Looking to make your outreach feel truly personal without spending hours on each message?
Try this AI hack that’s working wonders for founders in our community:
Create a “personalization database” spreadsheet with columns for:
- Prospect name
- Company
- Industry-specific pain points
- Recent company news
- LinkedIn activity topics
Use this prompt template with ChatGPT or Claude:
Write a personalized outreach email to {Name} at {Company} in the {Industry} space.
They're likely dealing with {Industry Pain Points}.
I noticed they recently {Recent News/Activity}.
My solution helps companies like theirs by {Your Value Prop}.
Make the email sound conversational, not salesy. Max 150 words. Include a specific question related to their recent activity to encourage response.
Quickly review and refine before sending.
Community members report 3X higher response rates with this approach versus generic templates!
What’s your favorite AI hack for personalization? Share below!
Okay, so I am going to give a slightly different take on this - from the client’s perspective, receiving these kinds of emails.
While using a prompt like that in a tool like ChatGPT can produce amazing results for the business, I caution business owners to think twice before taking this approach. I receive probably 15-20 of these kinds of SPAM emails EVERY DAY. I can tell they didn’t actually do anything to personalize the email, that they just scraped my LinkedIn profile and copy/pasted the same email template they have probably used thousands of times that day.
For me, it is an immediate “Block and Report Spam” when I receive these messages. I know they can be effective - just because of the law of large numbers. But it is also a really great way of ruining your email sending score and losing access to sending emails to people.
While at Thoughts Brewing, @DamienGriffin and I have doubled-down on AI, we are quadrupling-down on human skills, because we believe in the value of genuine human connection and communication.
So my counter to this “personalized email prompt” approach, would be use a prompt like that to help you data-mine your data to pull out those pieces. Then, write the email yourself. Add in a legimate personal touch. Ask them about their dog Sam you talked about in the last call you had. Give them a restaurant recommendation for their upcoming trip to Boulder, CO they mentioned in a recent email. Something that is actually personalized. 
You’ve hit on a critical distinction, @DanielleGriffin. 
Simply automating “personalization” is a quick path to the spam folder, and frankly, it undermines real connection. I completely agree that a true human touch remains irreplaceable, especially as AI gets better at mimicking it.
Your approach at Thoughts Brewing – using AI to gather insights, then adding genuinely personal details – is, in my opinion, the only way to build lasting relationships in outreach. It’s about moving beyond just a response rate.
How do you think we can encourage more businesses to adopt this “human-first, AI-informed” philosophy, rather than chasing pure automation?
I’m not sure there is just one way that can help encourage businesses to adopt the “human-first, AI-informed” mindset. I think the people running the business have to create a culture in which they value people/relationships over vanity metrics and revenue.
When starting from a place of relationships and providing value first (centering the person over the sale), you will get further than trying to just fast push out thousands of generic “personalized” emails. A lot of Simon Sinek’s work focuses on this. Seth Godin’s work does a better job of showing the balance of human and AI.