Personalization

There are two kinds of personalization. Shallow personalization inserts fields into a template: the first name, the company name, maybe the city. It is cheap and everyone recognises it. Deep personalization changes what the email says: it starts from something true and specific about the company, such as a launch, a hiring push or a problem their customers mention, and connects it to why you are writing.

Deep personalization only helps when the facts are right. An email that congratulates someone on a funding round that never happened, or names the wrong product, is worse than a plain template, because it shows the research was guessed. So the facts an email relies on should come from a source you can point to, read recently, and anything the research could not establish should be left out rather than invented.