Personalising 50 emails by hand was killing my mornings. This does the first pass automatically.
The workflow
- Trigger a Zap on a new lead row
- Send the lead website and role to ChatGPT
- Generate a one line, specific opener
- Drop it into your sequence for review
Result: 50 tailored openers waiting for a quick human check.
The prompt
Write a single opening line for a cold email to [ROLE] at [COMPANY]. Reference something specific about the company. No flattery, no fluff, under 20 words.A note on what follows. The workflow, the prompt and the result above come from the member. The notes below (why the prompt works, what to watch for, how to adapt it) were written with AI help.
Why this prompt works
Under 20 words, and one line only. Both limits exist because the model wants to write a whole email and the whole email is always worse than mine. I only want the opener, the bit that decides whether line two gets read. "No flattery" is the instruction I would keep if I could keep only one. Every early version opened with "I was impressed by your recent growth", which is the exact sentence every other rep sends, so it actively hurts. The specific reference is where it lives or dies, and that depends entirely on what I feed it. Their careers page and a recent post work well. Their homepage does not, because homepages are written to say nothing.
What to watch for
- It invents the specific detail when you give it nothing to work with. A funding round that never happened will look completely plausible.
- Old news treated as new. Something from 2023 gets referenced as if it happened last week.
- The compliment sneaks back in as a subordinate clause even when you banned it.
- At volume the openers converge. Run thirty and you will see the same three shapes, which defeats the point of personalising.
How to adapt it
- Bound it to the source you pasted:
Only reference facts present in the text above. If there are none, say so.This kills the invented funding rounds. - For an opener that earns a reply, add
End on something they can correct or disagree with. - If the openers all sound alike, add
Do not start with "I" or with their company name.and they diverge again.
What good output looks like
I ask myself whether the line could be sent to their nearest competitor. If yes, it is not personalisation, it is a mail merge with extra steps. It should reference something a person had to actually read, and it should not compliment anyone. Slight awkwardness is fine, polished is suspicious. If it opens with a question I usually cut it, because everyone opens with a question now.