Cold emails are broken.

The generic ones get ignored. The personalized ones take forever to write. And the "spray and pray" approach just gets your domain blacklisted.

But here's the thing: personalized outreach still works stupidly well. The problem isn't the strategy. It's the execution.

Enter Clay.

Let's look at the numbers.

A generic cold email — "Hi {first_name}, I came across your company and thought..." — gets a 1-3% response rate. Send 100, get maybe 2 replies.

A personalized cold email — one that references something specific about them, their company, recent news — gets 15-25% response rates. Sometimes higher.

That's not a small difference. That's 10x.

But here's the problem: writing a truly personalized email takes 10-15 minutes. You gotta find their LinkedIn, look for recent news, figure out something relevant to mention, write something that doesn't sound like a template.

At 15 minutes per email, reaching 50 people takes 12+ hours. A full day and a half of just... writing emails.

Nobody's doing that. So everyone sends garbage instead.

Clay fixes this.“I’ve never seen a runway where you walk out in something you stitched 30 minutes ago,” said Rivera. “It’s chaos—in the best way—and the content writes itself.”

Clay is basically a research assistant that never sleeps.

You give it a list — companies, people, whatever — and it pulls everything publicly available about them. LinkedIn profiles. Recent funding rounds. Job postings. Tech stack. Podcast appearances. Tweets. News mentions.

All the stuff you'd manually dig up if you had infinite time.

Then it uses AI to turn that research into personalized opening lines. Not "Hi {first_name}" garbage. Actual "saw you just closed a Series B and are hiring engineers in Austin" personalization.

The kind that makes people think "wait, did they actually research me?"

Because technically... yeah. Just not manually.

A recruiter using Clay reported going from 8% response rate to 31% — almost 4x — just by adding personalized first lines based on candidates' recent posts and projects.

A startup founder said they booked 3x more sales calls after switching from generic templates to Clay-enriched outreach. Same offer. Same target list. Just better emails.

An agency owner claimed they cut their prospecting time by 80% while increasing responses. They went from spending 20 hours a week on outreach to 4 hours — with better results.

These numbers sound like marketing fluff but they track with the broader data on personalization. The lift is real.

The catch (read this part)

Here's where people mess up.

Clay makes it easy to send a lot of emails. Like, a LOT. You could blast 500 people in a day with "personalized" messages.

Don't do this.

Mass outreach — even personalized mass outreach — still looks like spam. You'll burn your email domain, annoy a bunch of people, and feel like a sleazy LinkedIn bro.

The move is to use Clay to send fewer, better emails. Not more.

Think about it: if you can get a 25% response rate instead of 3%, you don't need to email 500 people. You can email 50 and get the same results with way less damage to your reputation.

Quality over quantity. Always.

The bottom line

Cold outreach isn't dead. Bad cold outreach is dead.

The people who say "cold email doesn't work anymore" are the ones sending generic templates to 1,000 people and wondering why nobody responds.

Personalized outreach works better than ever. It's just hard to do at scale. Clay makes it less hard.

Not a magic bullet. But a legit edge.