Personalization Is Eating Itself: Here’s What Comes Next

The personalization software market is experiencing substantial growth. According to 360iResearch, the market is projected to expand from $10.09B in 2024 to $31.62B by 2030, representing a CAGR of 20.95%. Meanwhile, McKinsey's State of AI report indicates that 71% of organizations are currently using AI in sales and marketing, and Salesforce data reveals that 84% of sales professionals using generative AI report increased sales performance.

However, current personalization approaches are approaching saturation. Outbound strategy has traditionally involved sending high volumes of impersonalized emails, often characterized as 'spray and pray'. This approach has evolved in recent years toward AI-driven strategies that incorporate personalized content at scale.

The industry has shifted from standard templates to research-driven messaging, and is now transitioning toward more sophisticated methodologies. But current approaches are becoming less effective as market saturation increases and new strategies require greater complexity than most organizations currently recognize.

The Personalization Cycle

A consistent pattern emerges in sales and marketing tactics: effective approaches become popular, popular approaches become commonplace, commonplace approaches become ineffective. Subsequently, the cycle resets with new innovations.

Tactics that demonstrated effectiveness in 2023 - such as "I saw your LinkedIn post about..." or "Noticed you're hiring for..." - have become familiar territory for many markets. The issue is not that personalization has ceased to function, but rather that obvious personalization is quickly losing its effectiveness.

The Spotio data indicating that personalized cold emails generate 32% more replies than generic ones remains accurate but incomplete. This statistic does not differentiate between personalization that creates genuine connection and personalization that merely demonstrates basic research capabilities.

The market has reached an inflection point where advanced practitioners are moving beyond surface-level research toward more sophisticated, authentic, and effective approaches.

The Looming Relevance Trap

The current trope in outbound strategy is that relevance is more important than personalization, but the misconception that follows is that relevance equals resonance.

Organizations focus extensively on relevant personalization - referencing recent funding rounds, commenting on product launches, mentioning job postings. The logic appears sound: if information is relevant to their business, prospects will engage with it. However, relevance without resonance constitutes sophisticated small talk. This can still be effective, but sales teams need to start asking the question; why? When multiple organizations reference the same Series B announcement or industry conference, research becomes undifferentiated.

Many organizations also use personalization as disguised segmentation, such as referencing someone's role as "Head of Sales" as a point of ‘personalization’. This approach does not create resonance; it merely confirms list segmentation by an arbitrary vertical (often job title or company type).

Personalization, relevance, and segmentation are essentially abstractions on the same spectrum - things that make a message resonant, specifically to this person rather than everyone else.

Layered Personalization - Integrated Understanding

The first evolution we predict, and which is already being executed by top operators, is toward layered personalization: integrating multiple research insights to demonstrate understanding rather than mere research.

Being able to identify connections between prospect background, company challenges, and industry trends, whilst tying them to the core offering in the email creates personalization that is more than simply ‘personalization’.

Consider this current, and commonly applied form of personalization:

"Marcus, I noticed you moved from Salesforce to VP of Revenue at CloudTech right as the company shifted from horizontal to vertical SaaS. That timing suggests either excellent instincts or excellent luck - and given CloudTech's 40% growth since you joined, I'm betting on instincts. The vertical playbook you're running reminds me of what another former Salesforce VP executed at his fintech startup..."

The key is intelligence, not information. As sophisticated data collection becomes more accessible with the burgeoning GTM software market, it will be how these insights are used to create intelligent messages over the fact that a team can state the obvious.

Authentically Irrelevant Personalization

The second prediction represents a more calculated use of irrelevant personalization - implemented authentically. In a market oversaturated with hyper-relevant research, personalization that may appear irrelevant can start to indicate authenticity when deployed honestly. This has been a long-debated topic amongst outreach operators, with the most recent consensus landing on ‘irrelevant’ personalization being…well, irrelevant.

However, this is often largely because it is used unauthentically to hook prospects, which is inherently deceiving.

Traditionally, it may look something like this:

“Hey Jessica,

Saw you went to Rutgers university, that’s so cool so did !

I was just reaching out because we’re helping companies like you…”

The issue here isn’t the fact that the personalization is irrelevant per se, it’s that it's used in a bait and switch strategy that makes it deceiving. The irrelevant personalization is the weapon, but the bait and switch is the criminal using it.

We can change how we frame that personalization to make a real connection, simply by the language and where we structure it. Take this example:

"Hey Jessica,

I wanted to reach out because we’re helping Chief People Officers in SaaS with our new recruitment software - it uses AI to automatically create professional development schemes for employees that evolve with appraisal data.

It’s got quite a bit of buzz on Tech Crunch so would love to get your feedback?

(Oh and btw, my sister was in New York the other week and said this place called Joe’s Pizzeria is the best pizza ever…do you know it??)

Best,

Daron”

The comment about Joe’s Pizzeria is irrelevant, but it’s framed differently to the earlier example in 2 ways.

Rather than a generic statement, the personalization is referring to a real life scenario that creates a genuine point of connection (Daron’s sister went there)

The tone and language is far more colloquial and breaks pattern compared to traditional personalization statements that are often a little gimmicky.

It’s still completely irrelevant, but leans closer to actually resonating with the prospect.

Context Matters

Linked inextricably to the prior point is the placement of the personalization. Moving away from opening hooks and embedding it naturally throughout messages. In the example above, the comment about Joe’s Pizzeria is placed after the core ask in the email, making it clear that this is a side-comment not meant to be used as bait. There is no pretense that this detail relates to the business proposition.

Even in the more relevant personalization examples, placement becomes a tool of sophistication. Where traditional personalization frontloads research, making it feel like a to-do task that’s been ticked off, more sophisticated structures can weave personalization subtly into messaging in a way that creates authenticity.

For example:

‘Hey Joey,

We’re building this lead Slack integration which I figured could be useful for teams like yours. Territory managers in particular tend to be fans of the country lead notifications - not sure if Rachel or Chandler already have this setup, but could be interesting if not.”

In this example, Rachel and Chandler are territory managers in Joey’s team. Rather than starting with a basic demonstration of our research stating that we can see they have territory managers, we’re weaving it into the relevance of the message as a whole and using a more subtle structure to create a more authentic message that feels far less forced or automated.

This approach transforms personalization from manipulation into conversational context. Rather than personalization as a door-opener, it becomes personalization as conversation support.

Signal Accessibility

Tools like UserGems, Common Room, and Clay are facilitating trigger-based outreach based on job changes, funding announcements, and hiring signals. Apollo and HubSpot are developing similar capabilities. The result is simultaneous access to identical triggers across organizations. Not only do they allow for it, but they’re built-in features are becoming more and more layman-friendly, which will lead to a mass-popularization of many of the signal based messaging we’re already seeing.

When multiple organizations reference the same Series B round or VP of Sales hire, trigger-based personalization becomes generic rather than solution-oriented. Successful organizations will need to use these signals as research starting points, but not personalization endpoints. The objective is not data quality demonstration, but genuine connection creation.

Personalized Assets

While organizations debate email copy tactics, advanced practitioners will move beyond personalized messaging that ends at the foot of the email and start creating personalized experiences - and again, certain operators are already building out these workflows.

This will include dynamic landing pages that adapt based on prospect research, lead magnets that reference specific company challenges, and demo environments pre-loaded with industry-relevant, and maybe even company-relevant, examples. This is already possible. Integrations between tools like Clay and Webflow give sales teams the ability to create these highly personalized experiences that extend beyond the message that delivers it.

This represents the next development phase. Rather than longer, more researched emails, shorter messages may direct prospects to highly personalized assets. Personalization shifts from message to experience. The operational complexity may be significant in the near term - creating personalized assets for individual prospects requires sophisticated automation - but the differentiation potential is substantial.

Even more so, as MCP and other abstractions of automation become even more accessible too, the ability to spin these up will be just as easy - but we are not there yet.

Strategic Considerations

The transition from copy-based personalization to experiential personalization presents interesting strategic challenges that teams will need to consider. Which asset and which personalized form of the asset will be a good strategy and why? This is (or should) already be a consideration for teams applying copy-based personalization, but asset creation will require more operational complexity, so these strategic questions will need to be well thought out before resources are spent building them for testing.

What Most Teams Will Miss

These shifts are essentially an ever-moving requirement to create resonance as the market slowly absorbs the impact of whatever’s working at that time. Layered personalization requires operators capable of insight synthesis, not just data point collection. Authentically irrelevant personalization requires those who understand conversation and what makes an interesting remark vs a trite one. Context-driven personalization requires structural thinking about message flow and language.

Many organizations will struggle with this transition because it requires judgment, taste, and understanding of human psychology, not just tools and automation. Teams will succeed not just by adopting these new personalization strategies but from deploying them in an intelligent way - and because they are inherently more sophisticated, they require a strategic mind that understands why they’re doing it.

Final Comments

Personalization is not obsolete - it is evolving more rapidly than most organizations recognize. Previously effective tactics are becoming baseline requirements. Future tactics require greater sophistication, honesty, and creativity.

Future success belongs to those who understand that effective personalization does not announce itself - its intelligence not information, resonance not relevance.

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