Sending emails with custom ice breaker

Creating a connection with your audience is key to increasing engagement. A great way to achieve this is by using a custom ice breaker in your emails. This feature allows you to add a unique, personalized touch to each email you send, making your recipients feel valued and understood.

Mailmeteor makes it easy to insert custom ice breakers into your email templates.

What is a custom ice breaker?

A custom ice breaker is a short, personalized sentence or phrase tailored to the recipient. For example, if you’re reaching out to someone who recently spoke at an event, your ice breaker could be:

“Hi John,

Loved your talk on email marketing at XYZ Conference!”

This personal touch can capture attention and make your email stand out from generic, templated messages.

How to use custom ice breakers in Mailmeteor

Follow these steps to include custom ice breakers in your emails:

  1. Prepare your contact list. Open a new Google Sheets spreadsheet and include your recipients’ email addresses in one column.

    Add a new column titled icebreaker (or any name you prefer) and fill it with personalized messages for each recipient. Each row corresponds to one recipient. Here’s an example:

    Email Address Icebreaker
    [email protected] Well done on landing on the moon!
    [email protected] Loved your blog post on remote work!
    [email protected] Congrats on your recent promotion!

  2. In Google Sheets, go to Extensions > Mailmeteor > Open Mailmeteor. If you haven’t installed the extension yet, here’s the install link.

  3. Choose Create a new template or edit an existing one.

  4. In your email template, click Insert variable and select the icebreaker column from your spreadsheet.

    Hi {{ firstname }},

    {{ icebreaker }}

    I wanted to reach out and share some insights about our latest product.

    In the example above, the {{ icebreaker }} variable will be replaced with the personalized message you added in your spreadsheet.

  5. Before sending, preview your emails to ensure that the custom ice breakers are displayed correctly.

  6. Once you’re happy with the preview, proceed to send your emails.

Adding more personalized variables

Want to go beyond custom ice breakers? You can add as many personalized variables as you like, such as “firstname”, “city”, or “company”.

Learn more about using personalized variables in our personalizing emails guide.

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