Creating personas based on your target market is excellent. However, using them to generate leads is what personas were all about in the first place. Prospect personas can be generated, and emails can be written, but the process is arduous. This tutorial is not about creating personas. It’s about saving time creating prospect personas and using them to generate a lead campaign. 

This tutorial shows you how to identify buyer personas. Once the personas are in place (preferably in a central location), we will generate outreach emails for each of them and find targeted leads using AI. Once everything is in place, we can create a smart lead campaign. 

Tools Required For This Tutorial

• ChatGPT - This tool will create buyer personas and generate emails for each of them.
• Notion - This is where we will store all the personas and the targeted outreach emails for each of the personas
• Clay - we will use this fantastic AI tool to find targeted leads.
• SmartLead (Optional) - This tool allows us to create smart lead campaigns.

Step 1 - Identify buyer personas for your target market

For this tutorial, we’ll use ChatGPT to identify buyer personas. Claude is another viable tool, but ChatGPT had the best multi-modal and multi-skilled chatbot at the time of writing. ChatGPT allows you to send web links, documents, or any other resource to tailor the responses and provide well-rounded content. 

We will ask ChatGPT to define buyer personas for the Techpresso AI Academy. This prompt allows you to upload pitch decks or any other business collateral. Feel free to experiment with it. 

Prompt:

Identify buyer personas for {name of your business} where {the nature of the business}.

If you don’t agree with the personas or think something is missing, you can always follow up with another prompt asking for the specific information. 

Note: It is best to start with a simple prompt for an initial query. The ChatGPT models are good, and the answer quality is high, even with a simple request. 

Step 2 - Generate targeted outreach emails for each persona

There is no reason to get buyer personas if you do not have an outreach plan. For this step, we will generate targeted outreach emails for each buyer persona generated by ChatGPT. 

‍Prompt:

Please write a very targeted outreach email for each of the personas you created for {Name of the business} using the information provided here: {A short description about your business's latest offering and how it can help achieve their goals}

ChatGPT created personalized emails for each persona by focusing on their likes and wants. It has given you persona descriptions that are accessible whenever you want to run an email campaign. The emails are tailored for each persona without us having to provide context for everything or upload anything related to it. 

Step 3 - Put personas data in Notion

Storing all this data in an Excel sheet can be time-consuming and cumbersome. We want you to store it online, where it can be accessed anywhere. Notion is the perfect place to manage your marketing and sales collateral. It uses markdown format only. The markdown table provides a streamlined, persona-centric view of buyer data. ChatGPT can convert all the data into markdown, making content formatting a breeze. 

So, let’s convert the buyer persona and the outreach email data into a markdown table. 

Prompt:

Please convert the buyer persona data you’ve generated, including the outreach email for each persona, into a Markdown table, formatting it as one row per persona.

Click the ‘Copy code’ button at the top right corner of the markdown table. We will paste this data in Notion to generate a formatted data table. 

Click the three dots button at the top right corner of the Notions page and click ‘Full Width’ to set the page width. This will help you align the formatting with the table data.

There you have it. You can publish them on a separate webpage or Notion’s page. This way, you can access this data from anywhere. 

Step 4 - Find targeted leads based on personas

The best way to find targeted leads based on the personas you created is to get a Clay account. Clay.com is a platform that helps businesses simplify data-heavy tasks like lead generation, CRM updates, and personalized outreach by automating workflows with AI. It pulls data from over 75 sources, ensuring up-to-date, high-quality information for sales and marketing teams. With its AI-powered tools, Clay allows users to send custom messages at scale and eliminates the need for tedious manual research, making it an excellent fit for go-to-market teams looking to boost efficiency and focus on more strategic work.

Sign up at https://clay.com if you don’t have an account. After signing in to your account, you will be taken to a dashboard. Click the blue ‘Create New’ button and select ‘Table.’

This step generates new leads for the personas. For the new table, select the ‘Find People’ template in the new table pop-up window. 

The Find People template allows you to create a lead list with specific parameters in the Clay app. 

Go to the persona’s table you created in step 3, select a persona, and use its attributes to define the lead parameters in Clay. 

For our example, we will use the ‘Business analyst at a small-sized company’ persona.

In the Clay app, set various parameters to match the persona attributes we have in our table. First, set the ‘Method’ to ‘Search Query.’ This setting builds the people search query in Clay instead of an external list. Set the company size to 10-50 people in the company attributes.

Use the persona attributes in the table to set the parameters in Clay. For example, we will specify the ‘Job title’ parameter according to the titles listed in the personas table. We will also set ‘Include past experiences’ by toggling the setting so that Clay can find anyone who currently holds the title or has held these job titles in the past. 

Use the persona’s data in the notion’s table to set the query parameters. Once everything is set, click the ‘Preview people’ button to get a sample of the leads from the query you built. 

Make sure to specify a location parameter to drill down to a list that includes people in France, for example. You can always change the parameters and click the ‘Preview People’ button again to generate a more specific list. 

If you’re satisfied with the results, click the ‘Import’ button to transfer these leads to a table. Select ‘Import to new table.’

In the ensuing popup window, enable the ‘Work Email’ option. This setting adds the contact data to the table, allowing us to contact the leads. Click ‘Continue.’

Follow the method in this step for each persona profile in the notions table. You can generate a separate list for each persona. 

Step 5 - Create a template email for the bulk outreach

Finding people who match your buyer persona is the first step in getting leads. The second and most important step is to send emails to pursue the leads. Luckily, we have already created template emails for each persona. 

Click the ‘Actions’ button in the top right corner of the table and select the ‘Draft email’ option in the dropdown menu. 

Copy the subject and body content of the email we saved in the Notion’s personas table. It’s in the Outreach email column. 

Paste the contents in the Draft email window. Format it and specify your name, designation, and a web link at the end of the email. You can see how your email looks in the ‘preview for Row #1’ window. 

If you notice, there is a placeholder text in place of the first name. Delete the placeholder text by typing a backslash ‘/’ and use the actual name of the lead by selecting the variable data from your Clay table. It will dynamically insert the name of the person it sends the email to. 

Note: Clay.com has its own AI chatbot. You can use it to generate emails for the leads. However, we prefer ChatGPT due to its updated models and output quality. 

Finalize the email template and click the ‘Save’ button to save the email. You can click the ‘Save and Run’ button to generate the emails for all the leads in Clay. 

Note: Clicking the ‘Save and Run’ button does not send emails to your leads. It generates email content for all the leads in the table. 

Step 6 - Run an outreach campaign

To send these emails in bulk, click the “Actions” button at the top right corner. From the dropdown menu that appears, select the “Create Smartlead campaign…” option.

‍Pro tip: You'll need a Smartlead.ai account to complete this step and send emails through Clay.

In the following pop-up window, click the “Add account” button to connect your Smartlead.ai account and map your new email columns to the appropriate fields in the form.

There you go! You can now send personalized emails in bulk to all the leads you found in Clay. We never thought a cold outreach campaign could be this easy.