How To Choose The Right Email Assistant For Your Needs
Running a business means wearing many hats, especially if you’re a solopreneur. You need to handle client acquisition, email outreach, and responding to queries from prospects.
That’s a lot to handle if done manually. You’d need to hire more people to handle the added workload to scale. That’s where an AI email assistant comes in.
An AI email assistant is a multitasker. It can help with prospecting, ensure lead list validity, and craft email copy that resonates with your audience.
Why Do You Need an AI Email Assistant?
Writing quality sales emails is straightforward. It starts with prospecting, ensuring lead quality, and personalizing. Then you have to do it over and over again.
When something needs repeating—it can be automated. AI email assistants help take the load off these repetitive tasks, ensuring the same quality, voice, and tone for each lead segment.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. AI email assistants also provide the following benefits:
Automated Email Responses
Your website or lead capture pages can be a 24/7 lead generation machine. However, studies show that businesses that respond to prospects first are more likely to land a deal.
Unfortunately, you can’t always be online to respond to prospect emails—but an AI email assistant can. They can send sales reps notifications or auto-respond to emails.
Some tools can do more than send generic responses. They can read the email, understand the context, and reply relevant and personalized to the user's needs.
Data-Driven Personalization
Personalization is simple enough. You can do this manually by finding prospects on LinkedIn, researching their company, or visiting their website for more information.
This should be realistic for a handful of prospects. But, if you want to scale, you must leverage lead intelligence data. An AI email assistant can use this data to hyper-personalize each email.
For example, you can tell your AI assistant to “create a personalized first line about pain points based on the prospect’s company description based on your writing styles.”
AI Email Assistants Can Write Emails Like You
Instead of writing dozens of emails, an AI assistant can learn from your writing patterns, style, tone, and voice to write emails just like you.
But if you’re not a copywriter by trade, you can take inspiration from email templates. However, not every AI email assistant has these features. To maximize your AI assistant, ensure you’re trying out tools with the right features, intuitiveness, and scalability.
How to Choose the Right AI Email Assistant For Your Business
There are hundreds of thousands of AI email assistants to choose from. Some are free with basic features, and others are paid but offer much flexibility and scalability. To help you choose the right AI email assistant, consider the following criteria:
Simple Email Integration
Find an AI email tool that’s easy to install or integrate into your existing email service provider. It should only take a couple of clicks to install. Some also use API keys from GPTs like OpenAI.
Inbox Management
Your inbox can get flooded with emails, both important and spam. An AI assistant can help you prioritize which emails you should respond to first or which have buying intent.
Productivity and Automation Features
The entire point of having an AI email assistant is to improve the productivity of your sales and marketing departments. Use a tool to automate email sequences, A/B testing, and replies.
Data Analytics
The fastest way to grow your business is to use data to improve decision-making. Using a tool that lets you monitor key email metrics is essential to help you track KPIs and business goals.
Data Privacy
Privacy should be a priority. An AI email assistant shouldn’t pose a threat or a security risk to your business and clients. Read the privacy policy and understand how secure the data will be.
Best AI Email Assistants This 2024
Now that we know what to look for in an AI email assistant, here are some tools you should consider. They are easy to integrate and have all the tools to scale and improve productivity.
Instantly.ai
Instantly’s AI email assistant is trained on hundreds of millions of high-converting, cold emails. Just upload your email list, and Instantly can generate an email copy that aligns for each lead.
When combined with lead intelligence data from B2B Lead Finder, you get as close to a plug-and-play email campaign as it gets. Just upload the leads and Instantly handles the rest.
Thanks to {{custom variables}}, there's plenty of room for hyper-personalization. You can also get inspiration from hundreds of community email copy templates from multiple industries. It can also automate replies depending on the prospect’s initial emails with its AI inbox manager.
But the real game changer is our AI Sequence Generator. Instead of one cold email, Instantly generates an entire email sequence, complete with Spintax, custom variables, and follow-ups.
Answer a few prompts and input relevant data, such as case studies and value propositions. Then, you’re good to go! Just ensure you’ve finished all technical setups and authentication.
For those who aren’t tech-savvy and need help with technical setups for cold email marketing, Instantly has a DFY service where you can buy domains and set up accounts on the app!
GPTWriter
GPTWriter is a Chrome extension that links your Gmail account to ChatGPT. It can automate replies based on email context, learn from your writing style, and create personalized emails.
Think of it as a mini ChatGPT integrated into Gmail. You can enter prompts and write emails using specific tones, lengths, or languages. However, the use cases aren’t specifically for sales.
It’s more of a personal email assistant. Let’s say you’re job hunting and finally get an email about an opportunity at a new company but don’t know how to word your reply correctly.
You can use GPTWriter to “Reply that I’m interested. Ask about compensation and remote work availability.” It’ll then generate a response and send it to Gmail’s email editor.
AI Mail Assistant
AI Mail Assistant is another Gmail extension that leverages ChatGPT to help manage your inboxes. It can auto-generate replies, summarize emails, and translate emails in any language.
The “Improve Draft” feature acts like Grammarly, offering suggestions, and improvements, and can even spot potential ethical or discriminatory language in your email.
AI Mail Assistant uses GPT-4. You don’t need an OpenAI account to get the API Key. It also uses other AI models, like Mixtral, for specific requests.
This tool can be helpful for solopreneurs who handle large volumes of emails daily, customer support agents who respond to client queries, or freelancers who pitch to prospects.
Friday: AI Email Assistant
Friday: AI Email Assistant is a paid tool with a three-day free trial. It’s one of the more robust email assistants with dozens of features focused on writing contextually accurate email content.
One of the main issues with most free AI email assistants is that prompts are left to the users. Friday is just ChatGPT attached to your ESP. With Friday, you don’t have to think about prompts.
There are over 40 prompt templates to choose from. You can then fine-tune each prompt to get your desired email copy using different tones, writing styles, and lengths.
Friday is also available on iOS and Android if you want to work remotely. Unfortunately, there isn’t an option for personalizing emails at scale. But you can get a lifetime deal at $69.99
Grammarly
Grammarly has its own “Professional Email Writer” tool. It can help you craft formal emails with two inputs: your audience and critical details of your value proposition. Let’s look at an example:
I told Grammarly that my target audience was internal sales teams. The value proposition was: “We help internal sales teams scale by automating expensive, repetitive tasks and streamlining sales pipelines.” Here is the result:
Aside from the AI Email Writer, having Grammarly installed can help you better structure your email. It can give suggestions, correct grammar, and improve your writing style.
If you pay for Grammarly Go, you also gain access to their generative AI. You can use it to improve your email drafts, identify gaps in your email, or give you ideas on how to align your value proposition to your prospect’s exact needs.
Sanebox
Sanebox is an AI email assistant focusing more on inbox management than generative AI responses. It’s perfect for eCommerce businesses, digital product sellers, Shopify customer support, and sending timely email follow-ups.
Sanebox leverages AI to identify the most important emails, making you more productive. There’s even an option to permanently remove unwanted newsletter subscriptions so they won’t bother you again. That means you’re left with a decluttered and prioritized inbox.
It also works on iOS and Android devices and popular email service providers like Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo Mail. That means it can be used for all your email sorting needs, whether for personal or business emails.
HoppyCopy
HoppyCopy is an AI email marketing assistant that can help you launch several types of email campaigns. You can use it for product launches, cold outreach, nurture sequences, or abandoned cart follow-ups.
With HoppyCopy, businesses can create entire newsletters complete with relevant images. It even has a content converter that can help you repurpose blogs into emails, emails into Tweets, and Tweets into texts.
Not only can HoppyCopy help you with your email, but it also gives you insight into your competitors. You can access thousands of emails from top brands or have HopppyCopy track a new one in real-time.
Seamless.ai
Seamless.ai is a prospecting and outreach tool that helps you find cell numbers, emails, and direct dials. It also has an AI email assistant that generates email copy for your business.
It uses user input, such as your company description, the products or services you sell, and value proposition, to help its AI writer tailor content for you.
Afterward, you can select from a prompt from its library or create your own. Example prompts include LinkedIn connection requests, cold emails, follow-ups, and personalization. Their writer also works for social media posts, cold call scripts, or voice mails.
EmailTree
Email Tree is an email automation platform built for customer service. You get an AI inbox assistant to automate replies, prioritize customer tickets, and understand customer requests.
That means you can scale customer service teams to handle higher volumes of customer requests without having to hire more and more customer support agents as you scale.
Email Tree gives 24/7 customer support on demand, even without agent supervision. You can use Email Tree’s AI assistant for onboarding, taking orders, payments, refunds, or customer data updates.
How to Streamline Email Outreach With Instantly AI Sequence Generator
If you want the fastest, most cost-effective approach to scalable outreach, Instantly’s AI Sequence Generator is a must-try, especially for businesses with zero cold email experience.
You get high-converting, personalized email copy that matches prospect needs for every email in your sales cadence. Here’s how you can do it in four easy steps:
Add a New Campaign on Instantly
Log in to your Instantly account and add a new campaign. Then, upload your lead list. You can upload leads from any lead source; just remember to validate and qualify your leads first.
If you want the most streamlined method, you can find pre-verified leads from B2B Finder and directly upload your email list into your campaign.
Click on “AI Generator” on the Sequences Tab
Once the leads are uploaded, go to the Sequences Tab. At the bottom of the dashboard, click on the “AI Generator” icon. This will open up a couple of prompts for relevant data inputs.
Input Relevant Data
Instantly will ask you critical details like your company name, the details of your offer, your target audience, the case studies you have, and the number of sequences (emails and follow-ups). Try to be specific, especially with your value proposition and case studies.
Click on Generate and Preview the Email Copy
The final step is to click on Generate and preview the email copy. Instantly will use your provided data to craft a personalized cold email sequence relevant and valuable to your prospects.
Key Takeaways
AI email assistants can help you streamline email copywriting, inbox management, and email marketing. When looking for an AI email assistant, consider ones that are easy to integrate, drive productivity, and can help automate repetitive tasks. To recap, here are the AI email assistants that we recommend:
- Instantly.ai is best for automating entire cold email sequences, from email copy personalization to sales cadence automation.
- GPTWriter and AI Mail Assistant can learn from your writing styles, automate replies, and improve email copy.
- Friday and Grammarly can help you improve the quality of your email and have it match specific tones and voices.
- Seamless and HoppyCopy are great for scaling email and content marketing efforts across multiple platforms.
- Sanebox and EmailTree help you with inbox management and have customer support features.
Try out Instantly and streamlistreamline your sales process!