5 (1,376 reviews) | Capterra 4.6/5 (96 reviews)

Overview

Reply is a sales engagement platform that offers many features to automate your sales outreach.

Reply.io offers a lot of customization features like variable insertion and ChatGPT integration, allowing for highly personalized communication.

Additionally, Reply offers AI-powered personalization features with the help of Jason AI that will allow you to include comments from previous interactions with your leads or follow-ups from events, webinars, etc.

When writing your email, you simply have to select the category your campaign falls under, and Jason AI will fill in data it scraps directly from your leads’ LinkedIn profiles.

Pricing

Reply.io offers 4 different pricing tiers, depending on what kind of tool you’re looking for. If you’re looking to automate your outreach, Sales Engagement is your tier.

Pricing ranges from $49 to $166 and includes features to automate your personalization, such as:

• AI reply categorization
• AI-generated icebreakers
• Personalized first-step emails
• AI sequence builder
• AI reply handling

Bear in min that if you’re looking for a comprehensive sales engagement platform that still fits a budget, Reply.io may not be your best fit as it can get quite expensive.

✅ Pros

• Scaleable AI
• Smooth CRM integrations

❌ Cons

• Does not integrate with Microsoft Outlook
• Lacks calendar integrations

7. Clay

Ratings ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

G2 4.9/5 (147 reviews) | Capterra 4.7/5 (10 reviews)

Overview

Clay is a data enrichment and sales automation platform which includes features such as CRM, lead scoring, and automated inbound and outbound, among others. Clay integrates natively with Open AI to offer you a strong AI-powered personalization.

With Clay, you can create personalized emails starting from a template. You simply have to complete the table with the information you will be personalizing in your email. For example, company, name, LinkedIn profile, website (for scraping purposes), etc.

Clay requires you to fill in your prompts personally, which is not the best choice if you’re a beginner.

Pricing

Clay offers 5 plans, including a free plan and a custom plan. Other plans range from $134 to $720 per month when billed annually.

If you’re looking for personalization features, bear in mind that email sequencing starts in the Explorer plan and AI prompting support is only included in the Custom plan.

✅ Pros

• Automated lead scoring
• AI assistant to streamline efficiency

❌ Cons

• It can become expensive very quickly
• There can be many enrichment errors

Final reasons to automate your email personalization

It’s clear that an email without personalization is not an email worth reading.

However, going through every single email and adding your leads’ information yourself would be incredibly time-consuming and there is quite a large margin for error.

By automating your personalization, you’re guaranteed to get correct data and saving hours of your time.

When choosing your email personalization tool, make sure it covers more than just the basics of personalization. If you want a little sneak peak of what we mean, check out lemlist’s free cold email generator to get your started.

lemlist team

Your source of actionable outreach tips and strategies that will help you get replies and grow your business.