💬 From Data to Conversations: Personalized Outreach That Converts

Welcome to Lesson 7 in our series on Inbound Automation with Clay!

By now, you’ve learned how to bring leads into Clay, enrich them, score them, and route them to the right reps. We’re almost at the finish line!

Now it’s time to go that extra mile in building GTM Alpha: crafting personalized messaging to turn inbound interest into real conversations.

After this lesson, you’ll know to:

• Leverage data enrichments and AI to compose personalized, human-sounding outreach using personalized snippets
• Cross-check your CRM to avoid redundantly messaging leads who have already been contacted

✔️ Step 1: CRM check

Before you send any messages, you should always double check whether the contact or company is already in your CRM. That way, you can avoid accidentally reaching out to a lead who might already be in conversations with another rep. You can also figure out from past CRM history more context about an inbound lead that can be super valuable for reaching back out.

This is super easy to do in Clay. You can use the lookup object or lookup record enrichment, depending on your CRM, and cross check table data against your CRM records.

Then, you can set up conditional logic based on the results to route leads to the appropriate workflows. Now, you’re ready to start writing messages.

✍🏻 Writing hyper-personalized email snippets with Clay

High-context, personalized messages, especially when sent quickly after a lead comes in, are huge in driving your org’s GTM Alpha. Research has clearly shown the benefit of personalization— personalized emails lead to six times higher transaction rates for B2B businesses. The challenge is that already overburdened reps simply don’t have the bandwidth to send personalized messages to each lead, which results in defaulting to a spray and pray approach.

For handling inbound leads, your messaging doesn’t have to be wildly creative or elaborate. These leads have already expressed their interest in what you have to offer - they just need to hear back.

Often times, the difference between an ok email and a great email really comes down to the first and second lines. You want to show the lead that you’ve done your homework, which we clearly have via all the enrichments we’ve run.

Let’s say we want to reference their job title and the company’s potential use case in the email opening. You can leverage the job title data as well as company description we’ve already collected via enrichments. Click on Use AI, then Generate Text using either ChatGPT or Anthropic:

Type in a prompt describing what you’re looking to do:

• “Create a personalized and engaging intro line for an email using the lead’s title and their company’s primary use case based on information you’ve collected from their website and description.

Or, let’s say you want to congratulate them on recent company news.

• “Congrats on growing your team by 20% this year—that’s huge and a testament to how you’re raising the bar in marketing automation.”

You could mention the tech stack they’re using:

• "I noticed you're using Outreach for your outbound campaigns. We've been helping teams boost reply rates by enriching leads with contextual data before they hit send - are you looking for easy ways to scale outreach personalization?"

Lastly, you could reference company headcount growth, the enrichment we discussed earlier:

• “Looks like your sales team has nearly doubled within the past year - curious how you’re thinking about new tools to keep up with that growth.”

✉️ Inbound emails: A simple formula

Line 1: Weave in personalized insights (based on the enrichments you’ve collected)

Line 2: Connect those insights to the problem your company solves

Line 3: Include a clear and succint call to action

The latter two parts don’t need to be personalized to every single lead, making it even easier to combine snippets with pre-written blocks and compose full messages.

🔚 Conclusion

A few thoughtful, personalized lines can be the difference between getting lost in someone’s inbox and starting a meaningful conversation. With Clay’s enrichment tools and AI copywriting, you can scale outreach without sacrificing the human touch.

In our last lesson, we’ll dive into how to export your cleaned, enriched, and scored leads into your CRM, Slack, or other tools. We’ll talk about how Clay enables real-time, ongoing data syncs so your entire team stays up-to-date and ready to act.