Writing Sales Emails For Different Industries

Your cold email has one job. And 99% people are failing to do it. It’s to make the reader say: “This email is literally meant for me.” Not: “Cool. Another agency spraying templates.” That’s where most fail. They confuse “personalized” with “specific.” First name isn't specificity. Neither is a job title. Nor is a 3-second {company} mention. True specificity speaks their language so well, They think you used insider intel. Here’s how to nail it every single time: 👉 1. Mention what only someone inside the business would know If you’re targeting SaaS RevOps: Reference their HubSpot→Salesforce sync issues. If you’re targeting eCom: Mention abandoned cart recovery inside Klaviyo. That’s when they stop scrolling. 👉 2. Use metrics that matter only to them “Revenue growth” is meaningless. Try “3.4% churn reduction in 6 months” for SaaS. Try “CPA under $14 with 3.7 ROAS” for DTC brands. These numbers show you get it. 👉 3. Reference their regulations, not just outcomes Selling to fintech? Bring up PCI-DSS compliance. Healthcare? Prior auth delays or HIPAA workflows. Edtech? FERPA compliance. Now you’re not just relevant, you’re trusted. 👉 4. Mirror the tools they use daily “Manual tracking” is vague. “Google Sheets updates missed by RevOps” hits harder. “Stitch breaking in your dbt pipeline” hits hardest. It’s not just about knowing the problem. It’s about knowing how they talk about it. 👉 5. Write for 1 person at a time If your email can go to 10 different industries and still ‘work’ It doesn’t really work at all. We’ve tested this across 2M+ outbound emails a month. Hyper-specific always outperforms “efficient.” So yes… Specificity is more work. But it gets more replies. Which gets you more deals. Which gets you more scale. And isn’t that the whole point? PS: Cleverly has generated 224,751+ B2B leads, and sourced $312M in pipeline revenue for 10,000+ clients. Want results like that? Go to our website and check it out now.

Personalization is supposed to be the difference-maker in outbound. But most of it still feels like spam with a {first name} tag. “Hey Alex, saw you went to [School Name]!” Cool. So did 30,000 other people. Delete. Surface-level personalization doesn’t move the needle anymore. Everyone’s doing it and nobody’s buying because of it. What works? ✅ Relevance > personal details I don’t care if you saw my podcast episode. I do care if you know I just hired two AEs and might need pipeline help. ✅ Contextual triggers  “I noticed your company just announced a partnership. Are you seeing new demand from that segment?” ✅ Persona fluency If you sell to RevOps, speak like someone who’s spent time inside Salesforce. If you sell to founders, get to the business case in two sentences. ✅ Industry fluency Different verticals, different pain. If you’re writing one email for SaaS and one for manufacturing then you’re doing it right. ✅ Make it about them fast The best emails are about the buyer’s world, not yours. No intro paragraph, no flexing. So before you call it “personalized,” ask yourself: Would I respond to this? Or would I immediately know I’m one of 200? You don’t need to write 1:1 emails. You need to write 1:many that feel 1:1 because they’re based on real pain, not just profile stalking.

I ran an A/B test for one of my cold email clients. They run a trucking company, and I wasn’t too familiar with that industry. In email 1, I wrote a generic email that said: "We can generate you 50 leads per month with our Trucking Marketing System." You might think it sounds professional, but it’s just like every other marketing agency email they get. For email 2, I fed the script into a custom-built AI tool and told it to rewrite the copy using actual trucking industry lingo. Here's what came back:   "Struggling to keep your trucks rolling and your board full? We can help you lock in 50 new loads per month. No broker fees, no dead head miles, just consistent freight." Massive difference. The first version talks about "leads" and "marketing systems." Generic business speak that could apply to any industry. The second version uses terms like "keeping your board full," "loads," "broker fees," and "dead head miles." Language that only trucking company owners use and understand. When prospects read a copy that mirrors their internal conversations, they pay attention. They think: "This person actually understands my business." Your email copy should sound like it came from someone inside their industry, rather than an outsider looking in. Hopefully, you now know why it’s almost always a bad idea to blast out the same email template to every industry.