Tamara Gielen, Be Relevant, and I were really excited about the positive response our presentation ’35 Great AI Ideas in 35 Minutes’ received at Email Innovations World 2024!
For those who missed it, I’m sharing my 18 ideas in a series of 3 blog posts. You can read the first one on the Only Influencers blog; I published the second one here last week. And this is the third!
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I’m including the slides from my presentation for visual appeal! Here we go…
13. Don’t stress about prompt engineering
I was talking with a fellow #emailgeek last month and he was talking about how daunting prompt engineering was. But when I asked him to be more specific about the issues he was having, he confessed. He hadn’t ever used ChatGPT or any other LLM, reading about how daunting it was had him convinced it was difficult.
It’s not.
The beauty of ChatGPT and other LLMs is that they are user-friendly; they are created so that you can use natural language, not a programming language, to communicate with them. It takes some time to learn how to make yourself clear and how to structure your language, but it’s not like learning a coding language – or a second language.
Don’t be daunted! Just jump in and learn!
14. Sign up for my free newsletter
Shameless plug, kind-of – but kind-of not. I am by no means an expert in using AI for email marketing. But I’m pushing myself to learn, and then I’m sharing my knowledge. Why? Because those who are ahead of me are doing the same and I’m learning from them.
So, if you find this helpful, please sign-up for my newsletter, follow my progress, iterate on what you learn from me, and publish what you learn – so that we can all get up the learning curve more quickly. This is how we built the email marketing industry back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Let’s do it again!
15. Tasks you are good at: test using a GPT to do them more quickly
Aren’t we all looking for ways to be more productive? AI can help us with that. And the place to start is with things you are good at, but which are rout and repetitive.
One example from my life: making charts and graphs from spreadsheets. I created a GPT that will let me input a spreadsheet; then it will calculate the key email marketing metrics (I trained it on the metrics I use and how to calculate them) and automatically create the standard charts and graphs I use with clients – to my specifications, using my brand colors.
I kind of miss spending all that time in Excel. But it makes me more productive. One note: Be sure to remove any brand identifiers in the spreadsheet to keep the data anonymous.
Looking to up your AI game for email marketing?
Join us for a 6-hour hands-on workshop training — you’ll create 3 of your own custom GPTs and leave with a good start on your next email marketing campaign!
16. Content is still king
The more information you can provide the GPT, in terms of briefs, website URLs to look at, etc., the better your results will be. Content is the difference between an okay campaign and a great campaign – content and collaboration.
In most cases, if you’re linking to a publicly available website, there’s no reason to keep the information anonymous, since it’s out there in the public domain already. But if you feel you need to, you can always copy the content of the site to a document, remove the brand identifiers, and input it to the GPT that way.
17. No GPT is smarter than you are
This is important to remember. It doesn’t know everything that you do – it doesn’t have the skills and expertise that you have. That’s why collaboration is best. And the more you work with it, the less daunting and intimidating it will be.
18. Join Only Influencers!
I’m a bit biased, since I’m the General Manager of Only Influencers (OI), but if you’re looking to up your email marketing game, with or without AI, OI is the place to be. It’s $20/month or $200/year.
Every Thursday we hold a members-only live discussion where the author of a recent industry article comes, and we talk about the post. It’s knowledge, it’s networking, and best of all, it’s fun.
Oh, and right now we’re talking about AI at least half of the time. Hope to see you there soon!
So that’s it…
18 tips about using AI for email marketing, spread across 3 posts on two different blogs. Are you convinced yet? Have you started testing the AI waters? Now’s the time!
Give it a try and let me know how it goes! And if you’re looking for one-on-one or workshop training on AI or other email marketing topics, let’s chat! I also do strategic and tactical consulting and fractional director/VP roles.
Until next time,
jj
Photo by Danielle Rice on Unsplash
