Email marketing remains a powerful strategy to reach and engage with your audience on a personal level. However, with the rise of large language models like ChatGPT, a question arises: is ChatGPT’s role in email marketing an asset or a liability? Crafting compelling email content can take time, especially if you’re managing an extensive subscriber list or facing tight deadlines. This is where ChatGPT and email marketing can be used together. It offers the potential to automate and personalize email marketing at scale.
This article offers insight into ChatGPT’s role in email marketing, weighing its benefits and limitations. The article also talks about some of the best practices you can implement to strike the right balance between automation and human touch.
ChatGPT’s Role in Email Marketing
You can use ChatGPT for various purposes, such as generating website copy, crafting social media posts, and writing product descriptions. That said, what exactly is ChatGPT’s role in email marketing? Let’s find out.
1. Generates Email Content
Are you struggling to write catchy subject lines or craft compelling email copy? ChatGPT can help you write engaging email content, whether it’s for established or small business email marketing campaigns, including:
- Subject lines
- Body text
- Calls to action (CTAs)
However, remember that AI writing tools like ChatGPT may not be able to replicate your brand’s voice. You’ll need to edit the automated copy to create tailored content that resonates with your audience.
2. Crafts Personalized Emails
Personalization is essential in small business email marketing. It helps you connect with your audience on a personal level and build stronger relationships. ChatGPT can analyze customer data and personalize your email content by:
- Addressing recipients by their names
- Suggesting relevant products, offers, or discounts based on past purchases
- Adjusting the email’s tone and language to match the preferences of your audience
3. Automates Responses
In situations where instant responses are necessary, you can use ChatGPT to automate responses to incoming emails, inquiries, or customer service requests. It can respond instantly to common queries, resolve issues, or direct customers to the appropriate resources.
You’ll simply need to integrate it with a reliable chatbot to enhance customer experience. According to this Attrock guide, there are various AI chatbots you can consider. The right chatbot for you can answer queries, ensuring you provide a satisfactory response.
4. Analyzes Consumer Data
Understanding consumer behavior, preferences, and trends can help you tailor your email marketing campaigns to resonate with your audience. In this regard, ChatGPT can help you sift through vast amounts of data. This can help you identify what content resonates and what needs improvement.
Benefits of Using ChatGPT for Email Marketing
Email marketing continues to be a lucrative way to increase ROI. In line with this, ChatGPT can be a valuable asset when used appropriately. Let’s look at some of its benefits.
1. Saves Time and Resources
Do you spend hours brainstorming and drafting emails? Perhaps you often outsource content creation for your email marketing campaigns.
With ChatGPT, you can generate email content swiftly and with ease, allowing you to save valuable time.
However, that’s not all.
By generating content quickly, ChatGPT reduces or eliminates the need to outsource writing. This means fewer expenses to account for in your budget.
2. Provides Inspiration and Content Ideas
Have your creative juices stopped flowing, and you’ve hit a block? With proper guidance, ChatGPT can generate ideas for your email content. Copywriters can use it as inspiration. For example, you can use it to write subject lines or a slogan.
What’s more, you can ask ChatGPT to provide several options that you can choose from or meld different options together. You just need to add your creativity and human touch to ChatGPT’s suggestions so you can make the copy more relevant, compelling, and unique to your brand.
3. Writes the Email’s Initial Structure
Sometimes, you just need a little help to visualize your email content. This is where AI writing tools like ChatGPT come in.
They can help you create the initial structure of your email—an initial draft, if you will. Then, you can add human touch to improve the content generated by AI. Email outsourcing marketing can generate good results if you use AI technology in balancing way. You can showcase your brand’s creativity. For example, add your brand’s unique sense of humor to tailor your content to your target audience.
4. Scales with Your Business Needs
As your email list grows, so will your email marketing efforts. You’ll need to create more content to engage your expanding audience effectively. ChatGPT can scale alongside your needs, generating content efficiently as your email list expands.
With the use of ChatGPT, you can meet the demands of your growing audience without compromising on quality or spending excessive resources. For example, if you wish to scale your email list, you can get emails from LinkedIn Sales Navigator without worrying about the burden of creating content manually.
Additionally, incorporating user-generated content (UGC) can further enhance engagement and authenticity. Using a Social Wall can also help you display this UGC effectively, providing a dynamic and interactive experience for your audience.
5. Available 24/7
Unlike human marketers, who are unavailable during certain periods, ChatGPT is available around the clock. Take advantage of every opportunity without worrying about time constraints.
Besides, project time tracking allows you to monitor your tasks and use ChatGPT to meet deadlines without any delays.
Here’s how you can utilize ChatGPT’s availability to maximize productivity:
- Generate content on demand
- Respond to inquiries
- Provide updates on emergency service disruptions
Drawbacks of Using ChatGPT for Email Marketing
While the role of ChatGPT in email marketing can’t be understated, it’s crucial to understand its limitations. Recognizing these limitations will help you create quality content with the help of such AI writing tools while remaining mindful of their limitations and shadowy sides.
May Give Generic Responses
Although ChatGPT can provide inspiration for copywriters in email marketing, it can sometimes provide generic and impersonal responses that may not resonate with your audience.
Recipients may perceive such messages as spam-like, leading to a lower engagement rate and a negative brand image. They may feel like just another number in a mass email campaign, leading to decreased trust and brand loyalty.
Doesn’t Produce Original Ideas
In addition to the ethical part, using already existing content can create another problem – it takes away the originality of your text.
This can cause a particular issue in all types of content, but especially with marketing texts or content related to sales. If your subscribers open your message and are greeted with the same old slogans from the beginning, it may cause them to become bored or feel a lack of trust and authenticity in your brand.
Therefore, if you have to use the help of AI, then find the time to read the text generated by it as if you were a customer. Think of how it sounds to you, remove overly common expressions, and think about how to add a tone and wording specific to your brand to the given text.
Ethical aspects
When discussing how ChatGPT and other AI tools put content together, it is necessary to mention in a separate point that it does not “invent” anything on its own. As mentioned, these programs use content that’s been previously created by others.
Yes, you are paying for this AI service and these programs put content together in a completely new form. However, the original sources used are still the product of someone else’s thinking and the result of their time invested in the work.
How much of a concern this is, is up to each individual, but to be fair, this point should certainly be kept in mind.
Lack of Emotional Intelligence
Effective email marketing taps into emotions like humor, empathy, or excitement to build deep and authentic connections. It’s highly unlikely that a customer will take any action if an email doesn’t evoke any emotion in them.
Unlike humans who can write from personal experiences, ChatGPT may struggle to interpret emotional cues accurately. It may also fail to tailor the tone of an email to a specific audience.
Data Privacy and Security Concerns
ChatGPT requires access to your customer data to personalize emails. This raises concerns about data privacy and security. Not adhering to data privacy laws and regulations can be a grave email marketing mistake that can have severe legal and reputational consequences.
Ensure you have proper user consent and fully understand ChatGPT’s data practices before handing over sensitive customer information. Additionally, take proper measures to safeguard sensitive information and comply with relevant regulations like GDPR.
Context Misinterpretation
ChatGPT may struggle to grasp the context of specific inquiries or conversations, resulting in irrelevant or inappropriate responses. This can erode customer trust, damage your brand reputation, and undermine the credibility of your email campaigns. To mitigate this, you must make it a point to review content created via ChatGPT.
Over-Reliance on Automation
It may be quite tempting to fully depend on ChatGPT for email automation. However, while automation is a leading entry in ChatGPT’s role in email marketing, the tool can’t fully replace human creativity, intuition, and critical thinking skills.
Overdependence on automation can lead to generic, uninspired emails that fail to connect with your audience. This, in turn, leads to reduced engagement, conversion rates, and ROI.
Best Practices for Integrating ChatGPT in Email Marketing
How can you maximize ChatGPT’s benefits while mitigating its risks in email marketing? Here are some best practices to follow.
Provide Clear and Specific Instructions
Provide ChatGPT with clear and detailed prompts to avoid generic or irrelevant responses. For example, don’t just prompt “Write an email”. Instead, clearly outline your expectations, including:
- Campaign goals (drive sales, nurture leads)
- Target audience
- Brand voice (friendly, professional)
- Specific content needs (subject line, product descriptions)
The more detailed you are with your prompts, the better the results. Providing structured prompts ensures ChatGPT generates relevant content that aligns with your marketing objectives.
Add a Human Touch
While ChatGPT can automate content generation, the output is not always as you need. Always review and refine the content to ensure accuracy, relevance, and alignment with brand guidelines. Reviewing AI-generated content also allows you to identify and rectify any errors or inconsistencies.
Use ChatGPT for Inspiration and Efficiency
Avoid viewing ChatGPT as a replacement for your expertise. Instead, use it to explore creative angles, generate content ideas, and streamline repetitive tasks. For example, use it to brainstorm unconventional email subject lines. Using ChatGPT for inspiration ensures you create content quickly while still maintaining a unique and human perspective.
Continuously Monitor and Refine Your Prompts
The more you use ChatGPT, the better you will understand its strengths and weaknesses. Track what works and what doesn’t. Analyze email marketing metrics, such as response accuracy, email outreach, email open rates, and engagement rates. Based on your results, refine your prompts to get progressively better content tailored to your specific needs.
Using ChatGPT to Write Marketing Email Copy
We’ve already discussed how AI writing tools like ChatGPT can be your ally in content creation. Now, let’s look at a hypothetical example on how you can use these tools to write compelling marketing copy.
For example, let’s say you own an ecommerce store that specializes in personalized furniture and home decor. Let’s name it UrbanNest and this is the brand’s profile.
Brand Name: UrbanNest
Brand Identity: Modern, chic, exclusive, accessible luxury
Tone of Voice: Warm and inviting, designed to resonate with a diverse audience of style-conscious consumers
Marketing Goal: Increase website traffic, establish long-term brand loyalty
In this example, we’ll use ChatGPT to write a welcome email.
Here’s the prompt we’re going to use:
“Write an email to welcome new subscribers to an e-commerce store named UrbanNest that sells personalized furniture and home decor. The brand specializes in exclusive, modern, and chic products that cater to style-conscious urban dwellers. Maintain a warm and inviting brand tone.”
This is the email copy that ChatGPT came up with:
This copy created by ChatGPT can be a good starting point that gives you an idea of how your email should be structured. Adding a welcome discount is also a good strategy to increase conversions.
However, to tailor this email to your target audience, here are some things you can add:
- Information on what type of products are available in your catalog
- A deadline for the discount code to create a sense of urgency
- High-quality product images
- Emphasizing the brand’s focus on creating bespoke furniture and home decor that fits the client’s home like a glove
You can also change the tone of the email to be a bit more playful and inviting. In this case, you’re not relying solely on ChatGPT to write the entire email for you. Instead, you’re using it to create a coherent structure that you can follow and compelling content from which you can draw inspiration. From this, it’s now easier for you to write an engaging welcome email for your brand.
Is ChatGPT an Asset or a Liability?
As you can see, there are several benefits to using AI writing tools like ChatGPT for email marketing. It speeds up content creation, provides inspiration, and presents many options for subject lines. ChatGPT’s role in email marketing can’t be understated.
However, email marketers should learn how to properly use this tool and strike a balance between using AI and writing their own emails. You must avoid relying solely on these tools as they can rarely perfectly showcase the language and tone of your brand.
ChatGPT also doesn’t understand timely relevance. It can’t write analytical and profound emails like an email copywriter can.
At the end of the day, you don’t have to use AI writing tools like ChatGPT to get ahead of the curve. We know you don’t want to miss out on this trend, but I’m sure your target audience will appreciate original content that depicts the heart of your brand more than one that’s written by AI.
About the Co-Author
Reena Aggarwal is the Director of Operations and Sales at Attrock, a result-driven digital marketing company. With 10+ years of sales and operations experience in the field of e-commerce and digital marketing, she is quite an industry expert. She is a people person and considers human resources as the most valuable asset of a company. In her free time, you would find her spending quality time with her brilliant, almost teenage daughter and watching her grow in this digital, fast-paced era.