When a complete stranger gives you their name and email address, they’re taking a risk on you. They’re hoping you’ll end up serving them well, rather than trying to take advantage of them.
For many marketers, this is a lot of pressure, even if they have no ill intentions – because they know the recipient is expecting great things from them. You will spend a lot of effort building your list as an online entrepreneur.
You have to come up with an enticing lead magnet, build a high-converting landing page, and drive targeted traffic – all of which take time. So you don’t want to blow it by causing people to immediately unsubscribe due to the fact that your emails aren’t deemed worthy or valuable to them.
Emails are such a personal form of content. Even though you’re using code to insert their name for personalization, it still feels like a more direct method of communication – so you have to craft your words carefully and over-deliver to not only keep people on your list, but get them to convert into buyers for you, too.
There are different types of emails you’ll want to send to your readers, so we’re going to cover an 8-step process that allows you to cater to the needs of your audience by nurturing them and showcasing your skills as a top niche marketer.
Welcome Your New Subscribers with the Help of AI
Your first impression is an important one when it comes to email marketing. The recipient may have hesitated to sign up, and when that initial email hits their inbox, they’re opening it in apprehension, wondering if you’re going to be a typical spammer.
When they get that initial email, the bare minimum they’re expecting is for you to deliver the free gift you promised on the sign up page. But ideally, you want to go above and beyond – make them feel relief that you’re not like all the others, and delightfully surprised at your first contact with them.
This is where you can showcase the tone you’ll be using. Whether it’s a drill sergeant tone to push them into action or a caring and nurturing tone, your email will set the stage for what’s to come.
The first thing you need to do is thank them! It’s a big deal to hand over your contact information, and while you might be thinking they should thank you for the free gift, it’s actually you who should be grateful they took a chance on you.
In addition to welcoming and thanking them for their subscription, you need to immediately provide a link to the download or place to access your free gift. You might want to mention that you’ve snuck a little surprise bonus into the file that they weren’t expecting.
It’s always a pleasant surprise to get more than what we asked for. Another thing you should do is tell them a little about what to expect as a subscriber. If you have a steady pattern of when and how often you email out, you can mention it.
If you do any marketing in this email, make sure you do it with a big incentive for your new subscriber. This can be a one time only steep, site-wide discount on your store, for example – or a coupon code for an individual product.
And lastly, you need to make sure that your new subscriber begins forming a connection with you. So you want to invite them to connect with you – whether it’s on a social media profile, your blog, a contact form or directly via email.
Make them feel comfortable asking questions or reaching out, because it shows how much you really care. Now if you’re not used to developing emails like this, AI can help! You just have to give it a little bit of information based on the above criteria.
First, let it know the tone you’re going for. Then, tell it what all you want to include, such as the thank you for singing up, link to the free gift (with the name of it), any incentives you’re adding, and the invitation.
You also may want to have it write something acknowledging their pain point or goal based on what they signed up for. In our case, we’re going to use a newbie marketer as an example and the gift we’re giving is a report called Start-Up Success on a Shoestring Budget.
You can use any type of AI tool that works best for you. For our purposes, we’re going to use ChatGPT. Let’s prompt the AI machine by telling it the following:
“I want you to write a welcome email for my new subscribers who signed up for a report called Start-Up Success on a Shoestring Budget because they are strapped for money and want to build an online business. I’d like you to use an empathetic tone discussing their struggles when you welcome them onto my list. Include a spot to provide them with the link to the free gift download. I also want you to tell them I’ve included a special surprise bonus in the gift. And help them get started with a 60% off discount code for my store at website.com. Lastly, invite them to connect with me via email and make it sound warm and welcoming, like they have a friend in their corner to support them. Make it sound like a personal friend-to-friend email and not a community of subscribers.”
Now you will likely need to tweak the response until you get what you want. For example, AI still used the word community, so I had to say specifically, “Quit using the word community.”
Why? Because I want the email to feel personal, not like a mass response. Now AI actually came up with something I hadn’t included – a personal note about having faced my own struggles.
So you can use that as inspiration to include a small moment when you may have faced budget concerns, too. The subject line wasn’t good. It read: A Personal Welcome to Our Group of Entrepreneurs!
That’s not very personal. So let’s prompt AI to do better by saying something like, “I don’t like the subject line. Write something better (give me 10 options) that motivates them to start a business on a budget, but make it emotional, not spammy. ONLY give me the subject lines, don’t rewrite the entire email.”
ChatGPT loves colon marks, so every subject line is long. Prompt it to shorten them. If you still don’t like the results, keep prompting it. For example, I like to use the word “Welcome!” at the beginning of a welcome email.
But then there needs to be a call to action statement, so you can tell AI to create a list of subject lines with Welcome at the beginning, followed by an action statement for starting a business on a budget.
In the end, we’ll go with: Welcome! Time to Build Your Dream Business on a Budget! This immediately lets the recipient know their welcome email has arrived, and what it’s related to – the free gift topic they signed up for.
The body of the email that AI sent was almost perfect. I only changed one portion of a single sentence where it talked about a group again. It said: “I’m thrilled to welcome you to our group of like-minded entrepreneurs.”
So instead, I changed it to this: “I’m thrilled to be working with a like-minded entrepreneur who sees the importance of keeping costs down and profits high.” That way, the recipient seed this as a friend-to-friend communication, and not a mass email to everyone.
The only other thing you may want to tweak is adding your own story – just a line or two, not an entire memoir – and a small bit about how often they should expect to hear from you with tips and advice. This is something you can prompt AI to include if you want, or write it yourself.
Let AI Develop an Email Series You Can Use to Cater to Your Subscribers
Once your welcome email has been written, the next step is to let AI help you develop an email series. This is something all marketers should have on hand. Some people actually make this the gift that they are willing to give an exchange for the subscribers name and email address, but most people use a lead magnet report instead.
You can also have an email series written ahead of time by AI so that if anything ever arises and you need to take a little bit of time off, such as for travel or for a health issue, you can simply queue up this series and let it nurture your list for you on autopilot.
The first thing you want to do is have the system help you think of a good topic for a series that would go over well with your subscribers. You can prompt the AI like this: “Give me a list of 10 topics that would be suitable for an email series for an audience of new online entrepreneurs who are trying to build a business online on a shoestring budget.”
It delivered the following results (with more detail that I’ve left out):
* Introduction to online business
* Digital marketing on a budget
* SEO for beginners
* Creating content that converts
* Building a strong brand
* Customer acquisition strategies
* Maximizing conversions
* Scaling your business
* Outsourcing on a budget
* Maintaining work-life balance
This is something where you can sometimes get the topic to slant towards your target audience (people on a budget starting their own business) and sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to have that as your focus.
For example, with the first one, you could definitely tailor that email series to be budget minded. You could do the same for the one about SEO, creating content, and others. But some of them, such as work-life balance maybe good marketing topics in general, but they don’t have anything to do with a budget.
If you ever wonder how you would tie something in, just ask the AI. I prompted the machine this way: “How would I tie the 10th one into a topic of marketing on a budget? I’m not sure how work-life balance is related to budget.”
Amazingly, it delivered some smart results. It told me that if they’re managing their time wisely, they’ll get more done in a shorter amount of time and save money. It also said that operating on a budget can be stressful, so helping them avoid burnout can make them more productive and profitable.
And lastly, it advised me that work-life balance is important in staying motivated, which is sometimes hard to do when everyone else is pouring money into their business, and you have to do things with limitations.
So it’s not impossible, but it’s still not my favorite slant. You can even ask AI: “Which of those 10 topics do you think you could outline a 7-part email series for?” It will respond: “I believe Digital Marketing on a Budget would be a great topic and here is a possible outline for the series…”
If you want to see what it could do with the others, prompt it! Say something like, “Can you do a possible outline for the one on SEO but make it all about SEO on a budget?” It will say it certainly can and deliver some results for you.
We’ll go with the Digital Marketing on a Budget. But let’s prompt AI to create a better name for our series. I told AI: “I want to do Digital Marketing on a Budget, but can you give me 10 better names for the series and keep them pretty short?”
It delivered two that stood out to me: Budget Marketing Hacks and Low-Cost Marketing Mastery. I like the hacks option better because it’s a buzz word many people use in this industry, so let’s go with that one.
I then told AI to rename the outline so that it included the wording Hack #1, Hack #2, etc. You want to go over the results, because sometimes what it provides you will not necessarily be in line with what you have promised in the series.
For example, AI gave me a list of seven email topics, but the first one was simply an introduction about budget marketing. That is not necessarily a tip or hack, so I asked it to replace it with an actionable tip.
Now, instead of the subject for email #1 being “Introduction to Budget Marketing,” I have a real hack – “Stretch Your Budget By Repurposing Content.” Another of the hacks it provided was simply, “Email Hacking Strategies.”
That’s not really a hack. So instead, we’ll prompt AI by saying, “On hack #5, can you give me an actionable hack or tip for email marketing regarding budget?” The first result wasn’t much better.
It simply changed it to, “Increase Email Open Rates with Creative Subject Lines.” You have to be willing to call out the AI machine when it doesn’t deliver for you. I responded with: “How does that have anything to do with budget?”
Luckily, the AI machine will apologize for the confusion and give you an actionable tip like you wanted. In this case, it changed it to a true hack, which was, “Design a High-Converting Email Template with Free Tools.”
Once you have your series mapped out and in a logical order (if applicable), have AI start writing the emails. You can try this one of two ways. The first is simply to say, “Write Email #1: Hack #1: Stretch Your Budget By Repurposing Content.”
Or, if you know do you want certain things in it, you can say something like, “Write Email #1: Hack #1: Stretch Your Budget By Repurposing Content and make sure you start by introducing the problem, then explain what repurposing means, and offer some strong tips on how to implement it. End with a strong call to action.”
With the first option, AI does a fairly good job, but it doesn’t deliver enough information. It basically just tells people to repurpose content like turning videos into text, etc. With the second method, it provides lots of great information and three very specific tips or hacks.
To complete this task, you want AI to write you a teaser email for your subscribers announcing the upcoming series. Prompt it like this: “I want you to create a teaser email for this series. Don’t tell them everything that’s in it, but make them look forward to getting the emails for the Budget Marketing Hacks and hype up how it’s going to help them.”
You’ll be sending this email out first – getting subscribers excited about the value you’re about to provide, and making sure they know to be on the lookout for your emails. When I had a I write this email, even though I told it not to tell them what was in it, it did mention a couple of things.
So I deleted that. It also told people to sign up for the emails, but they are already on my list, so I deleted that sentence as well. This is why it’s important for you to read through all of the content that any AI machine delivers for you.
Promotional Emails Are a Breeze Using AI’s Input
You wouldn’t believe how many people are intimidated about the thought of marketing to their subscribers. Promoting products to someone who has granted you the ability to contact them via email sometimes makes you take pause because you don’t want to be viewed as a spammer.
However, you are in this business to make money. Promotional emails are part of the package, and most subscribers understand this. The key is to make sure you have plenty of value going out to them so that you are not only pushing products without giving in return.
AI has no problem and no hesitation creating promotional emails. Whether you are sending out a promo for your own product, or to someone else’s product that you are promoting as an affiliate, all you have to do is prompt it to craft the words for you.
So your example target audience in this report is for newbie marketers on a budget. When you think about items that you want to promote, you first want to pick the best product for their needs.
Not only do these individuals need quality, but they need good pricing, too. For you, as an affiliate marketer, you might want to consider something that will give you recurring commissions.
So promoting an email autoresponder system would be a wise choice. Start off by asking AI to answer a few questions for you, such as:
* “Why is list building so important for marketers on a budget?”
* “What features are most important in a good email autoresponder?”
* “What reasons could I give for why Aweber the best autoresponder for newbie marketers on a budget?”
Now prompt it to come up with the promotional email by saying: “Using all of that information, I want you to write a promotional email that first introduces the concept of why having a list is so important, followed by the importance of a quality autoresponder system and include a promotional slant to talk about why Aweber is the tool newbies on a budget should consider for their email marketing. Be sure to deliver a strong call to action to get them to invest in Aweber, even on a budget – especially since they get up to 500 subscribers on 1 list at no cost when starting out.”
Sometimes you can ask it for all of the benefits of a product, or feed it information about special deals that you want included. Or, you can ask it to highlight why one product is better than another.
For example, for the newbie slant, many newbies often go with MailChimp thinking it has the best deal. So you can prompt AI with: “Tell me why Aweber is a better email autoresponder than MailChimp.”
It will give you a list of reasons such as:
* Better deliverability rates
* Advanced segmentation
* Strong automation features
* More affordable pricing
* Better customer support
So then your promo email might take a different slant, with a subject line like, “Big Mistake New Marketers Make with Email Marketing.” And the person will open the email to see if they’re making that mistake, and your slant can discuss it’s the very first step that often results in an error – who they pick as their autoresponder system.
AI Can Help You Craft Emails That Deliver Subscriber Perks
When you are the owner of a list of subscribers, you have a duty to treat them well and nurture them in their journey. One way you can do this is to find or create perks for your subscribers who stay loyal to you.
There are a variety of ways you can show your gratitude for your subscribers. For example, you can give them unexpected freebies at times other than their welcome email.
You can also give them access to things like gated content, which is password protected content that you post to your blog or on another website that the public does not have access to.
You can have your AI system come up with an email that announces the special benefit to your subscribers. So let’s pretend you’ve created a case study on how to start an online business for under $20 per month.
Let’s prompt AI to write an email announcing this and sharing the value in a way that makes the subscriber feel special. Type in: “I’ve created a password-protected case study only for my list of loyal subscribers that teaches them how to start a business online for under $20 a month. Make them feel very special and emphasize how no one other than my subscribers will have access to this. Also go into how much it will benefit them.”
Send Informative Authority Emails to Bolster Your Niche Leadership
For this particular step, you are going to be creating one or more emails that simply showcase your leadership as an authority figure in your niche. Your purpose here is to prove to your subscribers that you pay attention to their needs, and that you will notify them whenever there is something helpful that they need to know.
There are two different ways to go about this. If you are wanting to deliver some sort of evergreen information, you can use ChatGPT. But it is limited to data from 2021, so if you want something that is trending or newsworthy, you’ll need to use a tool like Google’s Bard.
If you go to Bard, we can prompt it with: “What’s some cutting edge or new information that would help online entrepreneurs on a budget?” Bard will reply with different results, one of which includes Artificial Intelligence.
It’s true – that’s a topic everyone is talking about these days, and it’s cutting edge insight. Now you can take that idea back to ChatGPT. So you can then prompt ChatGPT with this: “Write an email for new marketers on a budget about 10 ways AI can help them save money in their marketing budget.”
You can give any type of tips and newsworthy information. If the tips aren’t enough to make a strong impact, pair it with additional content that you ask AI to create, such as prompting it for data on how many people use AI in their business, the accuracy and quality of AI, and so on.
AI Has the Ability to Create Complete Email Newsletters
Many people send out more than just a single focus email to their lists. Instead, they entice people to sign up for a newsletter. A newsletter will have different sections in it that all have their own unique focus, and the sections remains the same each week, while the information in each section is different.
So to start with, if you aren’t familiar with what an email newsletter includes, you can prompt AI like this: “I’d like to write a marketing newsletter that I email out once a week for newbies on a budget period what sections should I have in my newsletter?”
AI will give you a list that includes things like:
* Welcome message
* Tip of the week
* Featured resource
* Case study or success story
* Q&A or Ask the Expert
* Recommended reading
* Industry news
* Subscriber spotlight
Now that you can some good ideas, pick what you want and prompt AI to do the work for you! First ask it to “Give me some ideas for names for my newsletter.” It gives many ideas, so you can pick one form the list, like The Budget Marketer, The Marketing Penny Pincher, The Thrifty Marketer, Marketing on a Dime, etc.
I like the plain one – The Budget Marketer. Next, tell AI which one you’ve chosen and which sections you want to include from the list it gave you. We’ll include the welcome message, tip of the week, featured resource, Q&A, recommended reading, and industry news since we’re not going into specific subscriber success stories.
Write your prompt like this to inform AI of your project: “I’m choosing to name the newsletter The Budget Marketer. I’ll have the following sections: welcome message, tip of the week, featured resource, Q&A, recommended reading, and industry news. I want you to write the newsletter, starting with the welcome message first.”
Initially, AI delivered a welcome message that basically rehashed what they would find in the newsletter. So I re-prompted it with these instructions: “I don’t really want a rehash of what’s in the newsletter. Rewrite the welcome email to just touch on their pain points with marketing on a budget and end the message with an invitation to enjoy issue #1 and send in any questions or comments they may have.”
With those specific instructions, it wrote a much better welcome that really hit on the struggles of the reader. Next, you can ask AI to give you ideas for each section as you go, then choose which one you like and have it write it.
For example, instead of just prompting AI with, “Now write the tip of the week,” tell it: “Give me ideas for the tip of the week.” Then you choose what goes into it, allowing you to maintain control over what you teach.
We’re going to go with this one: “Attend virtual events on a budget: Save money on travel and accommodations by participating in affordable virtual events, such as webinars or conferences, to network with other professionals and learn new skills.”
Prompt AI to expand on this tip of the week like this: “I like the tip for attending virtual events on a budget. Write this section of the newsletter and be sure to explain why this is such a great option for newbies on a budget, how they feel left out not being able to attend in person, and how much cheaper virtual options are.”
It will give some great advice. You may have to continually remind ChatGPT or any AI tool to slant it for your exact demographic (in this case marketers on a budget) so that it all ties in together.
Repeat the process for all sections of the email newsletter. Ask for ideas, pick one, and have it write that section. You also might want to keep a file of the ideas it gives you so that you immediately know what to ask for in the second, third and subsequent issues.
For the recommended reading section, Bard might give you specifics, like naming specific blogs, books, and courses – while ChatGPT might just say “read blogs, read books, and read courses.”
If they do give you specifics, make sure that a.) they still exist and b.) they are what AI says they are – and a good fit for your readers of this newsletter. Bard suggests The Lean Startup as a book.
After checking it out, you can see that it does exist, is written by Eric Ries, and then you can prompt AI like this: “Write the recommended reading section and recommend a book called The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Do you know about the book?”
Now remember, AI will lie. So double check that what it gives you back is correct. And it was. For the industry news section, you might go back to Bard, which is up to date. ChatGTP is stuck in 2021, so let’s prompt Bard like this: “What are some newsworthy tidbits recently for a newsletter in the internet marketing industry about free tools or strategies? What about recent news that could impact marketers that has to do with profits or costs?”
It gives you many ideas, but one is: Inflation is on the rise. We’ll go with that one, and have AI expand on it. This time, we’ll use Bard to complete the content because ChatGPT isn’t caught up, and it did a fantastic job of providing tips – but if you want it to add specifics about the current inflation situation, you can ask for that, too.
Warming Up a Cold List Is Easy with AI at Your Side
Sometimes, a situation occurs where you may not have contacted your list in quite a while, and it has grown cold. You have to reconnect with your subscribers, and this can sometimes feel a bit awkward.
Instead of putting yourself out there and not knowing what to say, let AI do the work for you! The first thing you have to do is explain the problem to your AI tool, and to make sure it knows how much you do or do not want to share.
It also needs to know your goal in reconnecting with these subscribers, what kind of tone you want to use, and any other specifics that you want to include, such as a free gift for being so patient or staying subscribed.
Let’s prompt AI like this: “I have a list of subscribers that I have not emailed in months. I had some unexpected responsibilities arise that kept me from working online. I need you to write an email that warms up my cold list. I want the tone of the email to be apologetic, yet enthusiastic about being back and being able to help them with their goals. I also want you to mention a free gift that I want to offer them for being so patient and staying subscribed. It’s called “7 Ways to Start Earning $100 a Day on Autopilot.”
It did an impressive job of writing the email with zero corrections or tweaks needed. Had a very good tone of apology, yet sounded enthusiastic and positive. You don’t want to send an email moping about your problems.
If the results that you got back were lacking, you could simply re-prompt the AI tool and tell it to be more apologetic or more enthusiastic, etc. Don’t be afraid to redirect the robot because it doesn’t have feelings and it can correct itself based on your input.
Use AI to Come Up with Relationship-Building Emails
Sending value in your emails is the crux of how you should be marketing to your subscribers. However, business is not all about facts and figures or strategies and tools. It also, especially in this industry, depends on the people and the relationships you have with them.
You want to periodically send out emails that make your subscribers feel connected to you on an emotional level. So let’s prompt ChatGPT like this: “I’d like to send out a relationship-building email to my list of struggling marketers on a budget. What are some things I could discuss that would endear them to me or make them feel like I have their back and support them?”
Now if you already have a topic that you know you want to bond with them over, you can certainly feed that data into your AI tool and have it whip up something for you. But this is handy in cases where you want to have that bond and loyalty, but you just don’t know what to say.
AI will return results like:
* Your own struggles
* Success stories
* Personal touch details like hobbies
* Encouragement
If you want to put in some basic details about some sort of struggle that you went through that they can relate to, you can have AI write it for you. But in our case, we’re going to go with the last option, having it write an encouraging email to your list.
First, you want to ask the AI tool what type of emotions marketers often feel when they are limited with a small budget and trying to build a business. It will tell you answers such as frustration, anxiety, insecurity, guilt, and oddly – optimism.
You can select one of those and have the AI tool write your email so that it provides encouragement for your subscribers who are feeling that emotion. If you don’t want to use emotion, you can use a specific situation, such as having your payment platform shut down or being confronted by a rude customer.
For our example, we are going to prompt AI like this: “My list of marketers on a budget often feel insecurity in trying to be competitive in a niche when they have no money to spend on things others are buying, like top notch tools, courses, coaching, etc. I want you to write an encouraging email that starts off talking about their problem and the emotions that come with it, and then motivates them to realize it’s not as big of an obstacle as they may think. Share tips with them on how to get past this defeating mindset.”
When AI delivers the results, it may have wonderful information, but read a little stale. Sometimes you have to prompt it to be more emotional. You can tell it to paint a picture for the reader about how they are feeling, or even insert some of the emotions you know, as a human, they may feel – such as shame in not being able to afford the same things their competitors are using.
There’s no reason, with AI sitting there waiting to be used as a resource, that you should be ignoring your subscribers or waiting until you have a sudden burst of ideas in order to communicate with them.
As you can see, using AI correctly is not as simple as asking it to write an email. You have to do a lot of brainstorming on your own and prompt and redirect it whenever necessary.
You’ll also want to go through all of the content that it creates, extracting things that don’t fit, and adding wording that sets you apart from a machine or from your competitors.
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