Almost a full year after ChatGPT stormed into our lives, it seems like the hype around AI has mellowed down a little. Plenty of AI-powered tools are emerging on a daily basis, and now the questions around and about AI are shifting as well.
When it comes to email marketing, AI is catching up to speed and allows marketers to segment better, hyper-personalize inbox experiences and outreach, and come up with full strategies in split seconds.
And the big technology companies in the email space, like Salesforce, Adobe, and Movable Ink, don’t want to stay behind either and are making big bets on AI within their platforms as well.
But can you fully rely on AI to write your emails for you, and should you entrust it to do the work that in-house/freelance copywriters and strategists have done so far?
The following examples shed light on AI’s growing strengths and weaknesses.
Cold Email
The world of cold emails is changing rapidly.
Historically, cold outreach has been a numbers game, favoring more generic personalization and sometimes pushy tactics. Nowadays you want to keep the email relevant, do extensive research, and reach out only when you identify a real, painful gap in your prospect’s operation.
Yurii Veremchuk, head of Growth at Woodpecker, shares useful information on how to use AI (alongside other tools) to send successful and helpful cold emails that get impressive results consistently.
With the rise of AI, there are now plenty of tools to ease up and streamline this process.
In a post on their blog, Regie.ai, a generative AI platform for sales teams, shared a few templates to use for potential future cold outreach.
While the length is spot on, the tone and way of writing do sound very human and approachable, and the Call To Action isn’t too big of an ask, such an email could have been better.
When you contact a prospect, you want to make it about them and their issues. However, none of the paragraphs in this email started with “You” or “Your”, but only with “I”. In addition, you want to make sure that when using such an AI assistant, you give it the exact issue that your prospect encounters – the specific problem isn’t apparent enough in this email. A cold outreach like that can easily get lost in the inbox.
Personal Brands (who do eCommerce)
The one niche that seems to be having the most fun with AI in the last year is brand owners who sell products, services, and courses online.
But so far, the fun is just fun, not something such brand owners can really rely on.
The founder of “Talking Shrimp” and author, Laura Belgray, has tried training ChatGPT to write an entire email to her list in her brand voice.
The result is hilarious. In a long email (shared only partially here), Belgray dissects and tears down what GPT gave her, which, according to her, was “truly tragic”:
- When asked to be “funnier”, the new email referred to comedy shows and writing a few “LOLs”.
- When asked to be “more snappy”, the OpenAI tool inserted a few “Here’s the dealio”.
- When asked to sign off the email, she got “Your Chuckler in Charge”.
Belgray was amused but not convinced – and she’s not the only one holding that stance.
For such brands that ooze the personality, knowledge, and humor of the ones in charge, it’s crucial to stay consistent with the exact things that make them stand out. Anything “less than” is going to be very apparent to the audience and create unwanted and growing detachment from the brand.
B2B Nurturing
What does Artificial Intelligence have to do in a niche that becomes gradually less buttoned-up and more personal? Litmus shows us that the answer can be “a lot”…
… With a caveat.
In a recent campaign, the email marketing platform let Jasper write its message, and deliberately mentioned it to their readers.
Not only that this email could pass as a human-written one, but that mention almost raises empathy for a bot and you find yourself almost rooting for it for doing such a great job.
Yes, for B2B, AI email writing can be an asset – if and when used correctly.
So can you let AI take over your email marketing fully? Not yet.
Although AI is already a great help in the backend of email marketing capabilities (smart predictions, data analysis and reporting, etc.), don’t fire your human copywriters just yet.
As great as AI is, it’s still an ideation tool to get rid of your writer’s block or think of new approaches to subject lines – particularly when it comes to subject line testing. Having said that, that great first draft still requires a human touch to prepare it for broadcasting and publishing.
