By Beki Fuller, Sr. Product Manager at Act-On
The convergence of AI and email marketing will transform the day-to-day marketing function. Email marketing remains one of the most cost effective channels for marketers to build relationships and engage with customers. But your audience has dozens of marketing emails hitting their inboxes every day. It’s crucial to capture their attention. Your emails need creativity, novelty, a clear value proposition, all while staying true to your brand’s identity and voice.
It’s enough for any marketer to feel daunted, and meeting these demands has many suffering from creative burnout. The result? Repetitive emails and less engagement from customers. Enter artificial intelligence (AI). I think most people are beginning to acknowledge the seismic shift artificial intelligence will bring to marketing. However, making the most of this technology takes leveraging a new set of skills.
AI and Email Marketing: It’s All in the Prompts
As in all aspects of life, the most important step to getting a good answer is asking a good question. If you’ve used generative AI tools for any length of time, you understand this. The quality of responses is directly related to the quality of the prompts. So how do you get AI to write the email you want? We’ve created a tool that enables marketers to create high quality emails.
With the new Act-On AI Create, a marketer fills in provided fields that Act-On uses to engineer a relevant prompt, which helps provide context for AI to write valuable and relevant content. The guided prompt dialog is especially helpful for refreshing email copy for campaigns that have worked well in the past but have since become less effective.
Here are a few examples of fields we are providing to marketers to build the prompt:
- Content Type: The type of content you are writing. Choose from email, paragraph, or heading.
- Marketing Intent: Tells the kind of email or content you are writing for. Choose from education, event, form response, new customer welcome, newsletter, product or service announcement, promotional, or webinar.
- Tone of Voice: What impression or emotion do you want your email to convey? Choose from casual, exciting, friendly, helpful, professional, respectful, simple, or witty.
- Content Length: Specify how long you want the content to be. Choose from short, medium, or long.
Marketers will also provide a summary of what the email is about, along with any additional instructions.
After submitting the prompt and receiving suggested content, you’ll have the ability to generate a new response if the generated content isn’t hitting all your parameters. You can retry with the same details and let Act-On AI Create dial up the temperature of the response, or adjust any of the prompt details and try again for a completely different piece of content.
I’m An Email Marketing Expert: Why Do I Need AI?
There are several reasons why a marketer may want to use AI for content creation assistance.
One of the most common uses we’ve heard is finding help getting started when you’re feeling creative burnout. Another: breaking through writer’s block at any point in the process. It’s also been extremely helpful when looking for an alternative way to present an evergreen product message. We have seen Act-On AI Create enable both the novice and the expert to use AI and generate creative, novel, and valuable content for their email marketing campaigns. Gone are those emotionally draining days fighting creative burnout or failing to engage your audience with fresh content.
This is only the beginning for Act-On leveraging AI to help build stronger email campaigns. The future looks very bright, and Act-On is focused on continuing to expand its AI offerings to help marketers be even more successful.
Looking for more help taking the hard work out of email marketing? Check out our best tips and tricks for email marketing success.
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At Act-On, we are excited to announce the release of Act-On AI Create, an AI product that will help marketers write more creative, novel, and valuable emails. Act-On AI Create is different from other marketing softwares’ AI tools, as it addresses the important detailed prompts that will return usable content. Act-On is a subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) product for marketing automation. Its software products are for email marketing, landing pages, social media prospecting, CRM integration, lead management, webinar management, and analytics. Act-On was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Portland, Oregon.