The Digital Marketer’s Guide to Effective AI-Powered Email Prompts 

Generative AI is all the rage, and digital marketers use it to generate massive time and cost-savings. 

But GenAI can sometimes induce rage, too, thanks to uninspired outputs. This piece is all about getting more consistent results. It just requires effective prompt-crafting. 

What Makes an AI Prompt Effective? 

It’s best to consider generative AI tools as young writers that need very specific instructions to do their job adequately. These specific instructions are given in the form of prompts.  

Effective prompts have the following qualities: 

Direct and Specific 

Well-crafted prompts provide clear and specific instructions, helping the AI understand the exact requirements of the content. In your prompt, spell out key details including: 

• The type of content you want produced. (Write a 150-word lead nurture email.) 
• Context. (The email should focus on 6sense’s Conversational Email capabilities.)  
• Author POV. (Write it as a B2B sales leader.) 
• Source. (Reference this url.) 
• Audience and Motive. (Write for BDR leaders who are looking for a more efficient way to prospect.) 
• Style. (Include key takeaways in a bulleted list.)  
• CTA. (Book a demo.) 
• Tone. (Keep the writing casual and authoritative.) 

Example: You are a B2B marketing leader. You are writing for an audience of digital marketers who are looking to generate more qualified accounts. The CTA is for recipients to access the new eBook. It has been attached as a resource. Reference the eBook to write a 150-word email. Be friendly, professional, and concise. The subject line should be no more than 6 words. The body of the email should include 2 short paragraphs in the body, then a bulleted list of key value propositions.  

Provide Additional Context  

The better you know your audience, the better you can write for them. This is also true for AI. To get output that’s specific and relevant to the reader, provide AI additional context about your audience. What do you know about their pain points, concerns, interests, company health, industry health?  

Providing this added layer of detail can make your content much more personal and persuasive. One of the powerful capabilities of gen AI tools like Conversational Email is the ability to tap into your proprietary data in a brand-safe environment and produce personalized content that draws from intent data signals, contact info, company info, CRM data, and other data sources. 

Example: The audience is sales leaders at SaaS companies. Their pain points are intense competition and demonstrating ROI to customers. Write as a professional peer. Summarize the attached blog post on how our solution addresses those concerns. End with an invitation to network with other sales leaders at our event at the upcoming SaaS sales summit. 

Be Playful  

Have fun, and don’t be afraid to be a little weird! By default, generative AI tends to drone on in a bit of a monotone. But it’s perfectly capable of more. Try including directions in the prompt to use a business casual tone, or employ humor, or play off a specific theme. 

Example: Write an email reminding customers about the after party for our user conference in Miami. The party has a retro 80’s theme. Use a playful tone and make references to the TV show “Miami Vice.” 

(Editor’s note: The writer of this article plugged that prompt into generative AI for fun and now really wants to go to that imaginary party, proving the effectiveness of the prompt.) 

Bad Prompts: Ready to See a Trainwreck? 

Now that you know what to do when writing email prompts for AI, let’s see what not to do. Asking AI for help writing an email is just as simple as asking it for help writing an email. But let’s take a peek at the results: 

Technically, that prompt worked. An email was written, with a subject line, email body, and a call-to-action. But it’s vague, not very engaging, and requires extensive editing to make it truly relevant to the reader. 

How to Fix It  

Let’s get something important out of the way: This fix is going to be long. Possibly long enough to make you think, “Why bother with writing a prompt when it’s going to be longer than the output?” 

Remember, the more details you offer your young virtual writer, the more engaging and relevant its output is going to be.  

Prompt:  

Write an email to prospects who attended our recent webinar on data-driven event strategies for manufacturers. Inform them of the next manufacturing webinar. The topic of the webinar is “How to Boost ROI at Manufacturing Events.” There is some information about that topic here: https://6sense.com/blog/industry-events-for-manufacturers/.  

The audience is marketing leaders at manufacturing companies who aren’t yet customers of 6sense but are in the consideration stage of the buying journey and looking to purchase an ABM solution.  

Include some of the pain points manufacturing marketers face with event marketing, like targeting the right audience and measuring ROI. Suggest that solutions to these problems exist within a data-driven ABM strategy. Solutions will be presented in the webinar.  

The call-to-action is to invite them to sign up for the webinar at webinarsignup.url.  

Write a short, snappy subject line. The tone of the email should be business casual and educational, but with room for humor. The email should be no more than 3 short paragraphs, and should use bullet points for easy readability.  

Results: 

Subject Line: Maximize Your Event ROI – Unlock the Secrets at Our Next Webinar! 

Email Body: 

Hello, 

Thank you for joining our recent webinar on data-driven event strategies for manufacturers. We’re excited to invite you to our next session, which dives even deeper into maximizing your returns: “How to Boost ROI at Manufacturing Events.” 

Manufacturing marketers like you often face challenges such as: 

• Targeting the right audience effectively. 
• Measuring ROI to prove event success. 

Our upcoming webinar will explore how a robust ABM strategy, powered by 6sense, can address these pain points. You’ll discover how to: 

• Engage more effectively with your target audience. 
• Track and measure your event success with precision. 
• Enhance overall event impact using data-driven insights. 

Don’t miss out on turning these insights into action! Sign up now to secure your spot. 

Best regards,  

The 6sense Team 

The above emails still require a human touch to add links as well as webinar dates and times, and perhaps tighten up the copy, but it’s a much better starting point. 

You can see another great example of email prompt-craft in this webinar to demo the capabilities of 6sense’s Conversational Email tool.  

You Were Right, That’s a Really Long Prompt 

We warned you. It is a long prompt, because it’s so specific. The instructions are clear. It’s full of context about the audience and their needs, making the resulting email relevant. It references other content for consistency, and it offers creative direction. 

But you only need to write them once, and then you have a template.  

Check this out: 

Write an email to [prospects/customers] who [attended a webinar/filled out a web form/dropped by our booth at the conference/insert triggering action here]. 

Invite them to [sign up for another webinar/meet our executives at another conference/download this ebook]. The topic is [insert topic here]. Reference a piece of content on a similar topic found [here]. 

The audience [role/industry/buying stage/insert as many persona traits as needed] . 

Their pain points and concerns include [insert pain points here]. Solutions our company provides include [insert solutions here] which can [insert results here], therefore [here’s why the reader should care]. 

The call-to-action is [insert CTA here.]. 

Write [this type of] subject line. The tone of the email should be [in line with the brand voice in the attached style guide/other specified tone/leveraging this theme]. The email should [be of this length and structure]. 

[Parameters for additional emails go here.] 

With just one template, you can swap out a handful of details to get virtually infinite custom-tailored, highly personalized emails for all your marketing needs.  

Tools for AI-Powered Email Creation 

Digital marketers have several reliable gen-AI tools available for crafting emails, including: 

• ChatGPT: Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is a powerful language generation model that can assist in writing emails by generating human-like text based on the input it receives. Marketers can use ChatGPT to come up with creative email content, subject lines, or even personalized messages tailored to different segments of their audience. Its ability to understand and generate natural language text makes it an invaluable tool for creating engaging and relevant email content quickly. 
• Writer.com: This AI writing assistant is specifically designed for business purposes, including email marketing. It offers features like tone and style guidelines, grammar and plagiarism checks, and terminology management. This makes it particularly useful for teams looking to maintain consistency and high standards in their email communications. 
• 6sense’s Conversational Email: 6sense’s Conversational Email tool is specifically designed to enhance the capabilities of digital marketers by automating and personalizing email communications at scale. This tool is part of the 6sense Revenue AI™ platform, which integrates deeply with marketing strategies to optimize engagement and conversion rates through AI-driven interactions. 

Key features of Conversational Email include: 

• Email personalization at scale 
• Automated email conversations 
• Integration with marketing and sales data 
• Enhanced lead qualification 
• Detailed analytics 

Conclusion 

Crafting effective prompts for generative AI that produces relevant email copy requires a thoughtful approach that embraces specificity and clarity, a thorough understanding of your audiences and their needs, and tools that can are trainable on brand voice and style.  

A little heavy lifting coming up with prompts in the beginning can save huge amounts of time long-term — and so can investing in reliable AI-powered solutions built with digital marketers in mind.