AI-Powered Email Outreach with Smartlead and Clay

Driving up your revenue got smarter. 

We understand that building a high-intent lead list is a painstaking process. Sometimes, it takes hours to create and verify a targeted lead list. Besides, crafting hyper-personalized emails can also be tiresome, neglecting the most important for any business – scaling through email campaigns. 

But, you don’t worry. 

We’ve partnered with Clay—a lead generation and data automation tool—to bring you a seamless cold emailing experience with native integration. 

Now, all you need to do is connect your Smartlead.ai account with Clay.com in just a few clicks. 

And what’s in it for you? You can: 

👉 Embed rich data seamlessly into your messaging for instant engagement.

👉 Utilize AI to identify high-intent leads from 30+ sources. 

👉 Enrich leads with data from 150+ providers for comprehensive insights. 

👉Craft hyper-personalized emails with Clay AI, powered by GPT-4. 

Read on to learn how this integration can help your business. 

Common Challenges Faced While Crafting Hyper-Personalized Cold Emails

The native Smartlead & Clay integration is a game changer for your email personalization at scale. While this opens up new possibilities for connecting with prospects on a deeper level, it's crucial to acknowledge the common challenges around cold email personalization. 

1. Personalization is Time-Consuming 

Crafting hyper-personalized cold emails is a time-consuming process. Verifying prospect data and tailoring each message to the individual prospect leaves a marketer or an SDR with little to no time for the more critical aspects of your campaigns. The challenge lies in finding a balance between customization and efficiency. 

2. Data Inconsistency

The quality of personalization is only as good as the data it relies on. Outdated or inaccurate prospect information can quickly turn a well-crafted email into a misinformed missive. Verifying data manually is not scalable, and the only solution is to maintain a data verification and updating system. 

3. Generic Personalization

Inserting a prospect's name into an email might catch their attention, but effective hyper-personalization goes beyond that. Generic personalization, such as a simple name insertion, can be futile for your business. And on the other hand, manual hyper-personalization is not scalable for businesses. Failing to reference specific details about the prospect's company, recent achievements, or industry challenges results in emails that lack the genuine, tailored touch that resonates with recipients.

4. Lacks Relevance and Engagement

Crafting hyper-personalized emails demands an in-depth understanding of the prospect's pain points, challenges, and goals. Without this crucial insight, messages risk coming across as tone-deaf and detached. Ensuring that your hyper-personalized content is relevant and engaging is a tough challenge. 

This is why, at Smartlead, we have devised a solution for hyper-personalization at scale—Clay integration. 

Smartlead & Clay Integration: Solution to Personalization at Scale

Clay is a SaaS platform that offers lead list building, lead enrichment (combining 50+ data providers and real-time scraping) and hyper-personalized cold emails for outbound email campaigns. 

We agree that the hyper-personalization of cold emails is quite exhausting and, frankly, not scalable. Smartlead has partnered with Clay to make your cold emailing experience even smoother. 

Now, with the new Smartlead & Clay integration, you can write hyper-personalized messages with AI in Clay and send them immediately to campaigns in Smartlead.  

How to Connect Clay with Smartlead? 

Step 1

Click on the “Integrations” tab from your Smartlead App dashboard. 

Step 2

Hover over “Clay” and click on “Connect App”. You will be redirected to another tab where you have to login to your existing Clay account. But before moving forward, follow the next step. 

Step 3

Hover to the top right corner, and click on the drop-down arrow on the profile icon. Click on Settings. 

Now, copy your Smartlead API Key. Just click on the copy button. 

Step 4

Now, open your Clay account and click on “Workspace Settings” on the side bar of the dashboard.  

Step 5

Under the “Integrations” section, scroll down, click on Smartlead.ai. 

Click on Add an Account and input your Smartlead API Key (that you’ve copied from your Smartlead account). You can see we already have an account connected to clay. 

Once you’ve pasted the API key, click on Authenticate, and you are ready to go. 

Create Hyper-Personalized messages with AI in Clay <> Smartlead

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First, click on any Clay table containing emails in it. Now, click the “Draft Messages” button from the “Start Email Campaign”. 

You will see a popup screen where you can draft emails and see live previews of the messages. 

From your Clay Table, you can insert variables and AI prompts to create personalized sentences. You can reference someone's job experience, a company's tech stack, open job roles, or even generate creative, relevant marketing ideas. Give a detailed prompt for your email and click on “Run Prompt”. 

You can even start with Clay’s tried and tested preset prompts. 

Gather multiple prompts and variable inserts to create variations.

And there you go! You have fully crafted hyper-personalized messages on your table. 

Once you are done composing your emails, send them to the live campaign on Smartlead. Click on the "Enrich Data" button on the top right of the table. 

Now, click “Providers,” select Smartlead from the menu, and click “Add Lead to Campaign." Insert your Smartlead API key and Campaign ID, and get started.

Additional Resources

1. Check out how you can iterate through different prompts, demonstrated by Clay.com engineer Tess Bianchi. 
2. AI Messaging with AI with Clay x Smartlead: an end-to-end process. 
3. Check out the Clay guide on using AI Personalization for emails. 
4. If you are still trying to figure out AI for sales emails, read this. 

Why is This a Game Changer for Cold Email Campaigns

We believe that the Smartlead and Clay integration will change the landscape of sales outreach forever. It brings the best of both worlds, empowering Smartlead customers with a potent toolset to create hyper-personalized cold emails at scale and seamlessly launch targeted campaigns through Clay. Here's why this integration is a game-changer for cold email campaigns:

• This integration provides a native experience with no copy-pasting or complex APIs.
• Users can write entire personalized messages with AI in Clay and send them to campaigns in Smartlead immediately. 
• Including Smartlead, Clay has 100+ built-in integrations to build a perfect prospecting list.

Conclusion 

We are confident that the Smartlead and Clay partnership will be a game-changer for your sales outreach. It eliminates the time-consuming task of personalization and helps you craft hyper-personalized messages at scale. 

So, what are you waiting for? Dive deep into the easy native integration and take your cold email outreach to the next level.
Crush your sales pipeline with more deals than ever. Cheers!