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This lesson covers writing personalized outreach directly from your AI tool.

🔄 The Old Way vs. The New Way

Writing outreach used to mean a dozen tabs open—research in one tab, writing in another, copying and pasting data between your CRM and LinkedIn. Drafting every email was a multi-tab scavenger hunt.

Now, research and outreach happen in the same conversation. Context from your people search and company research carries over automatically. Tell it what to write, and it already knows who you're writing to.

✅ Prerequisites: What You Need Before Writing

Number one: Enrich your contacts with email. You'll need a verified email address before using the draft email flow. If you haven't enriched yet, go back to the people step and add emails.

Number two (optional but recommended): Set up your Business Context. Business Context inside Clay uses the workspace to understand your company, ICP, and value prop. Emails autofill based on this, so every message sounds like your team wrote it instead of sounding generic.

Without Business Context, emails work fine, but with it, they sound like you. Go into settings, find Business Context, and use AI to draft everything based on your domain.

💬 Writing Directly in the Conversation

Building off work from the previous lesson, first enrich the email for the person you're reaching out to. Then prompt:

‍Draft an email to openai.com's CFO referencing their recent funding and tech stack. Keep it under 120 words.

Here's what came back:

Hi, Sarah. Congrats on the $122 billion raise—an incredible milestone as OpenAI accelerates into its practical adoption year.

As you scale your Salesforce-based GTM infrastructure to support 8,000 employees, imagine keeping your pipeline data clean and your outreach personalized is becoming a real operational challenge.

At Clay, we help high-growth teams like yours enrich CRM records automatically, build targeted prospect lists and run AI personal outreach at scale, all connected to your existing stack."‍

The third paragraph pulls directly from Business Context, enabling a personalized message about what Clay is and how it adds value.

Other Example Prompts

Write a personalized email to the Head of Partnerships at rippling.com mentioning their expansion into Europe

Draft outreach to [Name] at notion.com referencing their recent podcast appearance about AI in sales

Write three different emails — one for the CFO, one for the VP of Sales, one for the RevOps lead at [Account] — each one tailored to what they'd care about."

Clay, run [custom function] outreach generator for [jeremy@acme.com](mailto:jeremy@acme.com)”

🎯 What to Personalize With

The more research you've done earlier in the conversation, the better the personalization. Do all your research upfront, then write the email.

Personalize with:

• Work history and previous companies
• Recent role changes or promotions
• Company growth signals (funding, headcount, expansion)
• Tech stack and integration opportunities
• Thought leadership (posts, podcasts, articles)

📤 Sending the Email

In ChatGPT: The email auto-generates immediately. Copy it into your sequencer or send manually.

In Claude: It populates the prompt text box—you click Send. Claude has a generative email widget that lets you send directly to the contact's inbox without leaving the conversation.

🔁 Re-Engagement Example: Multi-Threading with Context

When multi-threading with first-party data available, you can draft and send outreach using context already gathered from enrichments and Gong calls in one flow.

The prompt:

Find their emails, then draft personalized outreach using the excitement and interest from our previous calls with this account.

This works because the conversation already has the research context. You're building on what's already there.

🎬 What You've Learned

You now know how to take your research and turn it into personalized emails that you can draft and send from one conversation. No more tab switching, copying and pasting, or starting from scratch.