This isn’t a mere AI writing tool. It can understand complex prompts and deliver remarkable — downright frightening — results. It uses well-structured sentences and writes with confidence and logic. It can even take stabs at writing humor.
So when I saw ChatGPT in action, I had two thoughts.
One, my entire career is ruined and I’d better learn how to weld or something because it’s like five months away from stealing my job and maybe my wife.
And two, I wonder how this works for cold email.
I ran several tests using ChatGPT to figure out what it can and can’t do for cold emailers.
Here are five great ways ChatGPT (and its future descendants) can aid your cold email copywriting.
And… there are also five big ways ChatGPT alone won’t be able to take over your entire cold email operation. You can (and should) read up on those here as well.
5 Ways ChatGPT Can Aid in Your Email Copywriting
5 Crucial Cold Email Elements Where You Can’t Rely on AI
ChatGPT and Cold Email: Takeaways and Next Steps
5 Ways ChatGPT Can Help You with Cold Email Copywriting
Here are five ways you can start using ChatGPT immediately in your cold email copywriting.
I’m not going to bury the lede here: ChatGPT can absolutely handle the first drafts for most cold emails.
No more staring at a blinking cursor wondering how to dive in.
For this experiment, I decided I would be a lead gen agency promoting our services to real estate agents in Bethesda, Maryland.
My first prompt to ChatGPT was:
write a cold email promoting my lead generation agency's services to real estate agents in Bethesda, Maryland
The result:
I don’t love it. It’s too wordy and messed up a crucial fact. (I’m not a fellow real estate agent, I’m from a lead gen agency. Well, in reality, I’m neither. But in this example case I’m the latter.)
So I prompted ChatGPT to tighten it up and to get the fact right.
can you make that email shorter, and also remove the part about me being a fellow real estate agent?
That’s much better. Now that I got that squared away, I can have ChatGPT try writing the email a few other ways.
can you make it funnier? (I highlighted its jokes in yellow.)
I also tried out other prompts like can you make the email feel more urgent?… can you write the email with a sense of scarcity, letting them know we're not taking on many more clients?… and can you make the email just 4 sentences?
You can keep refining your email ad nauseam, trying different styles, tones, and lengths. And by the time you’re done, you should have a great first draft.
I wouldn’t recommend sending this email as-is. It’s too generic to be effective. (Or, at least, to hit maximum effectiveness.)
But as a jumping off point? ChatGPT can write great first drafts to save you lots of time.
And if you decide you do want to roll with ChatGPT’s result unedited? At least you probably won’t get caught.
Here was the result when I checked the first cold email with an AI and plagiarism detector:
ChatGPT can also give you subject lines to try out with your email. And it can bang out those subject lines at scale.
please write 10 possible subject lines for that email
Those aren’t all winners but there are three or four in there that caught my eye has having potential.
And as with the email copy, I can direct ChatGPT on tone.
This is, hands down, my favorite thing ChatGPT can do for cold emailers.
I got my hands on 40 possible subject lines in less than a minute. Not all are winners, but each list of 10 has a few potential candidates. (Plus if I’d tried to write 40 subject lines myself, it would’ve taken an hour and not all would be winners there either.)
And if I wasn’t happy with this 40, I could keep on generating to find better and better subjects. At least until I ran into the dreaded ChatGPT Too many requests, please slow down message.
And that’s not all: ChatGPT can also generate subject line + preview text pairs.
It took me a lot of work on prompts to get it right (ChatGPT really wanted to write long preview text), but these are impressive results:
So how do you choose from the subject lines and email messages you’ve generated?
With this many possibilities in front of you, A/B testing is pretty much essential.
Here’s how to use GMass’s spintax to run quick split tests on multiple email messages.
(You can also use this same technique on subject lines. Yes, you could test subjects and email messages together. But I always recommend against testing multiple variables in single A/B tests.)
In the Gmail compose window, connect your Google Sheet to GMass and enter your subject line.
Then type {{spin}} and paste in the first variation of your email.
Type {{variation}} and paste in another variation of your email. You can repeat this over and over to test different copy options for this campaign. (Just make sure your list is big enough to send each variation to a nice-sized sample.)
Once you’re done adding variations, type {{end spin}
Now go into the GMass settings for the campaign. Go to the Advanced section and check the box next to A/B Test.
Your options are:
Percentage to send before making a decision. In the screenshot above, the first variation would go to 20% of your list and the second variation would go to a different 20%. That makes up the 40% total to send to before making a decision. After that, the remaining 60% of your list would get the “winning” variation.
Decide when? You can choose how long to run your test before declaring a winner.
Decide how? If you choose automatic, GMass will send your winning variation to the remainder of your list at the end of the testing period. And you can decide how GMass will determine the winner: Using opens, clicks, or replies. If you choose manual, you’ll receive an email with the A/B test results where you can decide which variation to send to the rest of your list.
A/B testing is this easy with GMass. So with the volume of possibilities you’ll get from ChatGPT, it makes sense to always test at least a few of them in every campaign.
We hear it all the time: No one likes writing auto follow-ups. You put everything you had into that initial email.
The follow-ups then become a challenge to see how many different ways you can say, “Hey did you see my original email? Are you interested?”
So offload your follow-ups onto ChatGPT.
It’s a lot easier to use theirs (with some edits) than start from scratch on your own.
I prompted can you write 3 short follow-ups to the email that will go to people who do not respond?
The emails were too generic for my liking so I tried a few other prompts. And ultimately, I found a prompt that got ChatGPT to write a sequence using the strategy I wanted.
Please write three follow-up emails to send to people who don't respond. Ramp up the urgency with each email and make sure the final email lets them know it's our last time reaching out.
Much like the initial campaign email ChatGPT created, I wouldn’t use these emails without editing and tweaking them first. However there’s a solid foundation to work from here so these will absolutely save me some time.
To add those follow-ups to GMass, open the settings for your campaign and go to the Auto Follow-up section.
You can set the trigger and timing for each follow-up. For example, I’m sending the first one after two days if I haven’t received a reply; the second one after five days; and the third one after nine days.
So far I’ve covered ways ChatGPT can write emails and related copy. But it can also review your copy in ways other tools can’t.
There are tools out there to help with grammar and writing (your Grammarlys of the world and such).
ChatGPT can replace a lot of what they offer; here’s an email I fed it with three errors to see if it would catch them. It did — and even suggested a new clarifying sentence to add.
That takes ChatGPT beyond a copy editor; it’s also a developmental editor.
And ChatGPT has another, even more valuable function in the editing process: It can read your email and gauge its tone.
This could be quite valuable for non-native speakers — or native speakers who want a second opinion.
For example, I had ChatGPT evaluate the tone on one of the follow-up emails it produced. Here’s what it told me:
Then I tested it by writing a hostile email. And it correctly recognized I was being too aggressive.
Finally, I tried an email with an issue we hear about a lot from non-native English speakers: Being too formal. ChatGPT was able to recognize that this message was unnaturally formal.
I could see a lot of cold emailers using these editing functions going forward. Even if you aren’t going to use ChatGPT on the email copywriting side it’s a handy tool to have on the copy editing side.
Plus it never hurts to have a second set of eyes on an email. Even cold, unfixing robot eyes.
