personalization-at-scale
Personalisation at Scale
{{first_name}} is not personalisation. It's evidence that a machine sent the email, because a human writing to one person wouldn't need a placeholder.
Real personalisation is a fact about that specific company that took effort to find, used to explain why this email is relevant to them. The scaling problem is that finding one fact per lead is the expensive part, and everything that makes it cheap tends to make it obviously fake.
The three tiers
Match the tier to the lead's value. Personalising everything equally is how programmes stall.
| Tier | Volume | Personalisation | Who gets it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1:1 | 5-20/day | A human researches and writes each one | Top 10% of leads |
| 1:few | 100-500/campaign | Researched fact per lead, merged into a template | The middle, most of the list |
| 1:many | Any | Segment-level relevance, no per-lead fact | Only if the segment is narrow enough |
Tier 3 works only when the segment is tight enough that a segment-level statement is itself specific. "For agencies running outbound for more than five clients" is specific. "For businesses looking to grow" is not.
Most of the value is in tier 2, and that's what the rest of this covers.