Waterfall personalization is a cold email technique where you progressively personalize each stage of the outreach. This approach aims to balance scalability with relevance by layering in different levels of personalization depending on the audience segmentation and campaign structure.
Here’s how waterfall personalization generally works:
- High-Level Personalization (Top of Waterfall): At the broadest level, emails may include general company or industry references that apply to all recipients in a segment, like mentioning a relevant trend or a common pain point.
- Segment-Based Personalization: For smaller segments within your list, you can personalize based on characteristics like company size, location, or specific roles. This could involve referencing a common industry challenge, a regional trend, or something relevant to their business type.
- Individual Personalization (Bottom of Waterfall): For high-priority leads, you add more specific touches based on individual research, like mentioning recent company news, specific projects, or achievements. This requires manual effort, so it’s typically reserved for the highest-value prospects.
The goal of waterfall personalization is to use the highest level of personalization that’s feasible based on the audience and outreach scale. This way, you achieve a mix of personalized relevance and efficiency in your cold email campaigns, targeting the message in a way that resonates at each level of segmentation.