AI has revolutionized cold outreach just like any other industry. But we’re not just talking about ChatGPT and copywriting here, AI tools can help with identifying potential customers, analyzing data, and helping you with lead management. That’s exactly why you should embrace AI as a permanent extension of your team and not just a trend – it’s a game-changing strategy that can elevate your cold outreach game to new heights.  We’ve gathered all the ways you can include AI in your process and how to harness its power to your advantage:

Research

Whatever industry you may work in, research is usually the most time-consuming part of every process. AI tools can completely transform the way we gather, process, and analyze information. They swiftly sift through vast volumes of data, identifying relevant patterns, trends, and insights, and then digest and synthesize complex information for us. Our team loves using ChatGPT when researching target audiences for a new client. Even though we’re experienced with a lot of industries, most of them are a general name to a number of different businesses and services and there is always more to learn about them. The same goes for job positions and their responsibilities – AI helps us a ton when we’re working to identify who would be the best person to reach out to depending on the product we’re selling.     Probably the most common use we get from AI chatbots is their ability to summarize and simplify information for us. Getting just the essence out of several case studies is of great help when our copywriting team is working on a case study-based email sequence for a campaign. This lets us get the pain points, the pain relievers, and the end results of the story without going through the whole process of note-taking while reading the whole testimonial. Tools like Eightify and Glarity which are available as Chrome extensions can help you by summarizing YouTube videos – you can use them for video essays or to get the most important points from video client testimonials.

Personalized Messaging

Personalization is key to all marketing channels. When it comes to cold outreach, it’s probably the most essential part, as it’s often the one that catches the reader’s attention. And while we love mentioning recent updates like a job change or a company’s recent funding as an icebreaker in our campaigns, these events are not as common for every audience and can limit our pool of prospects. Crafting tailored icebreakers for every prospect becomes a breeze with AI. I’d love to introduce you to our go-to tool for generating personalized icebreakers – Smartwritter.ai. Smartwriter works with your database of prospects and works by going through their company’s websites, LinkedIn profiles, or Google reviews and looking for any recent changes and news that the company has shared. The generated icebreakers that work best are usually compliments or a mention about what their company does and why it’s great they are doing so (compliment again). This makes the message tailored for each receiver while still keeping a genuine tone.   It’s worth mentioning that Smartwriter also offers persona-based icebreakers, as they use the prospects’ LinkedIn profiles for that. While this may sound even more intriguing, keep in mind that this method only works when the majority of the people on your mailing list are actually active and post regularly on LinkedIn. Here are 2 examples of icebreakers that we generated for a list of prospects in the Canadian e-commerce market. We set a company-based personalization and you can see how Smartwriter showcases the source material on top of the two generated options. Another app that provides very similar results at a similar price per credit is Lyne.ai. Lyne is specially designed for AI-generated outreach and has templates for whole sequences of cold emails. They offer AI-generated personalization for your campaigns based on the same sources as Smartwritter and their platform looks something like this:

An AI assistant

If you’re still growing your team, you may love this one! Reply.io recently introduced their ‘personal assistant’- Jason AI. Jason is powered by Chat GPT and is there to help you go through the whole outreach process – from the campaign setup to the booking of meetings.   Jason AI can also help you when you’re still working on your mailing list by suggesting filters to target the prospects most likely to buy your product or services. Jason AI creates sequences with the initial email, follow-ups, and social touches. Additionally, it offers recommendations for alternative channels to engage prospects, with a keen understanding of which channels are most effective for individual cases. Additionally, Jason AI can handle the responses of your campaigns – both the interested and the ‘not interested’ ones! It reads emails from your leads and handles basic customer inquiries, including suggesting a time and date and booking a slot in calendars for you.  Just like any other Chat GPT-based tool, Jason is supposed to improve with practice. It will learn about your company, your offerings, and your process.

Data-Driven Insights

Let’s talk optimization! The best way to be sure that you’re always doing what works best is to have a reliable reference to what you’ve done before! At Hypergen we’re very results driven and that comes backed up by data! We track what works best for each of our clients through lead dashboards. Our dashboards are essentially sheets with the most important data of all the interested leads we’ve gotten for a client – we keep track of information like job titles, company headcounts, location, what message they responded to, etc. These dashboards are the base of the weekly and monthly reports we do for our clients but are also an amazing source for internal analysis and checkups. As you progress through your outbound efforts, you’ll probably start to collect your valuable data in a similar way. To make the most out of it, you can harness some more of that AI power! AI is your secret weapon in deciphering data trends. It can help uncover patterns in your responses, create reports for your clients more easily, and support any kind of dashboarding you do. Every decision becomes data-backed and informed. AI can quickly examine massive amounts of data to find trends and patterns that can be used to derive insights for improving your campaigns. And if you’re using multiple channels for your outbound campaigns, AI also helps streamline data analysis by funneling all data into one solution, enabling your team to have a complete overview of the data.  Some of the hottest AI tools we found for that are Tableau.com, Akkio.com, and Data.ai. In conclusion, AI has ushered in a revolution in the realm of cold outreach, reshaping the way we engage with potential customers. It’s not merely a trend but a strategic move, offering an array of powerful tools to enhance every phase of your outreach efforts. As the data-driven landscape evolves, embracing AI as a permanent extension of your team ensures you’re not just keeping pace but surging ahead in the competitive world of cold outreach.