ChatGPT has taken the online world by storm.
In 2023, artificial intelligence experts say that we'll see a new wave of products and services powered by the technology behind ChatGPT.
With many companies integrating this model into their chatbots and voice assistants, it's hard not to notice its impact on content marketing – mainly email marketing.
Thanks to its advanced language processing capabilities, ChatGPT can now generate highly personalized, engaging, and compelling emails at scale.
This technology has been a game-changer for businesses looking to improve their email marketing campaigns and increase their conversion rates.
But it has also caused a concerning issue for many marketers: a digital overload on outbound emails caused by ChatGPT's fast and instant content.
In this article, we will explore the impact that ChatGPT has had on email marketing – its excellent opportunities and glaring limitations.
But first…
What is ChatGPT?
Imagine you have an intelligent friend who knows much about everything. They can respond to anything you ask with relevant information.
That's ChatGPT in a nutshell.
ChatGPT is a language model created by OpenAI – a research institution that develops artificial intelligence systems that are equally beneficial and safe for humans. ChatGPT uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to generate text as if a human wrote it.
ChatGPT – How It Works
ChatGPT uses deep learning techniques to generate text. The model is trained on a massive amount of data, so it has learned the patterns and relationships between words, phrases, and sentences in human language.
When you ask ChatGPT a question or prompt it to generate text, it uses this knowledge to create a response.
It can answer questions, provide definitions and explanations, and generate summaries, helping content creators research and understand topics.
It can even generate written content such as articles, summaries, and responses, allowing content creators to save time and effort in writing.
This advanced capability in content creation sent users into a frenzy, with many marketers starting to incorporate ChatGPT in their content marketing strategies.
Using ChatGPT for Email Marketing
Users can leverage ChatGPT for email marketing in several ways. For example:
- Content creation: ChatGPT can aid users in generating email content that appeals to a specific target audience. Marketers mainly use it to get ideas for email subject lines, draft email bodies, and create follow-up messages.
- A/B testing: Users can maximize ChatGPT to generate multiple versions of an email and perform A/B testing to determine which version resonates best with the target audience
- Responding to customer inquiries: ChatGPT can automatically respond to inquiries received via email, providing quick and accurate answers to common questions.
While users cannot fully delegate to the language model, it reduces the time, cost, and effort of manually executing these operations. It can improve customer engagement, too!
What is ChatGPT's Impact on Outbound Email Volume?
As an AI language model that serves as a chatbot, ChatGPT does not directly impact outbound email volume.
It is designed to generate human-like text based on the input it receives, but it cannot send emails or influence the volume of outbound emails.
Its usage could increase or decrease the need for manual email composition, but this depends on the specific applications and usage scenarios.
However, because of ChatGPT's advanced content creation capabilities, users are leveraging the platform to generate outbound email content. With its smart language processing technology, ChatGPT can create various pieces of high-quality content, like cold emails.
And for the most part, it can generate such content within minutes – seconds, even.
With the ability (and convenience) to send prompts to ChatGPT and have instant email content, users now have more "instant content" to utilize.
ChatGPT and Outbound Email Marketing – Limitations
While ChatGPT's content prowess is impressive, its abilities are quite limited. Here are some areas where ChatGPT might take a back seat:
Campaign Strategy
Unfortunately, you cannot tap ChatGPT to develop an effective campaign strategy, especially for outbound emails. To successfully do this, you will need to:
- know who you're targeting
- build and segment your email lists
- create an email flow
ChatGPT does not have access to specific information about individuals on an email list, such as their email addresses or past interactions with a brand. This information must be managed and stored outside ChatGPT's ability to execute an email marketing campaign effectively.
Follow-ups
The beauty of outbound email marketing is the process that comes after sending that first email.
Let's say you've generated your cold email using ChatGPT and sent it to your recipients. Once that's done, you won't be able to rely on it for your succeeding email sequences.
Yes, you could still turn to the chatbot to generate your responses. But typically, when users respond to cold emails, they want specific information about your value proposition – which ChatGPT is clueless about. That makes handling replies much more challenging on your end.
Personalization
ChatGPT can generate personalized responses, but only to a certain extent. There are several technical and practical limitations to using it for email personalization:
- Integration - to use ChatGPT for email personalization, you will need to integrate it with an email service provider's API, which can be complex and time-consuming.
- Data Privacy - ChatGPT requires access to user data to generate personalized responses, which may raise privacy concerns for email users.
- Consistency - Generating personalized responses for emails requires a high level of consistency and accuracy, which may be challenging to achieve with a language model like ChatGPT.
These limitations highlight the need for specialized and optimized AI technologies for outbound email creation.
Sample Cold Email Using ChatGPT:
To test ChatGPT's email marketing capabilities, we spun it and prompted it to generate a sample cold email. Here's what we got:
"Subject: Introducing Myself and My Marketing Services
Dear [Name],
I hope this email finds you well. I came across your company, [Company Name], while conducting research on successful businesses in the [Industry] industry and I was impressed with your track record. As a [Your profession/title], I have a keen eye for identifying opportunities for growth and improvement, and I believe that I can bring added value to your marketing efforts.
I noticed that your company has been successful in [specific area of company's success], and I would love the opportunity to help you continue that trend by offering my marketing services. My expertise in [list skills/services offered] can help you reach a wider audience and drive more leads to your business.
If you're open to it, I would love to schedule a call to discuss how I can help your company reach its marketing goals. Please let me know if this is something you would be interested in, and we can arrange a time that works for both of us.
Thank you for considering my proposal, and I look forward to hearing back from you soon.
Best regards,
[Your Name]"
What do you think?
Wrap Up
ChatGPT is a cutting-edge language generation model that helps with content creation, especially in outbound email marketing. Its quick and human-quality language processing can help businesses get ideas and write content drafts FAST.
But it can also be a double-edged sword; ChatGPT's "instant content" prompts companies to send more emails than they should, making recipients more annoyed than interested.
ChatGPT's lack of adequate personalization and strategic abilities also removes the charm and magic of outbound emails, failing to apply the subtleties of human communication that customers want in these campaigns.
It's a gentle reminder that email marketing, after all, still needs a human touch.
Want to discover how effective outbound emails are done? Book a call with our campaign experts today!