ChatGPT can help you save time and resources in your digital marketing, whether you’re planning a blog post or reviewing your customer data. You can also use it to create personalized, persuasive emails that boost engagement.
The key to using ChatGPT successfully when planning your email marketing strategies is using the right prompts. In this article, we’ll share some of the best ChatGPT prompts for email content creation and analysis and show you what to bear in mind when building your own.
We’ve created these email marketing prompts for ChatGPT, but you can use them in your natural language processing (NLP) model of choice, whether that’s Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, or something else.
What is a ChatGPT prompt?
A ChatGPT prompt is an instruction you provide ChatGPT to give it additional context and help it generate an accurate and relevant answer.
Here’s a simple breakdown of what happens when you type a prompt into ChatGPT:
- Takes your prompt and breaks it down into small chunks of data called tokens.
- Explores different tokens and works out how they relate to each other to understand the context of your prompt.
- Generates an answer to your prompt based on probability, predicting which word to use and the following words, based on the answer provided so far.
- Converts the tokens back into words and finesses them, using bullet points, paragraphs, and other relevant information.
- Presents you with a final response.
Benefits of using ChatGPT prompts in your email marketing campaigns
More and more businesses are using ChatGPT to help optimize their marketing strategies. According to Adobe, 47% of marketers and business owners now use ChatGPT to improve their marketing efforts.
If you’re one of the 53% of marketers and business owners not taking advantage of ChatGPT, creating prompts to use in the platform can help transform your email marketing journey in the following ways:
Saves time
ChatGPT can create email marketing content ideas for you in seconds. This speed frees up your time, meaning you can focus on the marketing tasks that require a human touch, like building customer relationships and creative storytelling.
Platforms like ChatGPT are particularly effective at generating content ideas. It allows you to create weeks’ and months’ worth of compelling email campaigns in just a few clicks with the right prompt.
Creates relevant content
When creating email campaigns, it’s vital to write content that identifies the pain points of both new and existing customers and encourages them to convert.
ChatGPT makes it easy to develop content aligned with the needs and wants of your target audience, as long as you provide a detailed prompt.
You can also use ChatGPT to build an ideal customer persona template, providing you with the information you need to tailor your marketing to the people most likely to buy from you.
Enables personalization at scale
If you want to create powerful campaigns targeted toward specific groups of customers, good personalization is vital.
With the right prompts, ChatGPT can write email templates that include mail merge tags, ready to upload to your preferred email marketing platform. You can also create email variants for different target audiences.
As well as using ChatGPT to create personalized messages, you can use it to refine your segmentation efforts. It can analyze data to uncover patterns and behaviors and recommend the right segments to maximize revenue.
Ensures consistency
Consistency is essential, not only across your email marketing campaigns, but also across your marketing strategy in general. Changes in your tone of voice, logo usage, and values confuse customers and lead to a loss of trust in your business.
Developing cohesive ChatGPT prompts helps ensure your marketing stays consistent across all channels. You can also use ChatGPT to “sense check” your content marketing to make sure it adheres to brand guidelines.
Ten email marketing ChatGPT prompts to get started
Looking to get started with ChatGPT? Here are 10 fully customizable prompt templates to help you improve your email marketing efforts.
Add the key details that are relevant to your business and target audience, paste the prompt into ChatGPT, and amend the results as required.
Example #1: Monthly content calendar prompt
“Create a month’s worth of email content (12 emails in total) for a fashion e-commerce business that sells stylish clothes and accessories for women aged between 25 and 35.
“The aim of the emails is to drive engagement and sales through a mix of promotional and entertaining emails.
“The tone of voice should be trendy and confident, yet approachable. Use American English throughout.
“All emails should include a subject line, preheader text, main body copy (around 150 words), and a clear call to action (CTA).”
Example #2: High-impact email sequence prompt
“Create a high-converting automated email sequence for a yoga company offering online yoga classes and guided programs.
“Subscribers will have just downloaded a free yoga e-book. The goal is to encourage customers to buy a monthly course subscription.
“The target audience is women aged between 25 and 50 who are health conscious and enjoy self-care. The tone of voice should be calm, motivating, and supportive.
“Create 5 emails, spaced over 14 days. Each email should have a specific focus and contain appropriate social proof:
- Thank you for downloading the guide
- Introduction to the brand’s mission
- Benefits of online yoga
- Customer testimonial
- Free trial invitation
“Present the sequence in a table format.”
Example #3: Attention-grabbing subject lines prompt
“Generate 7 email subject lines, 1 for each day of the week, aimed at boosting open rates for a SaaS brand. The target audience is existing customers that use the free version of the software.
“The subject lines should:
- Be short and punchy, under 60 characters.
- Include 2 personalized subject lines that mention the recipient’s name.
- Be curiosity driven or benefit focused but avoid clickbait.
- Use power words that encourage urgency or excitement.
“Emojis are acceptable. However, only use 1 per email subject line and add it at the end.”
Example #4: Re-engagement campaign prompt
“Write a re-engagement email (including subject line and preheader text) for an e-commerce store specializing in light fittings. This will target inactive subscribers who have not interacted with emails in the past 6 months.
“The email should:
- Be friendly, approachable, and personalized.
- Encourage inactive subscribers to engage or opt out if they no longer want to receive emails.
- Highlight the benefits of staying subscribed.
- Include a clear and compelling CTA.
- Be under 150 words.”
Example #5: Personalized recommendation prompt
“Imagine you are an expert email marketer for a business selling office supplies. Write a personalized recommendation email for a customer, based on their previous purchases and/or browsing behavior. The email should:
- Be friendly and helpful, yet professional.
- Include clear benefits or uses for each product.
- Have a clear CTA for each product.
- Suggest no more than 3 products, and be under 150 words.”
ChatGPT can suggest products if it has access to a customer’s purchase history or browsing behavior.
Alternatively, you can identify product recommendations yourself, using data from your customer relationship management (CRM) system, and ask ChatGPT to craft the email based on this information.
Example #6: Testimonial prompt
“Write a friendly, professional email (under 200 words) encouraging satisfied customers of a digital marketing agency to provide a testimonial that the agency can use on its website and marketing materials.
“The email should show gratitude for the customer’s business and explain why the testimonial will be valuable to the agency.
“Make it as easy as possible to provide customer feedback, either by responding to the email or completing a form, which will be linked to in the email.
“Provide the email in a ready-to-send format, with placeholders for the customer and business name.”
Example #7: Fear of missing out (FOMO) prompt
“Imagine you work on the Marketing team for a costume jewelry company. Write an email announcing an exclusive offer that encourages immediate action by leveraging FOMO.
“The tone should be exciting and compelling to encourage customer engagement, using urgent, attention-grabbing language and strong CTAs. Emphasize the limited-time nature of the offer and how once products are gone, they will not be restocked.
“Include an email subject line designed to maximize open rates, and include placeholders for product names, discount amounts, and offer end time. Also include space for a countdown timer.”
Example #8: Abandoned cart reminder prompt
“Act as an email marketer for an online toy store. Write an abandoned cart reminder email to encourage customers to complete their purchase. The email should:
- Contain personalization fields for the customer’s name and product details.
- Use a subject line and preheader text that encourages the customer to open the email.
- Be engaging and playful, with a human-like tone.
- Include a powerful CTA.
- Offer a small discount to encourage the customer to buy.
- Be under 100 words.”
Example #9: CTA prompt
“Create a highly optimized CTA for an email newsletter that is 5 words or fewer. The CTA aims to drive website clicks.
“The email newsletter will be A/B tested, so provide 2 distinct variants. For each variant, consider the:
- CTA text (formal and professional in tone)
- Button and text color, with accessible contrast in line with WebAIM guidelines
- Button shape and size
- Supporting microcopy before and after the button”
Example #10: Post-campaign analysis prompt
While the prompts above have focused on email content creation, you can also use ChatGPT to audit and assess your campaigns. This provides you with an objective overview of your email marketing and offers recommendations to improve future campaigns.
“Review the following email campaign and provide actionable feedback to improve future campaigns, prioritized by impact. Consider the following elements:
- Subject line and preheader text
- Email copy
- Design and layout
- CTA
- Personalization and segmentation
“Please also review the campaign performance data and suggest possible reasons for high or low performance.”
ChatGPT can’t access your campaign data—you will have to provide this manually. However, it can compare the results to industry benchmarks if it has access to web search.
Best practices when using ChatGPT prompts for email
While ChatGPT is a powerful tool for email marketing, you need to take time and care in creating effective and detailed prompts. Low-quality prompts will lead to low-quality content and dissatisfied customers.
Here’s what you need to consider when building your own ChatGPT email marketing prompts.
Teach ChatGPT your brand voice
Your brand voice and tone, the language you use to speak to customers, can be your unique selling point in a crowded marketplace.
To ensure the emails you send always receive a positive reception from your prospective and existing audiences, you must use your brand voice in your prompts.
If you use the paid version of ChatGPT, it automatically remembers your preferred style and applies it across the content it creates.
Select your most engaging emails, as well as solid examples of subject lines and other marketing materials to help ChatGPT understand your brand. ChatGPT allows file uploads, and you can also link to relevant pages on your website.
If you use the free version, ChatGPT may remember some elements of your brand voice, but it may forget or overwrite things over time.
In this situation, to ensure brand consistency and reliability, the best thing to do is to create a sentence or a few bullet points detailing your brand style. You can then paste it into each prompt you write.
Provide as much information as possible
The ChatGPT prompts in this article are highly detailed, and with good reason.
The more information you provide to ChatGPT, the more knowledge it has. With more knowledge, ChatGPT can create compelling emails that appeal to your needs and that save you time, as you don’t have to go back and forth to make revisions.
When you generate your prompt, use the 5 W’s to provide a comprehensive outline to ChatGPT:
- Who: The target audience you will send the email to
- What: The task you want ChatGPT to complete
- Where: The country and language you want your content to be tailored for
- Why: The goal you want to achieve by sending the email
- How: The format of the email, including how it should look and sound (also mention anything you don’t want the email to include)
Here’s a helpful tip: When you create your prompt, ask ChatGPT to feel free to ask questions if it needs additional information. That way, if your prompt isn’t detailed enough, ChatGPT knows to ask for further clarification.
Adapt the results to your specific needs
When you receive the output from your ChatGPT prompt, take the time to review it and make revisions.
While ChatGPT is a fantastic tool, as it’s trained on public data, it can sometimes make mistakes. Checking the content means your email content will be accurate, relevant, and, most of all, compliant.
It also means you can add an authentic, human touch to your emails. You can insert your own unique insight, tell stories, and include subtle nuances that ChatGPT might miss.
Review your email campaigns
Earlier in the article, we discussed how you can use ChatGPT to review your sent emails. Whether you use ChatGPT or audit them manually, it’s important to assess all your email campaigns to make sure they deliver the right results for your business.
As you review your email campaigns, also review your prompts and make changes to ensure that all future marketing campaigns get optimized for clicks and conversions.
For example, imagine the click-through rates for your welcome email are lower than you’d expect. You can revise your next prompt, asking ChatGPT to generate a more dynamic CTA that encourages customers to click.
Other success metrics you can monitor include return on investment (ROI), customer lifetime value (CLV), and click-to-open rate (CTOR).
Key takeaways
- What is a ChatGPT email marketing prompt? A ChatGPT email marketing prompt is an instruction you provide ChatGPT to help you create high-quality, engaging emails.
- Using ChatGPT prompts has many benefits: They help you save time, make it easier to scale your marketing campaigns, and ensure your emails share a consistent brand identity.
- ChatGPT can help with all aspects of your email marketing: These include building your email marketing content strategy, creating email subject lines, and analyzing your campaigns.
- The more specific you make your prompts, the better the output: Consider the 5 W’s—who, what, where, why, and how.
- Adapt your responses for the best results: Add extra information, introduce storytelling, take out content that isn’t relevant, and optimize for your unique brand voice.