Networking Pro-Tip: Quality Over Quantity
Show those business leads you do, you really do care, by ditching the mail merge.
Don’t send a poorly-written mail merge to your best prospects. Send them a handwritten note.
đź’ˇBottom of the funnel (Seth's Blog)
Break through the BS and the volume of noise in someone's inbox by taking the time to customize and personalize your outreach, as every person you're attempting to connect with, those people you've identified as "valuable prospects" or "leads", every communication to those "targets", is a person with a unique need, personality and perspective. Spending time to contextualize each communication - why, yes, you'll send out far fewer emails to "leads" and on the flip side of your communication, the person receiving the email will know it is coming from an actual human (imagine that!), someone with a head and a heart, someone perhaps worth responding to - is time worth spending, as those higher quality communications are more likely to "convert" into what you are seeking than your current strategy of continuously firing off Mad Lib'esque emails...which is the absolute definition of a networking failure (that is, doing the same stupid, inconsiderate thing, over and over again, hoping for a different result).