The popularisation of AI technology - particularly the emergence of ChatGPT has made waves in the email world and sparked significant debate among marketers and developers. The big question, amongst others, posed to two sets of copy and code experts from ActionRocket and Sinch was, ‘is AI a helpful tool or just a passing fad?’

If you didn’t catch the answers from the live webinar debates, you can take a look at what we saw as the top takeaways below.

For Copywriting:

The top 5 benefits of using AI in Email Marketing

• It can do the basic routine parts of the process of writing copy, so more time can be spent on being human, creative and strategic. After all…’strategy’ underpins what copywriters do. 

• It can service the growing needs of the modern marketing world, where the demand for personalisation has exceeded the resources to provide it - working smarter to scale. Particularly powerful when used around data sets for generating a large number of personalised subject lines, preheaders & CTAS to put forward for testing.

• It's particularly good for small marketing departments and many hat’s marketers who are strapped for time. It allows them to accomplish more at a lower cost. It also enables taking shortcuts until a resource is available.

• It’s a great writer’s assistant to set structure to initial thoughts with a rough draft of words with no emotional intent, that can be refined and humanised. 

• It’s really useful for generating inspiration, ideas, discovering new ways to look at a product, a service or a benefit. It's a collaborator and the ultimate research tool.

For Copywriting:

The top 5 watch-outs of using AI in Email Marketing

• There are curated lists out there digitally of spam trigger words, like ‘free’ and ‘click here’, which, without a sense of context, AI will not be considering currently. Plus, Open AI has admitted that web-enabled ChatGPT would lead to spammers committing more fraud. 

  
  

• If your emails start to sound like they were written by AI, it may reflect badly on brand reputation. The variable on AI is always going to be the brand tone of voice, standards and the nuances that are only known in-house.

  
  

• It’s trained on certain materials, so can only respond based on what it’s trained on, and its output will only be as good as its training. 

  
  

• It currently tends to lean to a certain bias and stereotype. How factually correct it actually is, and sourcing and copyright implications are a grey area.  

  
  

• It is a subject matter expert, but not a discerning one, so is dangerous if relied upon completely. It doesn’t have context or common sense, a POV, perspective or understand nuances. So it’s very important to specify the objectives correctly. 

  
  

For Code:

The top 5 benefits of using AI in Email Marketing

• Technically ChatGPT knows nothing about coding emails but it will interpret something you ask it, and the more questions it’s asked, verified to be correct, the more it learns and in turn can provide. 

• It’s a good debugging assistant tool. Questions like, ‘I don't understand why this is not working, can you help?’ could bring up something to trigger your thought process or actually give you the solution. 

• For speed purposes, an email can be coded using AI in minutes. It will not be perfect and will need to be checked over and improved, but it’s a starting point for a template. 

• It can be particularly helpful as a training tool for junior coders, making the fundamentals of code much more accessible to them when starting out. Ultimately it may raise the bar for code to be better overall due to the accessibility of knowledge.

• It can make the mundane steps of developing obsolete, such as adding all of the links to a set of email modules. Plus, as more plugins are added to train the machine learning behind the tool to make it more accurate, we’ll see real efficiencies.

“For email development, I can see AI helping with repetitive or simple tasks, or putting together a really quick proof of concept that I can amend to make it work across email clients.”

— Jay Oram, Coder & Interactive email specialist, ActionRocket

For Code:

The top 5 watch-outs of using AI in Email Marketing

• To fully leverage ChatGPT, the prompts have to be completely correct which means you have to know code to be able to do this. Currently QAing the code generated by AI may take as long as simply doing it. 

• Without specifying a particular client nuance, the tool will not supply what's needed.

• Scam and cold email creators can use AI to automate sends in a much more efficient way which means we will see more of it. The spam filters are smart however, so once AI-generated emails get caught up in them, deliverability will be affected.

• AI is only as good as the information that is put in, so if it’s fed bad code practices these will be used to give the wrong answers to good coding practice.

• AI tools are likely to lower the bar for more people to access code knowledge, but it will also make it more obvious where specialist human coder skills are needed.

• For example, “We all have great cameras on our phones but we will still hire a wedding photographer!” 

— Megan Boshuyzen, Lead Developer, Email on Acid by Sinch

But ultimately… Can AI be stopped?

A record-breaking speedy adoption makes it clear that there’s no escape from getting on board with generative AI and getting to grips with how best it can help us in our current jobs as email coders and content marketers.

“AI is inescapable so we need to get on board and evolve with it into creators who can expertly use it. I feel like it could be the way that we become more human…liberating us from routine parts of our roles, giving us the space to see the wood from the trees! Ultimately - I think that AI could raise the standards of communication altogether.” 

— Nicole Holden, Strategic Copywriter, ActionRocket

“It’s not going to take over email developers' jobs in the near future, but by working with it, it can free up time to work on more complex development projects. I’ve already seen some early integrations with ESPs, code editors and other tools I regularly use - all making my life a little easier!”

— Jay Oram, Coder & Interactive email specialist, ActionRocket