ChatGPT for Email Marketing: Best Prompts and Use Cases

Why use ChatGPT for email marketing?

Year after year, AI persists among the marketing trends. In fact, 69% of marketers are already using AI tools in their work, and for good reasons.

You can benefit from AI, and ChatGPT in particular, in several ways:

• Reduce time spent on repetitive tasks. AI can ease or eliminate tedious tasks like searching for errors in HTML code or coming up with several subject lines for A/B testing.
• Increase ROI and lower costs. AI aids personalization, segmentation, and other email marketing tactics that in turn bring more conversions. Plus, if you can manage to use ChatGPT instead of some other dedicated tool, it can lower your marketing costs. 
• Analyze data better. AI tools like ChatGPT can parse through data sets quicker than people and find patterns in analytics humans could’ve missed. This, in turn, can lead to better segmentation and personalization in email marketing campaigns which is great for customer retention. It will also help you to make advanced data-driven decisions. 
• Improve customer experience and relationships. AI can help provide customer support when your team is off the clock and automate customer journeys. 
• Assist in writing and ideation. ChatGPT has many use cases for writing like spellchecking, elaborating on ideas, helping to form arguments, and more.

ChatGPT use cases and prompts for email marketing

ChatGPT has plenty of potential uses, but let’s see what it’s capable of in real work scenarios. 

Generating compelling email subject lines

It may be tough to come up with new subject lines day after day, not to mention year after year. The task gets even harder if you need to sell the same product. ChatGPT to do it for you. You can also ask for variations for A/B testing and see what option performs best.

Here are some ChatGPT email prompts for you to try out:

• Generate 3 catchy email subject lines for a holiday sale email.
• Give me a drastically different subject line option for A/B testing based on the one I provide.
• Optimize the subject line I provide to increase the email open rate.
• Suggest relevant emojis for the subject lines I provide.

Drafting engaging email content

Over 50% of marketers use AI for drafting content. That said, we don’t suggest using ChatGPT for writing email marketing content for you, from start to finish. It’s best to use it for exploring different variations of the same message, and polishing what you’ve already written.

Here are some prompts you can explore for different types of emails:

• Provide the initial structure for a cold email addressed to a company CMO pitching our product and collaboration.
• Write an outline for a re-engagement campaign in a friendly, approachable tone of voice.
• Analyze the copy I give you and suggest improvements to make it more engaging.

Plus, with new ChatGPT capabilities, you can ask the AI to visualize your ideas. We asked ChatGPT to make a welcome email based on the cereals Surreal website, and here’s what it generated:

Although not perfect, this visualization can guide your process or spark some new ideas. Plus, if you like what you see, you can then ask ChatGPT to provide HTML code for the template. It goes without saying that you’ll need to either correct the output yourself or show it to an HTML email developer.

It’s also worth noting that ChatGPT is very inconsistent when it comes to email layout generation, so you’d be better off using dedicated tools like Selzy’s AI email generator.

Personalizing email interactions

Personalization is one of the most important advantages of email marketing, so why not combine it with AI for personalized email content? Personalization in subject lines is worth exploring, but you should also make the email body content more targeted, too. In fact, emails with personalized content inside have a higher average open rate than non-personalized ones. 

Prompts you can use to test out ChatGPT’s use for personalization:

• Provide 4 personalization ideas for my holiday sale email campaign.
• Based on the customer profile and preferences provided, suggest what I can personalize about this email.
• Based on the customer profile, the company website, and product catalog, provide 5 product recommendations to include in a promotional email for this subscriber.

Segmenting the email list

Cutting-edge email and automation software usually have various segmentation options (for example, Selzy provides 70+ segmentation criteria), but you may still want to explore ChatGPT’s ideas. Keep in mind the data safety, privacy, and ethical concerns when working with real customer information, though.

ChatGPT prompts to effectively realize segmentation potential:

• Suggest segmentation ideas for an eco-focused beauty brand.
• Based on the characteristics provided, identify this customer’s potential segments.
• Identify potential segments a receiver of the following email likely falls into. 

Increasing sales conversions

ChatGPT can work on individual tasks but also be an advisor in marketing strategy and motivating your customers to buy more. Apart from simply asking the AI to help you better understand email marketing conversions, you can use one of these prompts:

• Suggest ways to increase conversions based on provided email marketing strategy.
• Provide an engaging email sequence structure with the goal of maximizing conversions based on our new product launch, along with an approximate schedule and content outline for each campaign.
• Optimize these subject lines for conversions.
• Based on product and feature information provided, create attention-grabbing subject lines for conversions.

Streamlining customer support

If you use the magic of integrations, you can employ ChatGPT as your first line of support and virtual agent. It can create automatic responses to queries and answers to your users when the human agents are busy or unavailable.

You can also try some of the support-related prompts below:

• Find relevant Help Center articles to help the user solve the issue they experience based on the message provided.
• Make the support ticket reaction email that I provide more readable and help explain technical processes in plain language. 

Powerful ChatGPT prompts for different email types

Now that you’ve seen some general prompts, let’s explore what ChatGPT can do for emails aimed at different purposes. 

Welcome emails

Welcome emails are all about setting the right tone for future interactions, so try one of these prompts:

• Come up with an incentive for a welcome email based on the brand description and website.
• Write a draft of a personal, plain-text email from the company CEO expressing excitement for the person becoming a client of the company.
• Based on the brand description and other details, provide 3 unique benefits of the product to include in a welcome email for a person subscribing from this source.

Promotional emails

There’s a dime a dozen occasions for promotional emails in a holiday calendar, so let ChatGPT help you with ideas and initial drafts using these prompts: 

• Provide dynamic content ideas for the described promotional email targeted at this particular audience.
• Provide promotion ideas to use in the brand anniversary emails to subscribers. 
• Come up with ideas for visuals to use in a promotional email for Valentine’s Day.

Call-to-action emails

Generate CTAs for A/B testing or use AI for brainstorming:

• Create 5 CTA options for an email about a buy-one-get-one-free deal on classic sci-fi softcover books.
• Based on the email idea provided, list 3 potential CTAs to include in it.
• Analyze the following CTAs and choose which ones are going to be the most effective for this email.

Educational emails

Your subscribers will benefit from educational emails, especially if your product is complex or requires technical skills, so here are some relevant prompts:

• Provide an outline of an email sequence educating subscribers on how to use the product described.
• Offer 5 ideas for educational emails about the brand and product.
• Create outlines for 3 educational email campaigns based on the ingredients and production of the product.

Newsletter

ChatGPT can probably be the most helpful when it comes to text-based content, so explore its uses for newsletters with one of our prompts:

• List 7 newsletter ideas based on the company updates and relevant occasions provided.
• Analyze the email newsletter outline provided and give tips on what can be improved.
• Help to rewrite this email newsletter in a more friendly and readable way.

Event newsletter

Whether you organize webinars or host real-life events, ChatGPT can be a powerful tool to help you promote them:

• Based on the event recap and YouTube video provided, create an email summarizing the occasion.
• Find events in the calendar provided and plan emails around each of the events.
• Suggest ideas on how to promote the described event with an email drip campaign.

Re-engagement newsletter

Re-engagement emails are an essential part of any email marketing strategy, so make the most of them with these ChatGPT prompts:

• Based on the customer profile, preferences, and purchase history, suggest effective ideas for a re-engagement campaign.
• Give feedback on the re-engagement campaign information provided, and help to make the offer better.
• Give ideas for several re-engagement campaigns aimed at different customer segments.

AI in email marketing tips and best practices

ChatGPT can be a great ally and a helpful assistant, but there are some aspects of working with it you should keep in mind.

Remember ChatGPT’s limitations

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are prone to hallucinations (coming up with non-existent information), generic responses, and biases. Moreover, there are ethical, copyright, and data privacy and security considerations. Last but not least, unlike your human coworkers, AI has limited context based on what you feed it and it can also struggle to understand or convey emotions.

Note that OpenAI (ChatGPT’s owner) uses your data to teach ChatGPT. Though they claim that no third parties get this information (i.e. they are not selling it), not everybody is comfortable with this. If privacy is an issue for you, disable the “​​Improve the model for everyone” feature in your account settings, so your conversations with ChatGPT won’t be used in its training. 

Explore other tools

ChatGPT is not the end-all-be-all of AI tools. You can search for more niche services or compare ChatGPT to competitors like Gemini or DeepSeek. You may find that something else is better suited to the needs of your business or offers better-paid packages.

Be specific in your prompts

The more detailed your description is, the better ChatGPT’s answers. Try to include all or some of these parameters for more precise results:

• Brand and product information
• Email campaign objectives
• Target audience
• Brand voice
• Content types (subject line, email body, etc.)
• Email length

Experiment with different tasks

Go beyond the prompts we suggested! ChatGPT has a vast potential and we couldn’t have possibly covered everything there is about it in a single article.

Here are some other ideas for tasks:

• Play pretend: describe the role AI should play when it answers your queries (answer from the position of an email marketing expert, answer in Seth Myers’ tone of voice).
• Ask ChatGPT to provide storytelling suggestions or an email sequence based on a story.
• Use the AI for cross-sell or upsell ideas.
• Recruit the AI to help you with your content schedule.
• Make it suggest repurposing ideas or outline a different piece of content based on an existing one made for another channel.
• Gather the data and ask ChatGPT to analyze the performance of the specific campaign or email. Let him create insights and ideas on how to improve your metrics, like click-through rates or content engagement.

Final thoughts

ChatGPT has lots of applications for email marketing. You can use it to:

• Create subject lines.
• Draft email content.
• Personalize emails.
• Segment the email list.
• Increase sales conversions.
• Streamline customer support.

Regardless of your business niche or specific email types you need, experiment with AI and see how it can improve your day-to-day work.