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Generate Personalized Cold Email Icebreakers with GPT-4 Mini, Apify & LinkedIn

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Created by: Erfan Mostafiz || erfanmostafiz

Erfan Mostafiz

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Last update 3 days ago

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This n8n workflow scrapes LinkedIn data for your leads, feeds it into a GPT-4 AI agent, and generates laser-targeted, personalized icebreakers you can drop into your cold email campaigns.

It automates the personalization process at scale — saving you hours of research while sounding human and thoughtful.

Step-by-Step Setup (Beginner Friendly)

Step 1: Prepare Your Leads (Input Sheet)

  • Get your lead list based on your industry and niche from Apollo (free)
  • Copy the entire link
  • Go to Apify and use this Apollo Scraper to scrape the leads.
  • Download the result as CSV and upload the CSV to Google Sheets
  • Add a column at the end of the Sheet. Name this column as "status". Mark the entire column (every row) as "un-enriched" (this is important)
  • Connect your Google Sheets account to n8n
  • The workflow will pull leads from this sheet where status = un-enriched

Step 2: Set Your Credentials

Step 3: Customize the AI Agent

  • In the node “Generate Personalized Icebreaker”, adjust the system prompt.
  • Update it with your own niche, offer, tone, and insights
  • Keep the JSON output format exactly as shown. The rest of the workflow depends on it

Step 4: Run the Workflow

  • Click "Execute Workflow"
  • The system will:
    -- Pull all unenriched leads
    -- Filter out entries without email
    -- Scrape LinkedIn profiles using Apify
    -- Use GPT-4 to write a short, personalized icebreaker
    -- Save the result to a separate “Enriched” sheet
    -- Mark those leads as “enriched” in your original sheet

How It Works Behind the Scenes

  • Manual Trigger starts the workflow
  • Get Raw Leads from a Google Sheet (filter = un-enriched)
  • Filter for Valid Emails (hasEmail?)
  • Loop Over Leads
  • Set Apify API credentials
  • Call Apify’s LinkedIn Scraper using each lead's LinkedIn URL
  • Aggregate the scraped data
  • Simplify fields for AI prompt
  • Call OpenAI GPT-4.1 Mini with structured, data-rich prompt to generate icebreaker
  • Append results to Enriched Sheet
  • Update original list’s status to prevent reprocessing
  • Loop continues to the next lead

Best Practices for Successful Use

  • Clean your leads: Remove unnecessary columns from your Google Sheet raw lead list
  • Throttle large batches: The Apify actor and OpenAI calls may hit rate limits. Process in small batches.
  • Customize prompt deeply: The better your AI instructions, the more believable your icebreakers will sound.
  • Use shortened company names and local slang: The system prompt already does this — keep it.
  • Avoid fluff: Keep the tone Spartan, specific, and real.

Ideal Use Cases

  • Cold email campaigns for SMB SaaS, agency offers, B2B sales
  • Personalized intros for LinkedIn DMs
  • Data enrichment for lead gen automation
  • Integrating with tools like Instantly.ai, Smartlead, or Mailshake

Demo Link

Watch the full walkthrough and see it in action:
👉 Watch me build this LIVE on YouTube