The cold email industry has industrialised fake personalization. First-name tokens, company name insertions, pulled-from-LinkedIn job title references — these are all forms of automation that the recipient recognises instantly as automation. Real personalization is not about using someone's name. It is about demonstrating that you chose them specifically, for a reason that is specific to them.
Most outreach sequences that claim to be personalised are actually segmented: the same email sent to everyone in the "SaaS CMO" bucket, with the contact's name in the subject line. That is targeting, not personalization. And the difference is visible to every recipient who gets it.
What Fake Personalization Looks Like
- "Hi [First Name], I came across your profile and thought our solution would be perfect for [Company Name]." — This is a template. Everyone who reads it knows it is a template.
- Pulling a LinkedIn post and saying "I loved your post about X" when the post was scraped by automation and the sender did not read it. Recipients can tell.
- Using "I see you work in [Industry]" as an opening line. Every single person in that industry gets this email. It signals nothing except that you bought a list.
What Real Personalization Requires
Real personalization means researching the specific person before you write. It means finding one thing — a recent product launch, a job transition, an article they wrote, a position they took publicly — that is uniquely true about this specific person right now. It means your opening line could not have been written to anyone else.
This is slower. It requires more time per email. Which is exactly why it gets a higher reply rate: it is the rare thing in an inbox full of automated outreach. One genuinely personalised email per day to the right prospect will outperform 100 templated emails every time.