To personalise B2B outreach emails, use your ideal customer profile to choose who to contact, connect a verified business detail to your offer, and review both the first email and the follow-up before sending.
Aim to answer the recipient’s likely question: why are you writing to this business about this particular service? Start there, rather than adding a compliment or a company name to an otherwise unrelated pitch.
Which parts of your customer profile should shape the email?
An ideal customer profile, or ICP, describes the businesses you want as customers. Waving’s ICP guide covers six areas: business type, decision-maker, recurring problems, timing signals, places to find prospects and businesses to exclude.
Do not try to squeeze the whole profile into an email. Use it to make three decisions before drafting:
- Fit: does this company meet your criteria, and is there a reason to leave it out?
- Recipient: have you checked who is responsible for the area your offer concerns?
- Reason: what verified detail makes this a sensible business to approach about this offer?
Treat the problems in your profile as research questions, not facts about every prospect. If your ICP mentions difficulty coordinating several sites, look for evidence of multiple locations. Do not turn that into a claim that the company’s coordination is poor.
What should you check about each prospect?
Keep a short research note for each business. Record the detail you intend to mention, where you found it and when you checked it. Keep your interpretation separate from the observation.
For example, use this distinction when researching a possible training prospect. The entries below are illustrative, not details about a real company:
- Observation to verify: the company has advertised several management vacancies.
- Possible relevance: your management training might be worth discussing.
- Assumption to avoid: the company’s managers are inexperienced or struggling.
If you cannot verify a detail, leave it out or ask a straightforward question. Avoid dressing a guess up as research with phrases such as “you must be finding” or “I know your team is struggling with”. Keep the personalisation about the business and the work, not the recipient’s private life.
How do you turn the research into a first email?
Build the draft around one reason for writing. Try this order: the verified observation, the connection to your offer and one question the recipient can answer without committing to a meeting.
Use this as a drafting scaffold, not a finished email. Replace every bracketed section with checked information, and only describe a service you actually provide:
Hi [first name], I saw [specific business detail] on [source]. I’m writing because we provide [service relevant to that detail]. Is [relevant area] something you look after, or should I ask someone else at [company]? [Your name and business signature]
Read the connection between the first and second sentences closely. If you mention a new office but sell something unrelated to offices, reconsider the opening. Do not keep a researched detail simply to show that you found it.
Keep the subject line equally grounded. Try a short description of the actual topic, such as “[service] for [company]”, rather than implying a previous conversation that never happened.
How should you brief AI to personalise the draft?
Give the drafting tool your customer profile, your actual offer and the verified prospect notes as separate inputs. Set a clear boundary between what it may state and what it should ask. For example:
Draft one short first-contact B2B email using the ICP, service description and verified prospect notes below. Use only the supplied facts. Do not invent problems, budgets, results, relationships or compliments. Connect one verified business detail to our service, then ask one straightforward question. If the notes do not support a relevant opening, say what information is missing rather than guessing.
Review the output against your notes, not just for fluency. Remove any claim you cannot trace to the information you supplied. If you have no useful prospect detail yet, do more research or write a modest question about fit instead of manufacturing a personalised opening.
What should you check before approving the email?
In Waving, every outreach email requires approval before sending, and customers can edit emails that have not yet been sent. Use that review to check the reason for contact as well as the wording.
- Check the recipient’s name, company and role against your research.
- Confirm that the opening detail is accurate and still relevant.
- Remove assumed pain points, invented familiarity and unsupported promises.
- Check that your offer follows logically from the reason you gave for writing.
- Read the follow-up too. Keep it consistent with the first message and avoid inventing urgency or treating silence as interest.
Waving sends emails from the customer’s own domain, paces sending across the day and cancels the follow-up when a reply arrives.
Where should you start?
If your target customer is still vague, start with Waving’s ideal customer profile generator, which uses six short questions. Then choose one prospect, check one relevant business detail and draft one email you would be comfortable approving.
Not your trade?
Build your own ICP in a few minutes. Free, no sign up, nothing leaves your browser.
Open the ICP generator