Ultimate Guide to Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Emails

AI for email management has become a popular tool for communication. Especially since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 and Gemini in 2023, professionals are eager to use AI to make their emails more efficient, better worded, and easier to write. 

As email experts, our research shows that interest in AI for emails has grown exponentially in the last few years. 15% of US internet users already use artificial intelligence to write their emails, and 25% are ready to consider it. More than 50% of marketers believe AI emails are more effective than the traditional approach. 

If you’re eager to benefit from this promising trend, navigating teething issues and early challenges, this guide is for you. Read on to learn how AI for emails works, its pros and cons, and proven techniques for best results. 

What Do We Mean by AI for Email?

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Artificial intelligence (AI) for email refers to a broad category of technologies used to automatically perform email tasks that were previously done by humans, such as writing, personalizing, organizing, and scheduling them. 

At its core, AI is a set of advanced statistical algorithms that are able to make calculations and predictions in a fraction of a second. This allows them to anticipate many of the tasks involved in a typical email workflow and complete them automatically. 

For example, Gmail can analyze the recipient’s email ID and predict what you’re about to type in the email greetings. It then uses this data to auto-complete sentences, reducing manual effort. 

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Similarly, Gmelius uses AI to automatically understand what an email is about and add tags. The user can quickly get an idea of an email’s contents, associated process, and whether to open it, making it easier to prioritize communications. 

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Another important example of AI for email management is the use of large language models like Gemini or ChatGPT. These tools are trained on vast datasets of literature and communication so they can write professional-sounding emails on your behalf. 

Understanding AI Email Generators: How Do They Work?

One of the most exciting applications of AI in emails is AI email generation. Simply put, these tools study historical data, including publicly available information and your old emails (if it’s an enterprise-tailored AI model), to generate new emails automatically. 

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Now most companies will write hundreds if not thousands of emails a day. Despite the rise of new channels like social media, 69% of customers still prefer to communicate via email. AI makes this task much simpler and reduces the human effort needed. Here’s how: 

• The tool analyzes user input: The user provides instructions on the type of email they want, the tone, and the audience. These instructions, often called a prompt, is analyzed by the AI email generator to determine the ideal structure. 
• NLP is applied: Natural language processing (NLP) is a subset of AI that allows it to understand context in order to generate a coherent textual output. To apply NLP, the input is broken down into smaller parts through a process called tokenization. 
• The tool fetches data from LLM training: AI email generators have LLMs like GPT at their core, which are trained on text data sets so they can predict the right words in a sequence. The tool will use this training to generate the email one word at a time. 
• The response is contextualized: Once the email content is ready, the tool will apply contextual touches such as changing the tone, greeting, or date. This is one of the main features that make AI email generators so useful. 
• The response is integrated with a template: The tool will often apply a template (like Gmelius’ large template library) to produce consistent and professional messages. Templates also ensure that you don’t miss out on details like order ID or transaction number. 
• The user provides feedback: Some AI email generators allow the user to tweak the response so that the AI can learn from it and make similar changes autonomously in the future. 

AI email generators can be incredibly useful for anyone handling email communications at scale, whether for outbound marketing, HR, or even a PR professional. 

Why AI for Email is a Crucial Tool for Marketers

Marketers use AI through dedicated AI tools, embedded in marketing platforms, or as part of their communication systems. Regardless of its implementation, AI plays a powerful role in delivering and optimizing your campaigns. 

1. Never miss a hot lead

AI emails are automatically tagged so that marketers know which ones deserve their urgent attention. You can set up AI email tagging to reflect different stages of the customer journey so you can focus on your most conversion-ready prospects. 

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2. Supercharge your cold outreach

Marketers can also use AI for cold emails and contact data enrichment. For example, LinkedCRM is a cutting-edge AI tool that allows you to find any LinkedIn user’s contact information and use a co-pilot to connect with them via cold outreach. 

3. Mirror the customer’s tone

Research shows that mirroring and empathy are effective tools when you’re trying to build rapport with a customer. AI email generators allow you to mirror a customer’s tone, even if you don’t natively speak their language or aren’t conversant with their industry jargon. 

4. Break through writer’s block

Every marketer has faced writer’s block at some point, whether you’re dealing with distractions or writing anxiety. AI assists in brainstorming and idea generation so that it’s easier to get started with writing direct emails, taglines, newsletters, and other types of copy. 

5. Make every email professional and error-free

Even ace communicators don’t perform at their 100% every day. AI email generators can learn from your previous emails and generate new ones that are similar in tone and efficacy, without duplicated efforts. AI tools like Grammarly also eliminate grammar errors so your messages are always professional. 

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6. Reach a global audience 

AI can accurately translate your email content so you can reach customers in other countries. Even if a lead responds in a different language, AI co-pilots will provide in-line translation so you can engage with international customers. 

Challenges in Building an Efficient Email Flow (and How AI Email Response Generators Can Help)

The perfect email campaign with an optimized flow can be challenging to build. This is another reason why AI for emails is gaining traction since it can solve many of today’s email-related workflow bottlenecks. 

1. Content creation is extremely time-consuming 

A B2B company caters to 3-5 personas on average, while for B2C companies, the number is in double digits. Crafting an award-winning response for each persona manually can be time-consuming, eating into your costs. 

AI email response generators can create a tailored reply for every email based on previous communications and unique training data supplied by your company. 

2. The tone is inconsistent across teams 

Email workflows involve multiple stakeholders and there’s no guarantee that every stakeholder will adopt the same tone consistently. As your business grows, this becomes an even bigger challenge. 

AI response generators can ingest brand kits and other guidelines to automatically write consistent email responses. When different stakeholders rely on the same tool, guidelines, and templates to craft their responses, the entire organization has a harmonious voice. 

3. It’s difficult to personalize at scale 

When you engage with a large audience and diverse buyer personas, your communications have to be suitably personalized. Unfortunately, doing this manually requires a lot of time. More often than not, companies resort to a simple mail merge process to personalize the customer’s name and address but not much else. 

AI can weave in deeper elements of personalization in bulk, such as using a different greeting for specific customer segments or using emojis for certain segments, but not for others. 

4. Companies follow up too much or too little 

Email communication frequency has to hit the sweet spot. Bombarding customers with emails makes brands seem unlikeable, while infrequent emails can bring down brand recall. AI enables automated follow-up schedules so you can reach out to warm leads while giving other prospects the time to make up their mind. 

In fact, Gmelius offers AI agents that can configure email flows and automations using simple, natural language instructions. Thanks to AI, triggers like specific words can lead to a follow-up while prospects who aren’t interested are left undisturbed. 

5. Optimizing subject lines and CTAs can be tricky 

General marketing emails have a clickthrough rate of anywhere between 2% and 5%. As a result, marketers are constantly looking to tweak things like subject lines and CTAs to capture user attention. AI can analyze previous clickthrough rates to understand which tactics work best. 

The Future of AI in Email Writing [Key Stats]

AI for email management is still at a nascent stage, as the technology is constantly maturing. In the last two years, we’ve seen five versions of ChatGPT, and Gmelius is also working on new iterations of its AI technology. What does the future look like? Here are a few telling stats: 

• 51% of marketers believe AI emails are more effective than traditional email marketing; however, approximately 20% said that there is no difference between the two. This indicates that, despite widespread adoption, not everyone is bullish on AI email generation. 

• 74% of marketers report using at least one AI marketing tool. Chatbots are the no.1 most popular tool used reaffirming the importance of ChatGPT and other conversational interfaces. 
• 47% of marketers use AI to create content like newsletters and email campaigns. Recent advancements in LLMs and their ability to generate both long-form and short-form content instantly, continue to play a role. 
• 65.8% of users believe AI content is equal to or better than human writing. This statistic should be taken with a pinch of salt as results may vary significantly depending on the prompt and LLMs used. 
• 68% of marketers and 60% of communications professionals use AI daily. 6% and 3% respectively report using AI tools “all the time.” This has improved productivity according to 82% of respondents. 
• The ROI from AI adoption is clear.  Research shows that it has helped marketing leaders improve sales by 6%, customer satisfaction by 7%, and savings by 7%. 
• Even with the rise of AI in emails and writing in general, AI detection tools haven’t really caught on. Less than 30% of marketers use AI detection tools, which makes sense given that OpenAI themselves said that AI detection technology doesn’t work. 
• 73% of customers have concerns over unethical AI use. This is up from just 66% in 2020, indicating both leapfrog advancements in AI and a parallel rise in ethical issues. After all, with great power comes great responsibility. 

These statistics show that, while AI for emails is a promising technology, it has a long way to go before reaching the same maturity as CRMs and marketing automation platforms. A simple and low-risk way to stay ahead of the curve is to partner with vendors already testing and embedding AI into their platforms, like Gmelius.  

AI Email Errors to Avoid—Staying Personal While You Scale

While AI emails can be a game-changer, it’s important to use them correctly. Otherwise, common “AI-isms” can appear in your writing that make the text seem synthetic and unnatural. Look out for these common AI email errors to avoid being obviously flagged as AI-generated text.

1. Overuse of business jargon

AI generated emails (indeed, any form of writing) may use words like “efficiency” and “excellence” when they aren’t applicable. That’s because LLMs are trained on human writing for businesses, most of which will tend to contain words like these. Here's an example from Reddit:

To avoid this, feed the AI email response generator a few emails you have written before and are happy with. You can also engineer the prompt to avoid generic words and phrases.   

2. Incorrect structuring of emails

Emails should be short, pithy, and to-the-point, unlike blogs and articles. When using AI for writing, ensure that the structure adheres to email best practices and does not become an elaborate introduction-body-conclusion affair. 

#ProTip: Create Gmail templates to maintain a consistent structure for all your emails.

3. Frequent use of title case

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT typically use title case when writing bullets or section headers. This can be unnatural for emails in certain contexts and cause the recipient to suspect that you may not have spent sufficient time proofreading the text. Fortunately, this AI-ism is easy to avoid with the right prompt. 

4. Overly academic language 

Like jargon, academic language means that the email uses long and elaborate sentences, often in passive voice, using 30 words where perhaps 10 would have sufficed. 

Keep an eye out for such sentence constructions and train the model to speak naturally like a human, even if that’s grammatically questionable sometimes. AI tools like Grammarly should act as enablers for human expertise instead of being an absolute truth. 

5. Very long emails 

AI emails can end up being longer than expected, depending on the data included in the prompt. Iterate until you are happy with the length (100-200 words, according to research) — remember, customers will spend only a few seconds on an email and long messages can cause disengagement. 

Successful Examples of AI in Email Management 

The ROI from using AI for emails is well documented. Research shows that user productivity increases by 66% on average when using generative AI. By reducing time spent on repetitive tasks, AI tools like ChatGPT can transform users’ potential in professional settings. 

In another success story, crafts retailer Michaels Stores incorporated Gen AI into its messaging campaigns. The company used artificial intelligence to write emails as well as SMS communications for customer engagement. As a result, it could scale up its email personalization efforts from 20% to 95%, leading to a 25% rise in click-through rates. 

Best Practices When Using AI Email Assistants

While AI email assistants (or AI agents, if they’re more advanced) make processes faster and worry-free, you still need a human in the loop. The following best practices help combine your human expertise with the efficiency of AI agents to produce the best results. 

1. Re-read the emails in your sent box

Errors can occur even if you proofread an AI-generated email, and sometimes, you'll notice them after it's sent. Check your sentbox and send a follow-up email correcting it. Your recipients will appreciate that you caught the mistake before they did. 

2. Have escalation processes in place

AI-generated emails, canned responses, and fully templatized messages aren't ideal for every issue. When a conversation escalates, it's important to know when a human should intervene. Document your escalation triggers, such as a customer using specific words or an SLA being broken.

3. Use the same AI email assistant consistently

Depending on which AI email generator you use, the output will be slightly different. ChatGPT, for instance, generates slightly verbose messages by default while Claude tends to be more creative. Once you've settled on a tool, implement it across the organization for consistency. 

4. Monitor the performance of AI emails

AI emails aren't set-and-forget. Monitor KPIs like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion to analyze how the emails are performing, in addition to saving time. This will also tell you the best time to send an email, the perfect subject lines, and the type of content your audience is most interested in. 

5. Use a robust customer database as the foundation

AI email management is an efficiency overlay that needs to be built on top of data. Populate your customer database with first-party information and data from lead generation tools. The goal is to get emails to the largest possible target audience. 

6. A/B test your AI emails

When you're starting out, it's tempting to unleash your creativity using all the features AI marketing tools have to offer. However, over time, you need to refine your strategy to suit what works best. Test emails of different lengths and tonality and document the results in an AI email playbook unique to your company. 

7. Choose no-code, intuitive AI assistants

The user experience is crucial when using AI assistants as this will determine company-wide adoption. Look for tools that need zero coding and as little configuration as possible. Ideally, partner with vendors like Gmelius who will set up automations for you to make the experience really intuitive. 

8. Learn the basics of prompt engineering 

The output of generative AI is only as good as the prompt. Courses like this one and this one on Udemy can help you understand how to maneuver AI email assistants to get the best results. 

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While you don't need expert-level skills, the ability to make small tweaks to a prompt can make emails sound more human and engaging. 

In Conclusion

Artificial intelligence has transformed the writing process, and its benefits are particularly evident in AI for emails. From research and the first draft to personalization and scheduling, every aspect of how we communicate can improve if AI is used correctly. 

In this guide, we've explained how AI emailing technology works, its pitfalls, and how to get around them. Based on our extensive experience building the world's leading collaborative email platform, we've also shared the best practices for email success. 

AI isn't a magic bullet, but it can elevate your inbox and take the grind out of communication tasks. Discover how Gmelius is using AI to inject a shot of “genius” into Gmail. Sign up for a free trial today.