How to Personalize Cold Emails for Decision Makers Using AI

Most cold emails don’t get ignored because they’re cold. According to 71% of decision makers, they’re ignoring you because your email is irrelevant. 

The easiest way to make cold emails relevant? Send them to the right person at the right company with a message tailored to what that person cares about. But that level of personalization is easier said than done.

You don’t need a data stack or fancy integrations to get this right. You need a simple workflow that:

1. Helps you find the right companies and contacts
2. Lets you tweak your messaging per job title
3. Scales with you

This blog provides you is an exact workflow to utilize Hunter and a ChatGPT prompt, making cold email personalization easier. And if you want to skip prompts entirely, Hunter’s AI Assistant can write personalized cold emails for every contact, automatically.

To illustrate this, we’ll follow one recruiter’s use case throughout. She’s a GTM recruiter pitching hiring support to growing SaaS companies.

Summary

Before we dive in, here’s the quick version of the workflow:

1. Define your ICP
2. Find relevant companies using hiring, tech, or firmographic signals in Hunter Discover
3. Identify 2–4 potential decision makers per company
4. Use ChatGPT to generate message variations by role with this prompt, replacing the bold copy:
   
   "I want to send a cold email to a company in SaaS that uses HubSpot and is hiring. My offer is GTM recruitment support to help them hire junior marketers. Which of these contacts should I reach out to, and what should I say? Contacts: Founder, COO, Head of Customer Success, Head of Sales, Head of Marketing, Marketing Manager."
   
5. Or skip prompting with Hunter’s AI Assistant to personalize at scale

Why personalization is hard (and how AI can fix it)

Everyone advises personalizing your cold emails. But what they don’t say is how long it takes, let alone what it takes.

Researching what every contact cares about is slow. Writing new variations for each one is slower. For most solo marketers and small teams, it’s unscalable.

Tools like Clay can create rich personalization by unifying endless data sources, but require time, technical know-how, and complex workflows.

So, most compromise. They write one email and send it to every contact, no matter their role. The result? Vague messaging that doesn’t resonate and hits spam folders.

Take our GTM recruiter. She’s pitching hiring support to SaaS companies. The CEO and Head of Marketing may both care about the open marketing role, but for different reasons. If she sends them the same message, one of them tunes out.

Let’s improve that by building a more efficient workflow using Hunter and AI.

Step 1: Build a relevant list (companies first, contacts second)

Good messaging starts with good targeting. That means identifying the right companies before writing a single line.

Start with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). For our recruiter, it looks like this:

• Industry: SaaS
• Size: 11–50 employees
• Tech stack: Uses HubSpot
• Signals: Currently hiring for GTM roles (e.g., Marketing Manager)

You can find companies like this using Hunter Discover. It lets you combine firmographics, technographics, and hiring signals to build a company list that matches your ICP.

With your companies locked in, shift to contacts. For each company, find 2–4 relevant people. Start at the top and work your way down:

1. Founder or CEO
2. COO or CFO
3. Head of Sales or Head of Marketing or Head of Marketing (budget holders, customer-side leaders)
4. Marketing Manager or similar ICs (fallback tier)

These roles may all care about the same outcome (filling a role), but the way you speak to them should differ. That’s where ChatGPT comes in.

Step 2: Personalize your messaging by job title with this prompt

With your list in hand, you can now create personalized message variations per role. Here’s the exact prompt again:

I would like to send a cold email to a SaaS company that utilizes HubSpot and is currently hiring. My offer is GTM recruitment support to help them hire junior marketers. Which of these contacts should I reach out to, and what should I say? Contacts: Founder, COO, Head of Customer Success, Head of Sales, Head of Marketing, Marketing Manager.

You can adapt this to your own use case by changing:

• The industry
• The nature of your offer
• The job titles you’re considering

Here’s how the prompt output might look, based on our recruiter scenario:

The key here: the same offer (recruitment help) takes on different value depending on who you’re speaking to.

By tailoring your message to what each person cares about, you make it easier for them to see why they should reply.

Step 3: Skip prompting with Hunter’s AI Writing Assistant

ChatGPT is a great way to start personalizing cold emails. But if you want to scale this beyond 10–20 contacts, there’s a faster way.

Hunter’s AI Writing Assistant lets you personalize every email to every recipient in your list — instantly.

Here’s how it works:

1. Build your contact list using Discover or Bulk Domain Search
2. Import your list into Campaigns
3. Use the AI Assistant to generate messaging personalized to each job title

You get role-relevant messaging that feels hand-written, without ever having to tweak a prompt.

It’s ideal for recruiters, agencies, consultants, solopreneurs, and lean marketing teams that want to move fast.

Final thought: personalization = relevance

You don’t need to reference someone’s blog post or favorite podcast to be personalized. You just need to show that you understand what they care about.

That starts with:

• Targeting the right companies
• Identifying the right people
• Adjusting your message based on their role

Use the ChatGPT prompt to do this quickly. Or skip prompts entirely and use Hunter’s AI Writing Assistant to generate personalized cold emails at scale.

If you found any of this interesting, make sure you give Hunter’s AI Writing Assistant a try. We’re building it precisely to help you create great emails, personal to each of your leads, using your tone of voice - but at scale.