One of the most tedious parts of email marketing is personalization. Sure, you can quickly write 10 to 20 emails faster with the help of templates. But what happens when you start scaling?
Manually writing hundreds of email copies isn’t feasible. If you want to scale campaigns, you need the right tools. Here’s where ChatGPT can help.
And no, this isn’t one of those “passive income with ChatGPT guides.” You still need a bit of elbow grease to make this work. By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to learn:
- How to use ChatGPT for writing emails
- The limitations of ChatGPT for emails
- Prompt examples for email writing and personalization
- Integrating ChatGPT in your email tools
Using ChatGPT for Writing Emails: Is it Viable?
Taking away all the hype from hustle influencers on TikTok, ChatGPT is an extremely powerful marketing tool when used properly. You can use it to write email copies, personalize, and, more importantly—it can learn.
That’s the most underutilized aspect of ChatGPT, especially when writing emails. The best way to use this tool is to make it learn from sets of email copies first. Help it understand context, tone, and voice. Doing so helps it generate better, more personalized copies for campaigns.
GPT-3.5 can’t fully automate your emails. It can be integrated into email tools to streamline workflow. However, using OpenAI alone does have its limitations.
The Limitations of ChatGPT for Emails
One of the main limitations of ChatGPT for personalized emails is its inability to read website content. It can only make educated guesses based on a website’s URL.
For example, you ask ChatGPT to “write a cold email for petalrepublic.com.” The AI would create a cold email about gardening. This could work for some sites. But solely relying on this can end up with the AI saying irrelevant and hallucinated things to prospects.
OpenAI is also smart—but not that smart. It's limited to information gathered until 2021. You can upgrade to ChatGPT 4 for a fee if you want more up-to-date and real-time information. Automated personalization still needs to be fact-checked.
Even with its limitations, ChatGPT is still a powerful email marketing tool. You just have to know the proper prompts to train the AI based on curated data sets to output organic email copies that match your brand’s overall tone.
ChatGPT Prompts for Writing Email Copy
As a prerequisite, prompt ChatGPT to “learn from” curated data. For example, if you’ve received great email copy from other brands, you can copy them and ask the AI to make similar outputs.
Generic prompts like “write a cold email for ABC company based on my products and services” will likely produce a generic email copy—especially if it’s not trained.
If you want something more organic, personalized, and likely to convert, try out these prompts instead:
Generate Subject Lines for Cold Email for {{Industry}}
Every great email starts with an engaging subject line. Try out the prompt:
“generate subject lines for cold email for {{industry}}.”
You can even get more specific and target niches within that industry.
For example:
“write subject lines for cold email for real estate property management around Sacramento.”
Write an Intro to a Cold Email for {{Industry}}
Subject lines grab attention; the email introduction hooks your prospects in. Prompts like:
“write the opening paragraph of a cold email to {{industry}}” are a good place to start.
What Could I Offer {{Industry}}?
For this part, ChatGPT needs in-depth knowledge about who you are, what you do, and what you can offer. Give it the necessary information, then use prompts like:
“Based on my company, what can I offer {{target industry}} in a cold email that makes them more likely to respond?”
Create a One Line Soft Call to Action for {{Industry}}
In most cases, asking for a call or a meeting in your first cold email can be too much of an ask. Instead, try out soft CTAs. These are less-invasive, high-value, and no-brainer CTAs that work well with sales psychology. You can use prompts like:
“Write a soft call to action for recipients directing them to click a link to my case study.”
Write a Cold Email Mentioning Pain Point For {{Niche}}
One of the easiest ways to get responses is by providing immediate value. Solving pain points is a great way to do so. Here’s a prompt you can use:
“Create a short cold email mentioning a common pain point in {{niche}} and add blurbs on how {{product}} can solve them.”
Cold Email Variations Using ChatGPT
You can use this simple prompt to get multiple variations of a great cold email.
“Write syntax variations for the cold email copy below.” Then, just paste your cold email example, and ChatGPT will output easily personalizable variations based on the original.
For example, we used this sales email template as the original:
Hey, {{First Name}},
I saw you were interested in {{product}}. We wanted you to know that we’ve upgraded it to allow
{{benefit 1}}
{{benefit 2}}
{{benefit 3}}
{{common painpoint}} is something we deal with daily. So, we made upgrades to make our lives a lot easier. I’m sure that you could benefit from this too!
We can give you a free personalized product tour at your convenience. If interested, you can schedule a meeting with us through this link.
Thanks in advance,
{{Your Name}}
The prompt gave five syntax variations—the original, formal and direct, casual and friendly, straightforward, and inquisitive. Each with different tones and unique subject lines. Here’s what we got:
Using SpinTax to Personalize Cold Emails
Spintax is short for Spin Syntax. It can create variations of words or sentences to help you create unique and better personalized cold emails. We also use spintax to avoid being tagged as spam. Imagine sending the same email to 1,000 people. That’s a recipe for disaster.
We can use spintax for every part of the email, including the subject lines, body, CTA, signature, contact information, addresses—the list goes on. There are a lot of spintax generators, but ChatGPT is simple enough to use with this prompt:
“Add spintax to this cold email. Use the spintax structure {{RANDOM | main word | synonym 1 | synonym 2}}. "
Let’s take this cold email body as an example:
“Your LinkedIn profile made me feel you’re a great closer, so I am contacting you directly. We recently had huge success bringing high-ticket coaches like yourself 10-20 clients weekly.
I want to do the same for two more coaches in November. I'd love to show you our plan to get at least 50 meetings in the next three months. Are you free this week for a quick chat?
Cheers,”
Here’s the output:
{{RANDOM|Hey|Hello|Hi|Greetings}},
Your LinkedIn profile made me feel you’re a great {{RANDOM|closer|salesperson|finisher}}, so I am contacting you directly. We recently had {{RANDOM|huge|tremendous|impressive}} success bringing {{RANDOM|high-ticket|premium|top-tier}} coaches like yourself 10-20 clients weekly.
I want to do the same for {{RANDOM|two more|a couple more|a couple of additional}} coaches in November. I'd love to show you our plan to get at least 50 meetings in the next three months. Are you free this week for a quick chat?
{{RANDOM|Best regards|Cheers|Looking forward to connecting}},
It's not ready to send, but it could be great with a bit of human editing—No?
Integrating ChatGPT into Your Email Tools
Integrating ChatGPT into your email tool is a game changer. Remember all those prompts, syntaxes, or spintax? OpenAI takes care of all of that for you. All you need is the right tool.
Instantly recently integrated OpenAI to help emailers run personalized cold emails at scale. Setting up only takes a few minutes. Here’s how it works.
Sign up for a free Instantly account. If you already have one, click on any campaign. Then, go to the leads section. At the top right, click the “brain icon” for AI prompts. Go to settings and get your API key.
Once that’s settled, you can find AI prompt templates created by Instantly members to generate first lines, target options based on company descriptions, or even get emails from domains. For example, we can choose the “Company Description from URL” prompt.
On the input column, select website and output “company description from URL.” Instantly will send your lead’s data from your campaign to OpenAI and output descriptions based on that. You can do this for all leads in a campaign, streamlining personalization.
If you want to try it out, you can create your template, set your spintax, and share it with the community (if you want to). After setting up your prompts, you can immediately use them for email sequences.
You can create spintax here for anything you want. So experiment, make your own prompts that fit your cold email strategies, and start scaling campaigns!
Key Takeaways
ChatGPT is a powerful tool in any marketer’s arsenal—as long as they know how to use it. But when you integrate ChatGPT with your email tools, your workflows get even more streamlined, optimized, and automated. If you want to make the most out of ChatGPT in emails, here’s a quick rundown of some key information:
- Be specific with your prompts
- Set your spintax or try different syntaxes of a great cold email
- ChatGPT can’t scrape website information yet
- To automate prompt creations, integrate ChatGPT with an email tool
If you want to automate personalization at scale, Instantly has you covered. Find hundreds of fine-tuned prompt templates to try on your campaigns or create your own! Sign up for a free trial today!