To maintain a personal voice at scale, have your team or VAs draft the bulk of your marketing emails. However, always reserve the top paragraph for yourself to write a brief, personal story or update. This maintains a relatable, human connection with your audience while scaling content production.
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Counterintuitively, highly formatted and image-heavy emails can feel corporate and impersonal, decreasing engagement. Shifting to a simpler, plain-text style mimics a personal message from a friend, which increases perceived authenticity and encourages more replies and genuine connection.
Amy Porterfield found her newsletters with the highest open rates and clicks were those sharing personal stories, not just promoting content. This human connection, she argues, is the most powerful business strategy available to a creator.
Users instinctively look for familiar names in their inbox, not company logos. Sending emails from team members, even if automated, creates a personal connection and improves open rates because it mimics a social feed experience where personal identity is paramount.
Top sales rep Evan Greek uses a GPT model she personally trained to mimic her writing style. By providing feedback on drafts, the AI learns her preferences for tone and structure, allowing her to combine the speed of automation with genuine personalization.
Adding a deeply personal postscript (P.S.) to cold emails, such as referencing the recipient's favorite whiskey, demonstrates genuine research and builds rapport. This simple tactic humanizes the outreach and can dramatically increase the likelihood of getting a response from a busy executive.
Leverage AI in email marketing not to replace your voice, but to augment it. Use tools like ChatGPT as a brainstorming partner to generate angles and outlines. This frees up your creative energy to focus on infusing the content with personal stories and genuine connection that only a human can provide.
Instead of asking an LLM to generate a full email, create a workflow where it produces individual sections, each with its own specific strategy and prompt. A human editor then reviews the assembled piece for tone and adds "spontaneity elements" like GIFs or timely references to retain a human feel.
To prevent automations from feeling robotic, inject your brand's personality. Use conversational language, like saying "I saw you scrolling," and incorporate fun media like GIFs or memes. This approach makes automated messages feel more like a personal interaction, leading to higher engagement and positive brand perception.
Go beyond sending from a real person by creating a consistent "inbox persona." For example, framing messages as coming from an intern establishes a unique voice and a story that subscribers want to follow, making plain-text emails feel like an ongoing series rather than one-off communications.
To make your emails more engaging, stop addressing your entire list. Instead, picture one specific, real person—a friend, an ideal client, or someone you admire—and write directly to them. This simple mental shift transforms your tone from a generic broadcast into an intimate, compelling conversation.