Generative AI continues shaping the future of communication, and its ability to help marketers build unique and data-driven campaigns is revolutionizing email marketing. If you can provide the right content, data, and context, it’s possible to delegate email creation to GenAI and focus on building lasting subscriber relationships, instead of handling the technicalities.
Here are some statistics on GenAI for email creation so that you can decide whether to implement it in your strategy:
- 34.1% of specialists noticed improvements in marketing outcomes after GenAI implementation.
- GenAI tools for subject lines can enhance open rates by 10%.
- Marketers use GenAI for a variety of tasks: 50% to strengthen human efforts; 45% for brainstorming; 43% for automation; and 41% for data analysis and insights.
- In 2024, 69.1% of marketers added GenAI tools to their strategies, compared with 61.4% in 2023.
- Using GenAI tools for email marketing campaigns can improve click-through rates by 13%.
- 65% of marketers reported better SEO results after implementing GenAI tools.
- While GenAI is good with real-time optimization, data preparation, email generation, and A/B testing, 32.7% of specialists still think humans should handle high-level strategy and decision-making processes. GenAI is convenient, in that it can handle operational roles and routine tasks while email marketers can focus on more strategic aspects.
Use cases or how GenAI can help today
GenAI can create entire email campaigns from scratch if you give it the right context, data, and content (including your brand colors and logo, code, and design and linguistic preferences). Now that you understand how GenAI tools can help you speed up the email creation process, attain better results, and save time for more strategic tasks, let’s examine three specific ways to use it in your email marketing workflow.
Generating email copy and images
Copy generation is one of the first things that comes to mind when discussing GenAI for emails, and it’s rather good at it. Whether an email marketer needs to create copy from scratch, adjust tone of voice to maintain brand consistency, or proofread already-existing text, GenAI tools can do these within seconds with the right prompts. However, these tools still make mistakes, so treat GenAI as a strong junior team member who needs your guidance and detailed feedback to elicit better results.
GenAI learns from the data you “feed” it and from the mistakes it makes, so don’t forget to offer continuous feedback and correct any errors to enhance its outputs for future texts.
Besides text generation, GenAI tools also excel at image creation. Long gone are the days of too many fingers and distorted proportions—GenAI now can create amazing product photos, breathtaking landscapes, and beautiful portraits, then display them from different angles, making it much easier for you to boost your newsletters’ visual appeal. It’s also a time-saver, as your designers now won’t need to create visuals from scratch; they can refine AI-generated images instead to fix any issues and add a unique human touch.
You also can train GenAI to stick to your brand guidelines and produce images that include certain colors, logos, and aesthetics. It’s also possible to generate visuals based on customer data and past behavior, making it much easier to create personalized emails. With advanced GenAI tools for image creation––like Leonardo AI, Midjourney, or DALL-E––you can refine your generated visuals and add text to them (like slogans or product names), choose the desired image size so that it fits within your email layout, and define style parameters for brand consistency.
Localizing emails for a global audience
According to research, 65% of buyers would purchase from brands that send emails in their language (even if the quality isn’t perfect!). Email localization isn’t just about translating your copy into different languages—it also includes adjusting all of your email content to the needs of your subscribers from different countries.
Thus, you can benefit from a powerful combination of GenAI and human expertise. Use GenAI to localize and translate your emails, but remember to ask it to analyze and adjust cultural nuances, images, colors, date formats, currency, and units of measurement to make your content relevant for different subscriber segments. Then use human expertise (preferably native-speaking translators) to refine your localized emails, ensure relevance, and fix any errors.
This approach will help you save time and money (GenAI tools provide results in mere seconds, and their subscription-based model is more predictable for your budget), and ensure that your emails sound natural in different languages.
In the example below, I asked Gemini to provide some cultural quirks that I should keep in mind when writing a promo email for my Italian subscribers to ensure relevance.
Brainstorming new ideas
If you must deal with texts, visuals, or email campaign idea generation at some point in your career, you’re probably not a stranger to a creative block. A lack of ideas causes a lot of intense feelings, from anxiety and anger to apathy and irritation, but GenAI is one of the best tools to beat this block!
Great ideas are born through dialogue, so it will be great to keep a conversation going with your GenAI tool. You can disagree with it, ask it to examine a problem from a different perspective, or offer your own ideas once they appear and ask GenAI to refine them.
Below, I asked DeepSeek to suggest creative ideas for the travel industry that stand out from typical marketing emails.
GenAI evolution stages: From text optimization to full email sequence generation
Let’s examine the entire process of creating emails with the help of GenAI. We can divide the process into the following stages:
1. A single element
This stage includes conducting separate tasks that aren’t part of the full-fledged email campaign (e.g., creating subject lines, proofreading email copy, or generating images). Such tasks save email marketers time on mundane details, but this stage is still the most basic.
To maximize the results from GenAI tools, it’s important to provide them with the right context, data, and content. It will help you train GenAI to go beyond performing isolated tasks and provide personalized outputs tailored to your brand guidelines and target audience.
2. Element as part of a whole
At this stage, GenAI has evolved from a tool and into a reliable assistant that’s aware of your brand’s glossary, tone of voice, and linguistic and design choices. Compared with Stage 1, these tasks are now part of a larger process.
GenAI now can handle separate text blocks within the context of your email marketing strategy, making your email content consistent and recognizable. For instance, you can ask it to optimize email text to match your corporate style or rewrite copy using certain terminology that highlights your brand features.
3. Content module
Now things are getting more complex and intriguing, as GenAI can create email blocks (aka modules) for your emails. Modules are bricks from which you can construct your whole email, and they include such email elements as a header with a logo and menu, product cards with descriptions and prices, banners, a footer with social media links, etc. You create these “bricks” once, and then you can reuse them for future email campaigns.
One of the examples of using GenAI for content modules is a Stripo case study in which ChatGPT 3.5 was used to optimize entire text blocks in email digests (blog post descriptions, product card copy, call-to-action buttons, and headings). As a result, this approach contributed to a 41.34% boost in the click-to-open rate.
4. The entire email
When a GenAI tool is trained with your continuous feedback and equipped with the right content, data, and context for your campaigns, it can create the entire email with your guidance. It would be a good idea to create your instructions or checklist based on previous successful email campaigns.
Even when GenAI has enough information about your brand, it still needs data about a campaign you plan to launch to create entire emails effectively. For instance, if you need to generate an abandoned cart email, provide GenAI with multi-level data:
- Basic information—a list of abandoned products with images, names, and prices.
- Detailed information—product availability, discounts to motivate customers, shipping information, and payment options.
- Extended information—localized pricing and translated email variations.
- Supporting information—customer reviews and FAQs about common issues.
5. Full-fledged email marketing campaign
This is the most advanced stage, in which GenAI benefits from your content enrichment to perform not as a junior team member, but as an experienced email marketer capable of generating and running email campaigns with you. Here, GenAI can create email sequences, analyze your subscribers to suggest the perfect send time, localize your campaigns, and help you process the results.
AI email creation flow for controlled success
As you can see, GenAI is quite good at copy and image generation, but it’s still not enough to create an email or email sequence that you can trust completely. You also need context, structure, data, and content.
Think of the email creation process as a flow you can divide into separate parts and gradually enrich each part with the context:
- Setup — define your brand, personas, and tone of voice.
- Prompt — add your data (landing pages, event details, product feeds, etc.).
- Strategy — add feedback data, campaign goals, and best practices.
- Brief — divide your email into logical blocks (headers, CTAs, speaker intros). Remember to provide a detailed brief and references for better results.
- Design — create templates and modules that match your brand guidelines. Modules will help you speed up the production process by reusing email elements (headers, footers, product cards, banners) across different campaigns.
- Content — fill each section with trusted AI-generated copy and assets.
This approach helps you avoid starting from scratch every time you plan a new campaign. If you give GenAI a solid foundation, it will speed up your routine tasks without compromising brand consistency.
Wrapping up
GenAI holds vast potential for email marketers, as it can help speed up the email production process and save time for more strategic tasks. Your constant data enrichment is vital to refining GenAI algorithms and “teaching” it everything about your brand and subscribers to get to the most advanced stage of AI-powered email creation, when it can generate entire email campaigns. A powerful combination of GenAI and human expertise will let you offer innovative and relevant email content that will amaze your target audience.
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