Automate Personalized Cold Outreach with Clay AI

Looking for a powerful way to automate and personalize your cold outreach using AI? Clay streamlines the process with advanced data enrichment and scalable workflows—ideal for anyone launching LinkedIn or email campaigns at scale. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to use Clay to build lists, enrich leads, generate tailored emails, and automate outreach faster than ever, keeping your cold outreach campaigns hyper-personalized and efficient from the start.

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Understanding Clay and Its Cold Outreach Capabilities

Clay isn’t just another automation platform—it’s designed specifically for highly personalized, large-scale outbound efforts. By combining over 50 third-party data sources, built-in web scraping, and AI-driven message generation, Clay empowers businesses to create cold outreach campaigns that truly resonate with prospects. This people-first approach is essential for improved outreach results, connection rates, and overall campaign success.

Setting Up Your Clay Workspace

To get started, sign up for a Clay account (a 14-day trial is available) and log in. Once inside, you’ll find yourself at the workspace dashboard—a central hub where you manage all your tables and databases for storing and organizing leads.

Unlike basic starter templates, creating a custom table ensures you’ll target precisely the right audience. Hit create new, choose the table icon, and get ready to build.

Bulk Data Scraping: Building a Targeted Lead List

Clay gives you access to bulk data scrapers for major platforms such as LinkedIn, Google, GitHub, and HubSpot. To create an ideal cold outreach list, select the LinkedIn people scraper option—but you can adapt these steps for other sources as needed.

• Choose filters like job title (e.g., Manager), location (e.g., Florida), and experience (e.g., 10+ months in role).
• Click preview people—Clay aggregates results from its connected data sources.
• With a free plan, you can import up to 2,500 people per search, while paid plans scale even higher (up to 50,000 results).

Once you have your filtered list, import the contacts directly into your table.

The Power of Data Enrichment in Clay

Clay’s unique value comes from its robust data enrichment engine. Rather than relying on its own static database, Clay uses a ‘waterfall’ system to pull, cross-check, and expand lead data from an array of providers. This ensures up-to-date, comprehensive contact profiles—without manual research.

Enriching Your Leads: What Data Can You Find?

When importing leads, you’re prompted to enrich profiles further. Options include:

• Full profile enrichment (education, employment history, bio, social URLs, and more)
• Personal email address
• Work email address
• Mobile phone (where available)

Simply select the enrichment type(s) you need. Clay will sequence through multiple data providers, finding as much info as possible for each row. After enrichment, export your table to CSV for backup, review, or further use.

Advanced Enrichment With Custom Columns

Beyond initial imports, you can add new columns to your data for granular enrichment. For example, append a “personal email” or “bio” column—Clay will attempt to populate these fields using your available contact data (like LinkedIn URLs).

You can:

• Run enrichments across all rows or select a limited batch to test features using trial credits.
• Leverage additional third-party data providers (such as Apollo, Lusha, or Swordfish) with your own API keys for broader results.
• Add validation columns to verify and score email addresses for higher deliverability.

Typical enrichment options span social profiles, work experience, company names, bios, and more—giving you a 360-degree view of each lead.

Data Cleaning and Advanced Recipes

Clay isn’t just about finding data—it can also clean, deduplicate, and format your leads. Recipes allow multi-step workflows (like obtaining email + validating + segmenting based on role) with just a few clicks. Integrations with CRMs (like HubSpot or Pipedrive), databases, and email sequencers amplify your automation potential.

Personalized AI-Powered Cold Email Generation

One of Clay’s standout features is its built-in AI-driven template generator for crafting cold emails that speak directly to each recipient. Personalized messaging—referencing a lead’s job title, company, or recent achievements—drives higher open and reply rates in outbound campaigns.

Building Dynamic Message Templates

To draft a campaign:

• Click Start Email Campaign, then Draft Messages.
• Use dynamic fields (e.g., first name, job title, company name) to customize content for each row. Insert them via the backslash command.
• For even deeper personalization, use the AI prompt tool. For instance: Generate a friendly opening sentence that compliments the lead based on their public role and company.

Your message might read:
Quick question for [First Name],
Hey [First Name],
[AI-generated compliment about their leadership at Company Name]
I specialize in AI development and automated marketing solutions. Have you considered using AI to speed up your marketing by 30%? We’ve helped similar businesses improve conversions and save time. Would you be open to seeing a case study?

Personalizing emails at this scale is a proven method for higher response rates. For more on the impact of smart automation in outreach, see this guide on AI-powered cold emails for 2025 and how AI is revolutionizing B2B replies.

Combining and Validating Emails Effortlessly

Often, Clay will turn up both work and personal emails for the same lead. To streamline your outreach, you can create a formula column to consolidate these—preferring validated work email if present, and falling back on personal if not. This logic ensures you always have an actionable contact for each row.

• Use the Add Column > Formula function
• Set your formula to combine validated work email (when available) with the found personal email
• The resulting column powers your outbound sequence for optimal coverage

Export your list at any point as a CSV to use with your favorite outreach tools or manual campaign tracking.

Launching Outbound Campaigns

When ready, you can push data to integrated sequencer tools or CRMs, or export for use in platforms like Smartlead. Simply map your finalized message and recipient email columns to start sending at scale.

If you’re looking to maximize the deliverability of your emails, make sure you follow best practices—learn how to prevent emails from going to spam to ensure your carefully crafted outreach lands where it should.

Why Use Clay for Your Cold Outreach?

• Massive scalability: Import and process thousands of leads with ease
• Multi-source enrichment: Pull granular data from over 50 sources for a 360-view of each contact
• AI-powered messaging: Ensure every email is unique and hyper-relevant, increasing conversion rates
• Streamlined export and automation: Integrate with your favorite CRMs, sequencers, or custom workflows

Personalized cold outreach, when done at scale and with accurate targeting, fuels sustainable lead generation and sales growth. Clay enables this while reducing manual work and unlocking the potential of your outbound strategy.

FAQ

What is Clay and what makes it different from other lead generation tools?

Clay is a cold outreach automation platform that combines data from 50+ sources, uses advanced web scraping, and integrates AI enrichment so you can scale personalized LinkedIn and email campaigns efficiently. Its waterfall enrichment process is unique in that it checks multiple data providers to build the fullest, most up-to-date profiles for each lead.

How can I enrich my lead data using Clay?

After building your list, Clay lets you run enrichments—including personal/work emails, bios, social links, and more—via a ‘waterfall’ across various integrated and third-party data providers. This ensures maximum data coverage with every import.

Can Clay generate personalized cold emails automatically?

Yes, Clay’s AI features let you insert dynamic fields and generate tailored first lines or message bodies for each contact, leveraging job title, company, and other fields. This improves reply and conversion rates by making every outreach unique and relevant.

How do I export my enriched contacts and message templates?

You can export your entire table—including enriched data and AI-personalized emails—as a CSV file, ready for upload into CRMs, email sequencers, or for manual outreach campaigns.

What tools can Clay integrate with for outbound sequences?

Clay offers integrations with popular CRMs like HubSpot, Pipedrive, and various email sequencers. You can also add columns and formatting recipes to fit your export with whichever tools you use.