Everyone can spot a mail merge. What they cannot spot is a short email that mentions one true thing only someone who looked would know.
A first name is not personalisation
It is table stakes, and its only real job is to not be wrong. The variable that changes the reply rate is the one carrying a specific observation: the project, the role, the sentence they wrote.
Two or three, never eight
Each variable is a thing you must find for every recipient. Eight of them turns a five-minute list into an afternoon, and the afternoon is why the sending stops. Choose the two that would be obvious to a human reader if they were missing.
Write the fallback into the sentence
Instead of "I saw your work on {{project}}", which collapses when the project is unknown, write a sentence that reads well either way and only include it when you have the detail. Conditional sentences beat conditional words.
Fill them from the page, not from memory
The details worth using are on the page you found the person on. Copying them across by hand is where errors enter — the wrong company, yesterday's job title. Taking the text straight from the page you are reading removes the step where things go wrong.
Reuse the same values down the thread
If the opening called them Mara at Nordlicht, the day-seven message has to as well. A sequence that changes how it addresses someone halfway through announces exactly how it was made.
Questions
What if I cannot find the detail for someone?
Do variables hurt deliverability?
More guides
How many follow-ups, and how far apart
Three messages, spaced from the first send, and a real ending.
Cold email deliverability, without the folklore
The four things that matter, and the many that do not.
Writing a repeatable task that actually gets done
Small, specific, and ordered the way you actually work.
Start with one task
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