How AI today is different

Various forms of AI technology have made it possible to create more effective email marketing, and this has been around for many years.

You can use AI to perform A/B and multivariate testing. You can use it to personalize emails by synching it with your customer database so it knows their demographics, prior purchases, and other relevant information. It can help you segment your lists more effectively and quickly, and clean up your email lists to improve open rates and deliverability. 

All of that is great. 

But now, with ChatGPT and its generative language technology that actually interacts with you in real time, AI has taken a big step forward. 

Now, AI can work as your assistant to help you actually write and enhance the content of your emails. Let’s look at some ways you can use AI to produce and improve your email content.

We’ll look at subject lines, email content, and CTAs. But first, you need to know how to engage with AI so it produces email content you can actually use.

How to prepare ChatGPT to produce what you need

ChatGPT can actually learn based on what you tell it. That means, you want to do more than just ask it to write an email or a subject line. Before you get to that point, give it some information so it knows what you’re trying to do and the assets you have to work with. Here are more instructions for how to do that.

For example, if you’re writing an email campaign built around a particular sale, deal, webinar, event, or some singular opportunity with a deadline, tell ChatGPT the goals of your email campaign. 

Also, describe your audience. For this email, who are you writing to? It may not be your entire list. It may be just for a particular segment. Tell ChatGPT whatever you can about these people — demographics, interests, previous purchase history (or lack thereof), how recently they subscribed, etc. The more you can tell AI about your audience, the more relevant the email content will be.

Next, be sure to share any relevant assets that are part of the campaign. These could include:

• Product images
• Landing pages the email will link to
• Free gifts or lead magnets like special reports or coupons
• Relevant dates, such as deadlines or times when this audience joined your list

The more you can tell the AI program in advance, the better its output will be. 

With that in mind, let’s look at how to use ChatGPT’s AI to make your email content better.

Email subject lines and AI

There are several ways to go about creating subject lines for your emails using AI. Here are three approaches you can take:

Ask the AI tool for subject line options

Once you’ve prepared ChatGPT with information about your email campaign and audience, ask it something like this: 

“Write ten email subject line options for the first email in our campaign.”

It will produce ten options. With those, you can either take one you like, ask it for more choices, clarify your request if it’s a bit off the mark, use several of them for a series of emails, or just take what it gave you and use it as a starting point to write your own subject lines.

If the tone is off, you can ask the AI program to write new subject lines with a more desirable tone. We’ll talk about how to do that a bit later.

Write one first and ask for alternatives

Another approach is to write your own subject line first and then ask the tool to produce alternatives. This might work better because it gives the AI program an idea of what you’re looking for. You might say it this way:

“I wrote this email subject line for our campaign – [subject line]. Give me ten subject line alternatives to this one.”

Write the email first

The third method for getting subject lines from AI is to write the email first, and then use either of the two strategies already given. This way, you can give ChatGPT the content for the actual email, and it will produce subject lines relevant to what is already written. 

Try all of these approaches and see how each one works for you.

Email content and AI

For your actual email content, you can use ChatGPT’s AI to improve your writing in all sorts of ways, as well as speed up the process for producing more emails. Here are several tasks you can ask the AI program to perform:

Get email topic ideas

Once you’ve fed the AI tool information about your audience, campaign, product, and other relevant details such as time of year, holidays, or perhaps the landing page the email will link to, ask ChatGPT to come up with email topic ideas.

This is particularly helpful if you want to create a whole campaign, but it works well for one-off emails, too. With topics in hand, you can get to work planning and producing the emails.

Write email outlines or suggested structures

ChatGPT can also produce email structures and outlines. This is sometimes a good first step rather than having AI write the whole email. Once you finalize the structure you want, writing the email will be easier, whether you do it yourself or ask an AI program to do it.

Write your opening sentence

The opening sentence is arguably even more important than the email subject line. If people open your email but the first sentence doesn’t draw them in, they won’t keep reading. 

So, ask ChatGPT to suggest several opening sentences, just like you did for subject lines.

Write the entire email

When you have the topic, and possibly the structure, for your email in mind, you can also ask ChatGPT to just write the entire email. What it produces will not work for a final product. But if you have given the AI tool sufficient information to help it write this email, it will be a strong start.

You can then edit and revise the draft to make it match your brand voice, and to make sure it’s hitting all the key points.

Improve a pre-written email

You may not be too thrilled about having an AI program write your emails for you. If you find it can’t quite do the job and you’re tired of revising what it produces, try it the other way around. 

Write the email first, and ask the AI tool to revise yours. The more specific and clear you can be in what you ask it to do, the more effective its revisions will be. 

For instance, you can ask it to shorten your email if it’s too long but you’re not sure where to cut. You can ask it to be more persuasive, or to be more engaging for your target audience. Try different suggestions and see what it does. You may find a couple of its improvements worth keeping.

Check your grammar, spelling, and clarity

AI can also easily check your basic writing skills so you don’t send out an unprofessional-sounding email. With an email you’ve written yourself, or even an AI-generated one that you’ve revised and improved to sound more like you, have an AI tool give it an editing pass.

Check your email’s tone

You may find that the emails written by ChatGPT have all the right content, but they don’t sound right. You can ask the AI tool to rewrite the email in a different tone. As mentioned earlier, you can also ask it to do this for your subject lines. 

The key to succeeding here is to use descriptive adjectives for how you want the email to sound. So, in your prompt, ask the AI program to “rewrite the email in a more [adjective] tone.” 

Here are some adjectives you might try:

• Casual
• Conversational
• Silly
• Friendly
• Professional
• Urgent
• Trustworthy
• Approachable
• Witty
• Emotional

And, you can always combine a couple of these, such as “friendly and approachable,” or “professional and urgent.”

This article shows screenshots of actual ChatGPT interactions so you can see how it changes the content of emails based on your prompts.

Inject humor, wit, or pop culture references

Yes, ChatGPT has a sense of humor. Or, at least it thinks it does. You can ask the AI tool to come up with funny or witty one-liners, puns, and other forms of humor. It will attempt to fulfill your request, and sometimes what it comes up with is pretty good.

You can also ask it to add in pop culture references you may want to use to engage and entertain your audience. And again — you can do all this with subject lines too, in addition to the email content.

CTAs and AI

By now, you’re probably getting an idea of how this works.

Your call-to-action buttons and links, and the text you use for them, play a big role in helping engage and convert your audience. 

Just like with subject lines, you can ask ChatGPT to come up with a list of CTAs. You can do this after the email is written so it has something to work with, and this is probably the best approach. But you can also use the other methods suggested for subject lines.

Use AI to make your email content better

Now you have a good guide for how to use ChatGPT to enhance your email content. And you can probably see how this will also help you write them faster.

If you have a MailPoet account, using AI to help write your emails means you can send out more emails without having to spend as much time on each one as you did before.

That means you’ll get more out of your email marketing. And remember — you can use AI to generate your automated emails, too. It can write your welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, confirmation emails, and all the other types you can use MailPoet to send.

See what else MailPoet makes possible

The latest marketing tools may grab headlines, but simple and consistent communication keeps potential customers thinking about your products, services, and brand. And nothing does that better than email.

Why is this true?

Because email is relatively simple to use. It’s also more affordable than many other types of marketing, and just about everyone has an email address and checks it regularly. 

In general, you should be using email for two main purposes — engaging and corralling new customers and leads, and solidifying your relationship with existing ones.

If you’re not already doing so, start using the small business email tips and practices listed below to create successful email marketing campaigns. Even implementing a few of these small business email marketing tips can lead to an immediate improvement in your engagement or revenue.

1. Send more emails

Stop worrying about unsubscribes — most small businesses send far too few emails because they’re worrying about annoying people into leaving their list. Most of the time, however, this just prevents organizations from making the most of their email list.

You’re never going to keep every subscriber forever. People’s lives change, their tastes change, they move or pick up new hobbies. Use email to nurture your best customer relationships and don’t sweat too much about things you can’t control. 

There’s no exact number here. Bigger companies may want to send more emails than smaller ones, but what really matters is two things:

• How fast your list is growing
• How many people unsubscribe with each email you send

You want your email list to grow, so don’t send out so many emails that your unsubscribes outpace your new signups. Otherwise your list will shrink. 

But again, this is not usually the problem. Almost all small businesses send way too few emails, sometimes even less than one per month. And if you’re not staying in touch with subscribers, how will they remember you?

If you have a webinar coming up, a big new product launch, or a holiday sale, just sending one email simply doesn’t get the job done. Even your best customers won’t even see, let alone open, every email you send. It takes multiple attempts. Simply re-sending the same email to people who didn’t open it the first time — with a new subject line — will increase responses.

If you only send out a couple of emails each month, make a focused effort to get out even one more every 30 days and see how it impacts your marketing goals.

2. Send email more consistently

Consistency is more important than volume. Sending five emails one month and then zero the next is worse than sending two each month. Gently and consistently nudging yourself to the top of their mind is better than overwhelming someone and then disappearing for weeks. 

But email cadence is also not an exact science, and each business will want to find its own rhythms, again depending in part on how much your list is growing. 

And while consistency is good, you may also have the occasional email marketing campaign or special event that requires an extra high volume for a time. That’s okay. 

Some businesses — especially large ecommerce brands — send email every single day. They wouldn’t do this if it was destroying their email list and not producing something. Other businesses find a diminishing return with too frequent emails. It just depends on your business and audience.

The main thing to keep in mind is to make a plan and stick to it. If sending once a month is all you feel you have capacity for, then start there. Or try twice a month, or once a week. 

The reason consistency matters is because, even if your subscribers don’t open the email, the subject line itself serves as a connection between your small business and your customers. They’re seeing a marketing message from you. You’re returning to their minds. You’re part of their lives. And you’re contributing to stronger customer retention. 

3. Leverage email automation

Email automation can be one of your small business’ best friends. It eliminates the complaint of “I don’t have time to send all these emails.”

When customers and leads take particular actions, they should receive an email reply, and with an email service provider like MailPoet, you can automate almost all of these. For example, you can automate email replies whenever a customer:

• Buys a product
• Leaves something in their shopping cart — abandoned cart emails
• Joins your email list (even segmented by a specific signup form)
• Requests a lead magnet such as a free guide or eBook
• Registers for a webinar

These automated emails can be standalones, or you can create a whole series of emails, such as a welcome series. If they buy, you want them to buy again. You can ask for reviews. Motivate referrals. Show appreciation. Send rewards. Make special offers. Announce new products. Show yourself as a valuable part of their lives. 

Email automation can perform all of this, and once you have created the email and set up the automation, it just runs in the background all by itself.

4. Don’t just sell — deliver value

To stay relevant and appreciated, you must give your customers things they want. That means, don’t just keep selling. Every email cannot be yet another coupon, sale, or deal.

Send valuable content. Valuable content wins over new subscribers who haven’t bought yet. It reassures new customers that they made a good decision. It increases lifetime customer value. 

Valuable content depends on your industry to some extent, but it could be:

• Problem-solving tips relevant to your contact list
• Answers to common questions
• Explanations of your return policy
• Descriptions of your shipping options 
• Customer success stories
• Links to videos and social media posts

If you have the right email marketing tools, you can deliver this sort of content in automated emails such as a welcome series or a post-order email. You can also send it out in your regular email communications. When you position your small business as a resource, an asset, an authority, and a helpful and friendly guide, your email subscribers will appreciate it and not feel constantly bombarded.

5. Segment your list to increase personalization and relevance

You’ll deliver even more value if you can segment your list and use those segments effectively. For example, for a WooCommerce or other stores selling online, you could segment your customers based on:

• Lifetime customer value
• Product categories related to their purchase
• Purchase frequency
• Average order size
• Location
• Demographics like age, gender, and family type
• Responsiveness to email deals
• Special calendar days and seasons

Yes, segmentation may take more time, because it can mean creating more emails each month since different segments will receive different content. But if you can send just one email per month to four segments, that could be more effective than sending four emails per month to your entire list. 

Here’s more about the seamless integration between MailPoet and WooCommerce.

6. Create and follow an email content calendar

An email content calendar sets your plan for your ongoing email communication. Typically, you’ll map out the following items, month by month:

• When you will send each email
• The topic or purpose for each email
• A call to action for each email — buy, click, read, sign up, share, etc.
• Any additional assets required for each email, such as blog posts, product pages, and coupon codes

What this does is make you stick to your goal of sending more emails, and sending them consistently. You may not know what you’ll write for each email when you create the plan, but you will have an email on the content calendar and a chosen topic. So when it comes time to create that email, you know what you’re looking for.

7. Don’t overdo the graphics

Some small businesses feel pressured to make design-heavy emails because they look better. And since design-heavy emails take more time and effort to create, the business owner puts off their next email marketing campaign because they’re too busy. 

If you don’t have time to make graphics, then don’t! Send emails that are mostly text or even an entirely plain text email. Email is first and foremost about showing up, staying relevant, and remaining on the minds of your customers. Trying to make the “perfect” email, but taking weeks to do it, will not generate as much value for your small business as sending out emails every week, even if they don’t have tons of fancy graphics.

Plus, text emails feel more personal and less like marketing. Ideally, you can create a healthy mix of graphics and text, because this will engage more subscribers who respond to different stimuli. 

Pro tip: Because some email users have graphics disabled in their mailboxes, you should include text links for your calls to action instead of only positioning these in graphics. 

If your small business site is on WordPress, you already have an advantage in this department because you can use one of MaiPoet’s WordPress email templates to create a beautifully-designed email. This allows you to balance text and graphics, but doesn’t take hours to build. 

8. Use email to grow your SMS list

SMS marketing is growing in popularity, and for good reason. Receiving a text from a small business feels different from receiving an email. Plus, texts are shorter and get a nearly 100% open rate.

Email is one of the most effective tools to grow your SMS list, because you can regularly mention it to your contact list and give mobile users the opportunity to opt in to receive texts from your small business. Plus, many people check email from their phone, so they can take action right then and there. Your existing customers are your warmest audience for this. And once they’re on your SMS list, you can market to them using two channels, not just one. 

9. Get permission

Speaking of opting in, you need to make sure all your email subscribers have given explicit permission to join your email marketing list. Email compliance regulations such as GDPR are quickly becoming the norm, so make sure you aren’t adding customers without their permission.

What this means for ecommerce stores and other small businesses: 

If customers give you their email address during the purchase process, you must provide them an option to give their express permission to receive marketing emails from you. Email platforms such as MailPoet make this easy. 

You can’t just add their email addresses to your list because they ordered something from you. If you do, they can report your message as spam and damage your sender reputation. This means that even legitimate subscribers may end up finding you in their spam folder instead of their inbox.

10. Keep your email reputation strong

Lastly, modern email marketing strategies require paying attention to the health of your email list. 

If you consistently send emails to expired or non-existent addresses, the companies that fight email spam and look for abusive practices will take notice. This can cause your emails to get delivered less often — even to loyal subscribers. 

What this means for small businesses online:

• Pay attention to bounce rates
• Remove email addresses that bounce repeatedly, or get reported as non-existent
• Keep your list clean of inactive subscribers

A good rule is to create segments of subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked on any emails in a certain period of time, such as a year. 

Once or twice a year, update this list segment, and send them a ‘reactivation campaign.’ This short series of emails gives these subscribers the option to confirm they want to remain on your email list. It’s a good idea to include a special offer in a reactivation campaign, because you want them to stay. And as made clear earlier, this email marketing campaign should include several messages, because not everyone sees each one.

Pro tip: Don’t beat around the bush with subject lines here. Be very direct — “Want to remain on our email list?” “Still want to hear from us?” “Are you still there?” Subjects like these have no ambiguity. Some people really are just busy, but like being on your list even though they don’t engage that often. 

This is called list hygiene, and it’s a good thing to do once or twice a year, in addition to regularly removing emails that bounced back as undeliverable. 

Need help with email automation and marketing?

MailPoet is quickly becoming the go-to email platform for small businesses and ecommerce stores. It makes email automation, segmentation, and consistent sending easy, and if you have WooCommerce, MailPoet connects with your data and will report on metrics showing how your email marketing is influencing revenue. It can also help you recover abandoned carts and grow subscribers in a GDPR-compliant way. 

MailPoet also has a built-in SMTP service for WordPress, so you can handle your transactional and marketing emails in a single place for a more consistent experience for both you and your subscribers.

Sign up for a free MailPoet plan here.