How To Use ChatGPT To Write an Email—A Step-by-Step Guide for Sales Pros

It takes time and effort to put together an effective outreach email. If you’re still doing it manually, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to streamline your workflow. A much better alternative is to let AI take the first shot, after which you can tweak the email if needed.

With a solid prompt that includes all the relevant data and instructions, you can get a first draft that minimizes the need for rewrites. Better yet, you can boost the conversion potential of each email to increase your response rates with less work.

We’ve seen such results first-hand. Using AI, we halved the number of emails we sent while doubling positive responses. 💌

In this guide, we share some of our secrets to show you how to use ChatGPT to write an email that maximizes the chance of a positive response. Specifically, you’ll learn the following:

• Why using ChatGPT for email writing is a good idea
• How to write effective emails in no time
• When using ChatGPT might not work
• How to maximize ChatGPT’s potential

Why You Should Use ChatGPT To Write Outreach Emails

Using ChatGPT for writing emails can bring plenty of benefits, most notably:

To enjoy these benefits and use ChatGPT for sales emails effectively, you need to understand how the platform works and how to master it. We’ll start with the basics, after which we’ll go over some prompting tweaks that make a big difference to your email creation workflow.

💡 Bonus read: For more ways to leverage AI to help your sales team, read our guides on AI in B2B sales, AI sales training, and using AI for cold calling.

How To Ask ChatGPT To Write an Email

If you use ChatGPT as a standalone solution, you can ask it to write an email through a prompt—a set of instructions that tell the platform what it should write and how to do it.

A sales email prompt can look something like this:

“Write a 100-word sales outreach email introducing [product name], a solution tailored for the [industry] sector. Start by addressing the recipient’s pain points in their industry and how [product name] can solve these challenges. Highlight 2–3 key product benefits or features relevant to the recipient’s needs. Mention a success story or client from the same industry, and end with a call-to-action for a meeting or demo to discuss how the product can help their business.”

If you give ChatGPT such a prompt, you’ll get a response like this one:

As you can see, the email is quite basic—what you get is a generic message most prospects will ignore. That’s why you can’t use any prompt to get the email you want—you must follow the right prompting practices to get the most out of ChatGPT. 💪

How To Use ChatGPT for Email Writing—Essential Tips

ChatGPT’s output directly reflects the quality of your prompt. To write effective emails that don’t need heavy revisions, do the following:

1. Provide sufficient context
2. Assign ChatGPT a role
3. Explain the end goal
4. Include enough prospect data

Provide Sufficient Context

A “sales email” can mean a lot of things. Depending on your funnel’s specifics, it can serve many purposes and be written from different viewpoints. Like any generative AI tool, ChatGPT needs to understand the context behind its task to ensure a solid output.

For example, if you have a new product feature you want to introduce, you can add something like this to your prompt:

“I have a [product] that primarily focused on [core feature] but was upgraded with a new feature, [specific feature], which helps with [additional nenefit]. I want existing customers to know about the new benefits and upgrade options.”

By including this at the beginning of your prompt, you can help ChatGPT understand why it’s writing the email, which can make the output more specific.

Assign ChatGPT a Role

Role assignment is an effective way to adjust ChatGPT’s output to fit your preferred style. Telling ChatGPT what shoes it needs to fill will tweak its tone and phrasing to match your chosen one.

For example, if you want ChatGPT to act as an SDR, you can use the following prompt:

“You’re an SDR at a fintech company offering [product], which was recently upgraded to include [new feature]. You should write an email to existing customers to notify them of the product upgrade and get them to try it out.”

With a prompt like this, ChatGPT will understand that it should use a promotional and somewhat technical style. You can further finetune the prompt by explaining the exact purpose of the email and the target audience.

Role assignment goes beyond tone and style. ChatGPT will start thinking like an SDR (as much as possible), which means it can support your actual team members by aligning its thinking with theirs. 🧠

There’s no one-size-fits-all technique when it comes to role assignment—you can prompt ChatGPT to assume any role you need for a specific email, which should help you get the desired output with less effort.

Explain the End Goal

Your emails can fulfill many goals, such as:

• Sharing a freebie
• Getting someone to sign up for a resource
• Encouraging a prospect to try or buy a product

Explaining the goal to ChatGPT is essential to ensuring the output can meet it. It gives the platform direction and clarity, improving the output’s contextual accuracy.

For example, if your email isn’t aimed at hard selling but inviting the reader to engage with your resource, you can mention this in the prompt so that ChatGPT uses a less salesy tone. The prompt could look something like this:

“Write an email from the perspective of a fintech SDR. The email should be about a new feature we include in our product, [specific product]. The email is meant to encourage the recipient to read a whitepaper discussing the feature’s benefits, so it shouldn’t directly promote the product or the feature.”

Include Enough Prospect Data

One of the main complaints surrounding AI is that it creates dry, generic content. This doesn’t have to be the case as long as you tell ChatGPT who the email recipient is. And not just their name and role—you need as many details as you can find, such as:

• ♥️ Likes and preferences
• 🖼️ Social media activity 
• 🏢 Relevant company information

By combining the other prompting tips with such abundant data, you can create a hyper-personalized email in no time. Include the prospect’s information in the prompt, and ChatGPT can write a highly specific message. Here’s what such a prompt might look like:

“You’re an SDR at a fintech company that recently added a [new feature] to [product]. Write a promotional email aimed at [prospect name], who works as a [role] at [company]. The goal of the email is to invite the prospect to sign up for a free trial of the product and test the new feature. The prospect recently shared a LinkedIn post discussing [relevant topic], so make sure to include this in the email and connect it to the product.”

Comprehensive prospect data is critical to effective outreach campaigns whether you use AI or not. Still, you can get the most out of each data point by adding AI-powered process automation to your workflow.

The key challenge here is finding the data you need. ChatGPT can help with this to an extent, though there’s a more streamlined way to collect all the necessary information (more on that later).

💡 Bonus read: For more prompting tips and examples, read our guides on ChatGPT prompts for sales emails and prompts for sales in general.

When Is It Bad To Use ChatGPT for Emails?

You may want to steer away from ChatGPT (and AI in general) when writing emails in the following three cases:

1. You can’t ensure proper supervision—ChatGPT is meant to support your SDRs, not replace them. While it can considerably tighten your workflow by removing mundane work, executive decisions must be left to your team members. Without adequate oversight, you may rely on AI too heavily, which can damage the value and effectiveness of your emails
2. You haven’t nailed down your target audience—Before you automate email writing, you must know precisely who your emails are targeting. Without such clarity, even the most effective prompt won’t be helpful because the output will be geared toward the wrong people and irrelevant to your audience
3. You’re working with lackluster data—Process automation won’t make much difference if your emails aren’t personalized enough to encourage a response. Before using any automated writing tools, you must streamline your data collection workflows and make sure you have all the necessary details

The above issues can impact your entire sales process, from lead generation and data enrichment to email creation. If you need a platform that pairs with ChatGPT to overcome these challenges, check out Clay. 🌟

Get the Most Out of Each Outbound Email With Clay

Clay is a comprehensive data enrichment and sales automation solution that streamlines various processes throughout the sales cycle. It integrates with Open AI, so you can go beyond ChatGPT’s native interface to write effective emails effortlessly and ensure each message is tailored to the prospect. 📬

Specifically, Clay’s OpenAI integration lets you complete the following actions:

Most importantly, Clay’s AI message writer can leverage ChatGPT to create highly personalized emails at scale. It automatically pulls your Clay data to tailor each message accordingly. All you need to do is fire up the tool after collecting the relevant data, and it can automate entire sequences in no time.

Want to see Clay’s AI email writing in action? Check out this video:

To further streamline your workflow, Clay also offers plenty of AI email writing templates for different tasks, such as:

• Writing emails using a prospect’s personal or professional posts
• Mentioning a product update in your email
• Writing personalized emails based on website data

You may be wondering where all that prospect-specific data in Clay comes from. The answer is simple—robust, hands-off data enrichment. 🚀

Find All the Data You Need for Outreach Emails With Clay

Clay integrates with over 50 data providers, letting you scour their databases for prospect data without ever leaving Clay or creating new accounts.

Such robust data coverage is paired with Clay’s waterfall enrichment feature to make data collection as streamlined as possible. Here’s how it works:

1. Select the data you need (contact information, company data, etc.)
2. Choose your preferred data providers (Hunter, Apollo, and many more)
3. Let Clay search the selected databases one by one until it finds the info you’re looking for

With waterfall enrichment, you only pay for successful searches. This means you don’t waste money on empty hits and can get the most out of your investment. 💲

All your data is added to the Clay table, from which it can be turned into hyper-personalized emails on autopilot thanks to Clay’s AI message writer and OpenAI integration.

If you want to pull data from pages as you visit them, you can also use Clay’s Chrome extension. It offers two ways to get the data you need:

1. Use pre-built recipes to pull structured data in a few clicks
2. Create custom recipes for specific data points

Finally, you can leverage AI during the prospecting phase through Claygent—Clay’s comprehensive AI researcher and assistant that can search virtually any page on the web to get the data you need.

Claygent works similarly to ChatGPT—give it a prompt, and it can perform plenty of actions, such as:

• Finding people and companies
• Answering questions about them
• Summarizing research

Start for Free, Upgrade Without Risk

Thanks to Clay’s robust free plan, you can use the core features without time limits. You get 100 monthly credits to find prospects, enrich data, and create emails in seconds. As you scale your workflow, you can get more credits and expand Clay’s functionality through four paid tiers:

Unlike many platforms, Clay doesn’t require annual contracts, so there’s no risk of vendor lock-in. Each plan comes with varying credit amounts, so you can choose one that fits your outreach needs and workflows. This further contributes to Clay’s cost-effectiveness, making it an excellent option for budget-conscious users. 📈

Create Your Clay Account Today

To write outreach emails effortlessly and explore Clay’s advanced data enrichment features, you can get started with Clay in three quick steps:

1. Head to the signup page 📃
2. Enter your name, email, and password 🔐
3. Start writing effective personalized emails 📨

If you want to learn more about Clay’s features, feel free to explore Clay University for more information and tutorials. You can also join Clay’s ever-growing Slack community to see how others are leveraging the platform. For product updates, industry news, and actionable outreach tips, sign up for Clay’s newsletter.

💡 Keep reading: Want to learn more about leveraging AI beyond email writing? Check out these articles:

• AI in marketing and sales
• AI-guided selling
• AI sales enablement
• AI lead scoring