This guide will get you started building your one-to-one gifting strategy for top-of-funnel sales development.
Applies to: All Roles
What You Will Learn
- Why personalized outreach significantly outperforms generic outreach
- How to leverage LinkedIn to create personalized experiences
- How to effortlessly create personalized gift emails
Personalization in Outreach Yields Results
According to a 2021 report from McKinsey & Company, “71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. And 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.” There’s a psychological reason that personalization is key to creating positive brand experiences, called the Cocktail Party Effect.
The Cocktail Party Effect is “the phenomenon of the brain’s ability to focus one’s attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli.” Picture a cocktail party. There are groups of people scattered around, each having their own conversations. Yet, you manage to focus on one group’s conversation and join in.
So, if you send a prospecting email and it lands in an inbox full of other messages, even adding a prospect’s name to the subject line can capture a prospect’s attention better than those without it. Going a step further and including a gift and personalized message relating to a new job, the university they attended, or personal interests is proven to yield much higher open rates and responses.
Source: Salesloft
Source: Salesloft
Leveraging LinkedIn to Personalize Your 1:1 Outreach
Creating a personalized experience for prospects whom you don’t know doesn’t have to take hours of research. It can be as simple as taking a few minutes to look up their hobbies, interests, and personal details on LinkedIn.
Check these key areas to mine for information:
- Headline
- About Section
- Interests
- Comments & Posts
For example, if there’s a prospect whose attention you are trying to get, and they have “dog lover” in the headline of their profile, select an item from the Postal Marketplace to send them, like the Pupyata, piñata for dogs filled with dog treats.
The accompanying gift message could look something like this:
Subject: Dog Days of Prospecting
Hi {Name}, sales teams are feeling pretty dog-gone beat down with outbound prospecting. (nearly sent over a coffee fix, but as a dog lover, a dog piñata seemed like the right move).
Before Munchbase, Lilypad reps were chasing their tails and losing time trying to find new, best-fit accounts to prospect into.
We helped cut down their prospecting time by 30% by surfacing recently-funded companies that are ready-to-buy, and the best contacts to reach out to.
Worth exploring for your team at {{company name}}? Either way - hope {{dog name}} enjoys their piñata.
What makes this message effective:
- The subject line is very specific to the individuals’ interests with a fun play on words to make them curious enough to open it
- It’s obvious that time was taken to do research and select a gift custom to their interests
- A pain point for this prospect is tied into the gift being offered
- It concisely states how the solution you’re selling can help with that problem
- A low-pressure call to action
Gift Messaging Framework
Writing a gift email that is clever, personalized, and gets the relevant information across can be the hardest part of one-to-one offline engagement for SDRs who are strapped for time.
We’ve created a simple framework called the Gift Messaging Framework to help you craft personalized gift emails in minutes:
- Subject: Play on words that tie back to prospects’ interest
- Sentence one: Insert a question or observation about personalization here.
- Sentence 2: Insert a problem they’re likely dealing with. Maybe make the gift connection here.
- Sentence 3: State how you can solve X problem, and an outcome. You could also make the gift connection here.
- Final sentence: Include a low-pressure CTA. This is the time to ask for their interest, not a meeting. (You can offer a meeting once they’ve accepted your gift in Postal’s recipient flow)
- Sign off with your name. Optional: add a P.S. at the end with a gift connection if you haven’t already included it.
Next up: SDR Plays: Gifting for 1:Many Outreach >
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