Email newsletters and ChatGPT are made for each other. From a marketing ROI perspective, emails written using ChatGPT could improve the context and customer experience (CX) in a more simplified way. Today, most brands are counting on AI as an enabler to not just conceptualize email newsletters from scratch but also ensure these marketing tools are steadily embraced as part of the overall CX management strategy. With powerful AI tools like ChatGPT, you can now use the power of personalization based on a subscriber’s conversational behavior, likes, and interests. With email analytics and insights, and with the help of finer details like clicks, open rates, and conversions, you can easily fine-tune your strategy.

Let’s understand the basics of newsletter marketing.

Why is Email Newsletter Marketing important? 

Newsletters are quick, cost-effective, persuasive, and valuable, and remain the most effective communication method.

Direct communication channel: An email newsletter is a direct and flexible method of communication. 

Cost-effective: Email marketing is cost-effective as compared to other marketing avenues. It doesn’t necessitate substantial expenditures for printing, postage, or advertisement space. 

Larger Outreach: With email marketing tools, businesses can reach a large number of subscribers at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing methods.

Nurturing relationships: Email newsletters help businesses build and nurture relationships with their audience. By consistently providing valuable and relevant content, businesses can establish themselves as trusted sources of information, engage with their audience, and strengthen customer loyalty.

Personalized communication: Businesses can categorize their subscriber lists for email newsletters based on details like demographics, interests, past purchases, or level of participation.

In this article, we are listing the best ways to leverage ChatGPT in email marketing. Before you begin working on it, list down your specific goals – whether it is increasing open rates, personalization, or amplifying CTR. But before that, let’s start by focusing on ChatGPT. 

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What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a large language model which was created by San Francisco-based start-up OpenAI. And within a short span of time, ChatGPT managed to gain millions of new users. ChatGPT’s most advantageous feature is its ability to create human-like text based on a specific prompt. This artificial intelligence tool uses deep learning methods to simulate natural language processing. Trained by humans using huge chunks of text data (as of 2021), ChatGPT’s output is remarkably closer to human speech behavior.  

How ChatGPT Works?

The Transformer architecture is the cornerstone of ChatGPT. It uses self-attention processes to analyze and produce text. The model can learn patterns, relationships, and context from textual data using this novel technique, enabling it to produce high-quality content that is suited to certain objectives and target audiences.

ChatGPT creates content that is fascinating, and precisely tailored to a business’s voice and messaging by fusing Transformer architecture with cutting-edge algorithms.

Litmus’ AI Assistant Assist to Empower Captivating Emails

Last month, email marketing expert Litmus announced the beta release of Litmus Assistant, a new AI-powered tool that enables marketers to produce engaging and successful email campaigns more quickly. It allows businesses more time to create and test creative email campaign plans that optimize their email-driven income by optimizing email content and assuring inclusivity.

Erik Nierenberg, CEO of Litmus, while speaking of email personalization using AI tools, said:

“We’re excited for Litmus Assistant to give marketers a competitive edge in crafting compelling campaign content and are focused on delivering additional AI-powered innovations to make it easier to optimize and personalize emails—design, build, test, collaborate, and ultimately deliver incredible audience experiences via high performing email campaigns.” 

Knowing your Audience 

Consumer behavior has changed dramatically, and in this digital age, they demand immediate attention and tailor-made content. For any business to flourish, you must follow the first rule – knowing your audience. For efficient communication and engagement, it is crucial to understand your audience, and ChatGPT is a useful tool for learning more about your intended audience. From what they care about to what their pain points are and the kind of content they like to consume, brands need to know everything. This information is crucial to establish the content of your newsletter and increase click-through rates before you let ChatGPT give the final touches.

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Brands can begin by skimming through the consumer data like location, previous interactions with your brand, and demographics before feeding data into ChatGPT.

Surveys are another great way to directly connect with the audience and know what they’d like to see in the newsletters.

To understand the interest of the audience, brands should follow a simple mantra – listen to their feedback and work on it. The clearer you are about your audience, the easier it will be for ChatGPT to generate customized content.

Why A Human-Like Voice Does The Magic 

To establish an organic connection with the audience, a human-like tone always does the magic. Customers like interactions and they prefer a tone that is conversational and effortless and feels real. ChatGPT makes this a cakewalk for brands. Ever since its launch, if there’s one thing ChatGPT is loved for then it is its exceptional ability to write like a human. Use this feature to your advantage. 

P.S.: Avoid using jargon and technical terms, it confuses the audience; instead use simple, easy-to-interpret language. 

Tip: Including your personality and writing style in your writing is another approach to do this. Use comedy, and humor from personal experience, and let your audience know you.

Taking the Conversation to the Next Level 

Conversational language is more about using colloquial language, contractions, and sentence constructions that have hues of real-life conversations. Brands can establish a sense of familiarity and warmth with their audience by using conversational language. 

A friendly, conversational tone has the power to make your email newsletter seem more interactive and less official.

Utilizing conversational components like questions, directives, and exclamations is another approach to accomplish this. To achieve this, you can train ChatGPT on conversational data that can help to improve the naturalness of your language. 

A Subject Line That Holds the User’s Attention 

Let’s enlighten you with some interesting facts here. Did you know that on average, an individual receives close to 120 emails every single day? And if one really has to make a mark, a strong, CTR-rich subject line is the only answer. 

According to research, around 47% of email readers read the subject line before deciding whether they wish to open the message or not. The rule of thumb is if the subject line doesn’t build enough curiosity, the audience will instantly discard the email or maybe even report it as spam. 

Fortunately, ChatGPT can suggest attention-grabbing phrases, instill a sense of urgency, or add customization to the subject line to make it more appealing thanks to its extensive linguistic expertise and comprehension of human communication patterns. Brands may boost the effectiveness of their communication initiatives and maximize email open rates by utilizing ChatGPT’s capabilities.

Personalized Content Always Saves the Day 

Content personalization can be defined as the art of tailoring your brand’s message according to the taste of the audience. Personalization is the key to making your newsletter seem more relevant and interesting to the readers. This can directly impact the click-through rates. 

There are different ways to personalize and make your readers feel special. The most basic way is to address the readers by his/her first name and another strategy is to divide your audience into groups based on their demographics, interests, or behaviors and then deliver each group-specific material. 

ChatGPT with details like the reader’s name, location, etc., to write customized emails and create tailored content. It’s a fact that if personalization is done correctly, brands can enjoy a deeper and more meaningful bond with their users.

Making your newsletter sound like a conversation will always give that extra push needed to produce better outcomes. 

Thomas Peham, VP of Marketing, Storyblok while speaking  of ChatGPT and its skills, he said,

When implemented correctly, generative AI has the potential to help companies produce faster, more personalized customer communications based on historical data and interactions around the clock. 

Speaking of the importance of personalization, he says, 

The modern consumer demands much more from the online experience. More than ever, it’s about hyper-personalization and customer-centricity. Brands need to be able to anticipate and address their customers’ individual needs and inspire demand.

Buzzfeed Plans to Use ChatGPT to Personalize Content

BuzzFeed CEO, CEO Jonah Peretti said the brand will employ AI technologies given by OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, to “enhance” and “personalize” its content.

According to Peretti, BuzzFeed will introduce “AI-inspired content” in 2023, which will “improve the quiz experience, inform our brainstorming, and personalize our content for our audience.”

He further added, “Our industry will expand beyond AI-powered curation (feeds), to AI-powered creation (content). AI opens up a new era of creativity, where creative humans like us play a key role in providing the ideas, cultural currency, inspired prompts, IP, and formats that come to life using the newest technologies.”

This news comes at a time when media organizations struggling with declining advertising rates are tempted by technology as AI tools like ChatGPT become more capable of writing text.

Better Open and CTRs 

As we mentioned earlier, the subject line of the newsletter seals the fate of the success of the email. A strong subject line decides if a user will open the email and click the links inside. But you know what else is important to improve the open and click-through rates, other than an eye-catching subject line? It is audience segmentation. This will help your email reach the right group of people rather than a generic message for everyone. 

Brands can leverage ChatGPT to generate headlines and body copies that are relatable, catchy, and click-worthy. This will amplify the chances of the email being opened and clicked through. Once more, educate the text AI about the context and purpose of the content to obtain a good text for your mail. Most often than not, the results may not be up to the mark. So don’t forget to use additional commands till you achieve what you are looking for. You can provide information like: 

• Type of newsletter (birthday email, welcome email).
• Target group. 
• Objective.
• The call-to-action elements.  

Integrating ChatGPT in the Newsletter Workflow 

Integrating ChatGPt clearly means using the tool’s capabilities to not just create but also distribute the newsletter. The processing for your newsletter can be streamlined and time-saving by incorporating ChatGPT. For instance, it can assist you in producing many versions of your email newsletter rapidly so that you can test various components and determine which ones work best.

Before adding ChatGPT to your mailing workflow, remember to check that you’re using the latest version and customizing it for your unique use case. You can train it using your own data, making adjustments to the parameters, and comparing iterations to determine which one performs the best.

How to Check the Effectiveness of ChatGPT

It’s always important to evaluate the effectiveness of ChatGPT-generated content and how well it is performing. One way to do this is to monitor open and click-through rates, which show how many people, are opening and clicking on the links in your email newsletter. If the metrics look promising with ChatGPT integration, you can safely assume the content strategy is working.

Monitoring engagement indicators, such as the number of shares, likes, or comments on your email newsletter, is another option.

The number of people using your service, purchasing your goods, or doing any other desired activity may all be tracked using conversion metrics. If the numbers are positively increasing then it indicates the newsletter is hitting the bull’s eye. 

What is A/B Testing in Email Content?

It is a method where two versions of a piece of content are compared. A variety of email content, including subject lines, headlines, and body text, can be produced using ChatGPT. These can be then put through A/B testing to determine which one connects with your audience the best.

For instance, you can use ChatGPT to come up with a list of various topic lines. One email version with one subject line is sent to a set of recipients, while another email variant with an alternative subject line is sent to a separate group.

• You can determine which subject line fared better and apply it in your upcoming campaigns by monitoring the open rates for each version.
• Use ChatGPT to create several subject lines and body copy for your email newsletter and experiment with them on various audiences.
• You can test several iterations of your email content with your audience with the use of ChatGPT. You can maximize your email newsletter and boost your outcomes by making data-driven decisions.

Things to note before testing: 

• Ensure to set up the model with the proper parameters and to have a clear knowledge of what you want to test.
• Always keep a minimal sample size to get results that are statistically significant.

Final Thoughts 

ChatGPT is here to stay and the best part is, it just keeps evolving and getting better. In the last few months, it has proven to be a game-changer in all fields related to email marketing and other fields of sales, marketing, and communication. But what needs to be kept in mind is the fact that ChatGPT’s effectiveness is dependent on the data, i.e. prompts provided. It all boils down to correct prompts. 

Email newsletter marketing is undeniably a powerful tool for businesses to engage with their audience, build relationships, and drive desired actions. With its direct and personalized nature, email allows businesses to deliver targeted content directly to subscribers’ inboxes. It is a cost-effective marketing channel that enables businesses to reach a large audience without significant investments. By creating well-designed newsletters with compelling content, businesses can establish themselves as trusted sources of information; strengthen customer loyalty, and increase website traffic and conversions. 

ChatGPT’s capabilities will increase as technology develops, enabling more complex personalization, dynamic content creation, and improved audience segmentation. It has the power to influence the future of email marketing by enabling the delivery of highly targeted and engaging newsletters and establishing better relationships between companies and their subscribers.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com].