Any marketer that’s familiar with consumer lifecycle marketing knows that email and SMS are cornerstones to fostering and retaining a loyal customer base. As email marketing and SMS marketing strategies continue to evolve, it’s important to understand how the value of AI fits into the puzzle, and learn how to effectively leverage AI chatbots to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing efforts. The rising popularity of ChatGPT provides marketers with the perfect opportunity to create emails and SMS messages that are more personalized and scalable, consequently decreasing the need for excessive manual work or ideation delays.
As a leading growth squad with a team of proven experts in the consumer lifecycle marketing space, here is our best guide to using ChatGPT for email and SMS marketing.
What is ChatGPT?
Since its launch in November of 2022, the world hasn’t stopped talking about (and using) ChatGPT. So what exactly is it?
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot that utilizes a natural language processing model developed by OpenAI. A variety of industries, including marketing, have used it as a tool to improve and automate a variety of internal and external processes, such as customer interactions, content authoring, or SEO optimizations.
One of the major differentiators of ChatGPT that separates it from conventional chatbots, however, is its ability to produce incredibly tailored and personalized outputs to the user’s queries. Since ChatGPT is able to understand user input through machine learning and natural language processing techniques, it can take into account information about an end-recipient’s demographics, behaviors, or interests and integrate that information into a customized response. This level of personalization makes ChatGPT particularly useful for customer lifecycle marketing as it can effectively tailor content to a variety of different audience segments and user journey points.
How to Use ChatGPT for Email Marketing?
The best way to use ChatGPT for email marketing is to leverage the tool in a way that accentuates the existing core principles of successful email marketing: segmentation, personalization, and automation. It’s important to realize that ChatGPT cannot completely replace the role of copywriters and email marketers; rather it should be used to optimize, automate, and refine existing frameworks of proven success.
Segmentation
Although the immediately obvious use-case of chatGPT in email marketing would be to use it for email writing and content creation, it’s also useful to use the chatbot to create user personas for segmenting your email list even before creating the emails themselves. ChatGPT can be trained on demographic, behavioral and psychographic information about a specific group of email subscribers, and can then create highly detailed user personas that can help inform further segmentation frameworks. By analyzing consumer dropoff points and engagement rates, chatGPT can segment your users into the right categories so that you can tailor your messaging to resonate with different points in the user journey.
Personalization
With these user personas, email marketers can then use chatGPT to generate highly personalized emails catered to the interests and preferences of specific audience segments. This deliberate and personalized method of brand storytelling can increase the likelihood of leads, drive conversions, and set the tone for a long-term, loyal customer relationship. Content generation for emails can include everything from the body content, subject lines, preview texts, email CTAs, and even footer copy.
Automation
Rapid experimentation and A/B testing is a surefire method to optimize emails to drive up engagement and conversions to unlock the highest delivery, open and click-through rates. That being said, rapid experimentation inherently requires a large number of content variations within limited time and resources; this makes ChatGPT the perfect tool to automate and speed up the process of testing for various different components of marketing emails. Instead of spending time thinking of ideas for emails, ChatGPT can quickly create as many variations of a single email as you want, giving you a whole suite of testing variations from just one approved email template.
ChatGPT Prompts for Email Marketing
Now that you understand how to use chatGPT for email marketing, here are 3 go-to prompts that you can use (and customize!) for your email marketing campaigns.
For Segmentation and User Persona Creation
Prompt: “Create a user persona for a first-time customer of [brand name]”.
In the image above you can see an example of what ChatGPT outputs when asked to create a user persona for a first-time customer of JVN Hair. In mere seconds, the AI chatbot will produce a full user persona for that specific cohort of customers, including information about their background, goals, challenges, values, and behavior. These details provide essential information for producing targeted and personalized email content to each different persona, and can serve as a great starting point for making sure that you are sending the right emails to the right audiences.
Although the input here was specifically a “first-time customer of JVN Hair”, there are many variations of this input that can provide further detail on who your audience segment is. Input characteristics can include frequency of purchase, demographics, their familiarity with the brand, and their stage in the conversion funnel. Here are some examples, just to showcase the flexibility and variety of inputs that you can consider:
- A loyal customer of JVN Hair that has purchased at least 1 product every month for the last 12 months
- A 22 year old female who is considering switching from Ouai to JVN Hair
- A 30 year old male who is looking to purchase a JVN Hair product as a gift for his partner
- A top-of-funnel customer that has just learned about JVN Hair and is beginning to do more research before making any purchase considerations
For Producing Personalized Email Copy
Once you have your user personas written out, you can use them to produce personalized email copy targeted towards each of those personas.
Prompt: “Consider this user persona: [insert user persona here]. Create an email targeted towards this email persona. Include essential information such as: [insert essential information about the product/campaign here]. The aim of the email is to convert users to make a purchase by clicking on the “buy now” CTA on the email.”
For example, if you were looking to create a personalized email to target the user persona of a 22 year old female who is a loyal customer of Glossier, to convince them to purchase the new flavor of the Balm DotCom product, here is what you might enter into ChatGPT (assuming that you have already fleshed out the user persona in the step prior):
Prompt: “Consider this user persona of a 22 year old female who is a loyal customer of Glossier: [insert user persona here]. Create an email targeted towards this email persona. Include essential information such as the price, product description, and key ingredients of this product: Balm Dotcom. The aim of the email is to convert users to make a purchase by clicking on the “buy now” CTA on the email.”
Using the ChatGPT-generated user persona on the left, the above prompt will generate an email similar to the one on the right. If you are not satisfied with the email that ChatGPT has outputted, you can further refine it with additional parameters, such as:
- Shorten the above email by 50%
- Rewrite the above email with more of an emphasis on the new Wild Fig flavor
- Rewrite the above email with shorter, punchier sentences
For Creating Testing Variations
Coming up with multiple testing variations for continuous optimization can be tedious — but it doesn’t have to be. Here is an easy prompt to use when you need to generate multiple variations for headline A/B tests.
Prompt: “Create a list of 10 variations of the following email subject line: [insert subject line here]. Make sure that it is in a similar format, tone of voice, and is under 50 characters.”
For example, here is an email subject line from Oatly: “Sip Sip Hooray! Our Chocolate Oatmilk Has Landed”
Entering the above prompt with this email subject line will instantly produce 10 potential testing variations. Why 10? Without asking for a list, ChatGPT will likely only output 1 variation at a time. To speed things up, asking for a list of different variations can allow copywriters to select the best option that is most aligned with the brand’s tone of voice and campaign goals.
How to Use ChatGPT for SMS Marketing?
Using ChatGPT for SMS marketing is similar to using it for email marketing, except with a specific focus on high engagement, seamless integration, and personalization. Here’s how to do it right.
High engagement
Research shows 98% of text messages are read within the first three minutes, making SMS engagement the highest across marketing channels. When using ChatGPT for SMS marketing, it’s important that each message effectively leverages the direct connection to the customers to build trust and loyalty. This means being able to communicate the right information in a clear and direct manner, while adhering to the brevity of the SMS format. While sometimes it can be difficult to condense large amounts of information into a short SMS message, ChatGPT can aid that process in crystallizing longform content into the exact 1-2 sentences to send in an SMS campaign.
Seamless integration
Email and SMS marketing should not be siloed into separate campaigns or strategies. Effective SMS marketing uses SMS to compliment an existing email structure, so that audiences are receiving a cohesive, end-to-end brand experience across multiple channels. To do this, ChatGPT can quickly rewrite emails for the SMS format, highlighting key information that will lead to the highest click-through and conversion rates.
Personalization
Like email, personalizing your SMS campaign to your audience is at the heart of effective consumer lifecycle marketing. Since SMS marketing mostly contains time-sensitive messaging around appointment reminders, exclusive discounts or pop-up events, it’s particularly important for SMS campaigns to be personalized to the exact stage of a customer’s user journey.
ChatGPT Prompts for SMS Marketing
Now that you understand how to use chatGPT for SMS marketing, here are 3 go-to prompts that you can use for your SMS marketing campaigns.
For Condensing Information Into a Concise SMS Format
Prompt: “Condense the following information into a 1-2 sentence SMS message: [insert information here]. Highlight the key information to urge the user to make a purchase.”
For example, consider the following webpage from Away, showcasing curated suitcase selections for each horoscope.
By using the above prompt, here is what ChatGPT was able to output:
Depending on what your campaign goal is, you can also customize the “urge the user to make a purchase” part of the prompt to match what your intended user action is. Here are some alternative examples:
- Tell the user to make an appointment
- Ask the user to claim a 10% off discount offer
- Urge the user to download the app
- Instruct the user to click on the link to learn more
For Translating Emails Into an SMS Format
Prompt: Rewrite and condense the following email into a 1-2 sentence SMS: [Insert email here]. Highlight the key information to urge the user to make a purchase.
For example, let’s take the Glossier email that ChatGPT wrote earlier, and use this prompt to turn it into an SMS message. This is what was outputted:
A good copywriter will never accept a first output without further refinement and revisions. Depending on your satisfaction with ChatGPT’s initial output, here are some additional prompts to help you get to the result you want:
- Reduce the length of the above SMS by 50%
- Rewrite the above SMS in a more Gen-Z suited tone of voice
- Rewrite the above SMS to exclude the price of the product
For Personalizing Your SMS to The Stage of a Buyer’s Journey
Prompt: Write a 1-2 sentence SMS message to a user that’s in the [awareness/consideration/conversion] stage of their buyer’s journey. Include the following key information: [insert information here].
Let’s say, for example, that Uber wants to offer $5 off a user’s next ride as part of their promotional period. Here are three different variations of the same SMS, sent to different users that are at different stages of their buyer’s journey.
Communication isn’t one-size-fits-all, and knowing where your customers are in their journey can help you personalize your messaging to them, so that you meet them where they are to fulfill their individual needs.
Leveraging ChatGPT for Email and SMS Marketing
At the end of the day, leveraging ChatGPT for email and SMS marketing is all about being aware and familiar of all the ways you can use the AI chatbot to streamline and accelerate your ideation, strategization and copywriting processes. In today’s era of mainstream AI and high-speed automation, it’s crucially important for marketers to understand when and how to use ChatGPT to achieve optimal growth outcomes.
If you need help with your email marketing or SMS marketing strategy, drop us a note and we’ll get in touch.
