Everyone is up in arms about how artificial intelligence (AI) is taking over marketing and copywriters and marketers are going to lose their jobs or become obsolete.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah….
All of this came to a head when ChatGPT became the big story last December and everyone was predicting it would change the way everyone did everything, from writing computer code to writing the Great American Novel.
This especially became a story in the digital marketing world, because so many people predicted this marvelous new tool would replace copywriters.
Several digital marketing gurus jumped on this bandwagon and created courses purporting to show you how to use AI to “revolutionize your business.” I’ve seen a few that claim you can use AI to write all of your marketing copy in minutes too.
Whatever.
The truth is, AI can be useful in marketing, including email marketing. But I am not worried about an AI email marketing revolution at this point.
To prove this to myself, and to you, I asked ChatGPT to write a 500-word marketing email about how artificial intelligence can be used in small business email marketing. (This is the exact phrase I entered into ChatGPT’s system.)
Here Is ChatGPT’s Email
Dear [Name],
As a small business owner, you’re always looking for ways to improve your marketing efforts and reach more customers. One powerful tool that you may not have considered is artificial intelligence (AI).
AI can be used in a variety of ways to enhance your email marketing campaigns and help you achieve better results. Here are a few examples:
- Personalization: AI can help you create more personalized emails by analyzing customer data and recommending content that is most relevant to each individual recipient. This can lead to higher open and click-through rates, as well as more conversions.
- Automation: AI can automate many of the tedious tasks involved in email marketing, such as segmenting your email list, scheduling emails, and sending follow-up messages. This will save you time and allow you to focus on other important business tasks.
- Optimization: AI can help you optimize your email campaigns by analyzing performance data and making recommendations for improvement. For example, it can suggest the best time of day to send emails, or identify the subject lines that are most likely to get opened.
- Prediction: AI can predict which customers are most likely to make a purchase, or which ones are at risk of churning. This allows you to target your marketing efforts more effectively, and ensure that you’re reaching the right audience.
- Interaction: AI can also be used to create interactive and engaging emails that allow customers to take action directly within the email, such as scheduling appointments, or making a purchase.
Overall, AI can help you take your email marketing efforts to the next level, and achieve better results. If you’re interested in learning more about how AI can benefit your small business, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Best, [Your Name]
P.S. If you’re curious about AI and its potential for your business, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us and we can schedule a meeting to discuss how it can benefit your business specifically.
My Opinions on ChatGPTs Email
This is about what I expected to see from ChatGPT.
Factual, accurate information that could have been written by a high school student writing a report.
And while ChatGPT did include a great many keywords suggested by my SEO content app, Surfer SEO, (useful for this blog post, not for email marketing) I noticed that it only added 4 new keywords to the 50 I had written in my email below.
I did not alter a single word from ChatGPT’s output. I just copied and pasted exactly what it generated.
Is this a perfectly serviceable email?
I guess so…
Would I respond to this email asking for more information on how artificial intelligence can benefit my business specifically? Probably not. Unless it was to ask whether this email had been written by a robot.
To be fair, AI tools can do everything listed in the email above. Your current ESP or CRM may offer some of these features right now. And email marketers are making good use of lots of these tools to increase sales and make their marketing campaigns more effective.
My issue is not with the accuracy of ChatGPT’s email, it’s with its voice.
This email is flat. It’s dull. There’s no humor or “spark” to this email. It doesn’t touch on the reader’s pain points or even their specific desired goals. It’s average.
If you want your business to stand out in your subscribers’ inboxes, this email will not make that happen.
Which is why I believe that when you use AI in email marketing, it needs to be viewed as a tool, not an end result.
To illustrate this, I wrote my own email, using my own research and voicing my own opinions about how AI tools fit into email marketing for small business owners.
Here Is My Email
Before I start, I want to mention that I wrote this email prior to letting ChatGPT do its thing. I didn’t know what it would come up with or how it would read at the time I wrote the email below.
Hey [NAME],
If you’re like every other small business owner out there, you have a ton of work on your plate. In fact, you may have ALL the work for your business on your plate, especially if you’re a solopreneur.
That means you need to prioritize the important day-to-day things in your business, like creating your products or delivering your services. You need to spend time on bookkeeping, customer service, and new product or service development.
On top of all this, you need to figure out how to get new customers in the door. This most important of priorities tends to fall to the bottom of the list because it usually involves marketing.
Unless you’re a weirdo like me, marketing is probably one of your least favorite activities. Which means you look for every possible shortcut you can find to get it done when you actually give it your attention.
A lot of small business owners got very excited recently when ChatGPT was released. There were all sorts of reports and testimonials out there saying how great it was and how it could be used to write just about anything.
Pundits were predicting that artificial intelligence would take over much of the day-to-day work that marketers do now and copywriters would have to find new careers.
Well… Not really.
Candidly, as one of those copywriters, I do not believe robots are coming for my job. I’m not even worried about my industry.
Artificial intelligence can be one of many excellent email marketing tools. But it will never be the end-all and be-all of the marketing world a lot of folks out there are hoping it may be.
Please don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of amazing things AI can do, including:
- Tracking and processing customer behavior to create personalized emails and content that is specific to individual subscribers and customers.
- Deliver the perfect email campaign at the exact right time to the right person, based on where they are in the Buyer’s Journey.
- Help businesses create the ideal email marketing strategy, based on their customers’ needs.
But it will not replace humans at any stage of these processes.
I do believe that AI-powered technology will help a lot of small businesses grow faster. It’s doing it right now.
Think about the email platforms that offer to find the perfect delivery times for your emails, based on customer behavior. Or the platforms that help you remove invalid email addresses from your list, so it’s clean and up to date. These are powered by machine learning.
And I believe that we’ll use more AI-powered technology in the future, as it continues to develop.
Many businesses are using AI-powered tools to write email subject lines right now. And some of these platforms are increasing open rates substantially, which is wonderful.
A lot of customer data is being processed by AI email marketing platforms. Businesses that use this type of data analysis are able to create a better email marketing strategy and optimize their email deliverability.
But it still takes humans to look at all of this data and determine what will and won’t work for their particular business.
And in terms of the actual writing part, AI algorithms may be able to pull a bunch of words together into coherent sentences through natural language processing, but they’ll never write like humans.
Each individual who puts pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard and document, as the case may be, adds their own personality to what they write. We bring emotion and our own personal experience to our words, which makes them more powerful and easier for other people to relate to.
Artificial intelligence may be able to find the optimal combination of words to create personalized content for your customers, but you still need to add your personal touch to your email campaigns before you send them out.
My final analysis: AI-powered software like ChatGPT, Jasper, and others can give you a good place to start, but to quote Emily Bender, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory in a recent SoundSide podcast, “There’s no ‘there’, there.” Computers aren’t at the stage where they can understand how humans might respond to a question or express emotions in the same ways we do.
Go ahead and use AI-powered tools to get a head start on your writing. But for the love of everything, please fine-tune your emails before you send them. Otherwise, your subscribers will start unsubscribing because you sound like a robot.
Have a great day and I’ll talk to you again soon,
Tanya
My Incredibly Biased Opinion on Using AI in Email Marketing
I am happy to admit that as a professional copywriter, my opinion is incredibly biased toward humans writing email marketing campaigns. I think we do a better job and we actually insert some emotion and humor into what we write.
And yes, I do prefer my email to the one ChatGPT wrote. I hope you do too. If you don’t, no harm, no foul. My writing style isn’t for everyone.
I will say that if you want to leverage AI tools in your email marketing campaigns and content marketing, you certainly can. They can gather information much faster, deliver relevant content and give you a good start on your next email, blog post, or article.
However, as wonderful as the natural language generation functions may be, machine-generated content is no substitute for human-written content. Your emails and blog posts need soul. They need to resonate with the person reading them.
Go ahead and incorporate AI into your marketing campaigns, but don’t assume you can get it to do all the work for you. Pre-written copy will not deliver winning campaigns. Take the time to go through the copy the AI platforms spit out and add your human touch to it before you load it into your ESP or CRM.
You’ll get much better results and your subscribers and customers will thank you for it.
A Simple Way to Increase Subscriber Engagement
Believe it or not, you don’t have to integrate AI tools into your email marketing campaigns to get high-performing emails.
Instead, a good way to start writing your weekly nurture emails is to know what type of nurture email your subscribers are most likely to open, read, and buy from.
And the simplest way to find this out is to take my 60-second quiz that answers this question for you.
Click on the button below to find out which type of nurture email your subscribers are most likely to open, read, and buy from now.
Even if you do use an AI tool in your email marketing campaigns, you’ll have more relevant information to give it and it will be easier for you to transform that machine-generated content into something worth reading.