Is AI-powered cold email the future of sales or a spammy nightmare? Learn from a real-world example and discover how to balance automation with human connection.
A successful cold email program — or “prospecting,” if you prefer — takes careful handling. You’re contacting strangers one-on-one to persuade them to initiate a business relationship. It’s like calling someone you’ve never met to arrange a dinner date. (Do people even do that anymore?)
Cold emails take delicacy and precision. You have to show quickly that you know enough about your contact to have a reason for emailing them out of the blue and that engaging with you would drive a specific benefit.
Email automation can help you speed up sending cold emails, but you must be wary of sacrificing authenticity for scale. ChatGPT and other writing bots can give you workable first drafts that you can tweak to match your prospects. But you shouldn’t put your entire email-prospecting program on autopilot and expect good results.
Also Read: New Bulk Email Sender Rules: How to Stay Out of the Spam Folder
What would you do with this email?
I’ve been thinking about this since receiving the following cold email.
Hi <First Name>,
Congratulations on your remarkable achievements as an International Bestselling Author, Award Winner, and Keynote Speaker, all while leading <Company Name> as CEO.* It’s evident that your expertise and experience have made a significant impact in the industry.
For context, I’m [Name], a co-founder of [Name], an AI-based sales engagement software designed to accelerate business growth. Our platform offers multi-channel engagement, real-time data-driven insights, and customizable intent-based delivery.
We’ve had the pleasure of working with industry giants like Facebook, Marks & Spencer, and Transunion, and our team of email marketing consultants, each with over 10 years of experience, ensures exceptional results.**
However, we noticed that your email marketing strategy might have untapped potential. Our experts have identified key email metrics beyond opens and clicks that can provide deeper insights into your campaign’s success.***
If you’d like to explore how [Name] can further enhance your email marketing efforts, we invite you to join an exclusive strategy session. Simply initiate a chat with us at Holistic Email Marketing Exclusive Pitch Deck Chat. We have hundreds of bookings**** this month, showcasing the value our sessions provide. Secure your spot now to unlock the full potential of your email marketing campaigns.
Is this the worst sales pitch ever?
The best thing I could say about this email is that it gave me plenty of fodder to discuss what goes wrong when you turn your lead generation process to AI and automation. We help many of our clients craft their prospecting emails, and they don’t look like this.
- My first response: Who sent me this email? I couldn’t tell if it was someone in the same business as me — providing email services to clients and companies of all sizes and market niches — or a software company (badly) pitching me to use its AI platform.
- My second response: How did you get my name? I suspect this company used its AI-based platform to scour LinkedIn for names, email addresses, and company information. Then, it plugged all that information into its automation platform to create an email from a template.
- My third response: If you have the same clients I do, and you provide the same services that I do, and you know these are the services I provide, why are you trying to sell me the same services I offer to my clients?
Are you telling me that my agency, which, among other benefits, helps our clients discover their “untapped potential,” needs your help?
After 14 years as an agency, we’re doing pretty well. To imply otherwise is rather insulting. But if you know something I don’t, show me in the email so I have a reason to set up a call.
My overall impression: This email embodies everything bad about cold email, automated prospecting, and AI. It’s everything I have advised email marketers not to do. This was a big-time, confusing failure.
4 takeaways for better email prospecting
I will be the first to acknowledge that email prospecting is hard work. It would be best if you kept lots of prospects in the pipeline.
Still, you don’t have enough time in the day to research potential contacts, write a personal note to each one, and do everything else you have to as a business development specialist.
Also Read: The Email Marketing Renaissance: Beyond the Blast, Building Relationships
Having said that, I have some thoughts about what to do and what not to do.
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Don’t leave everything to automation
As I noted previously, you must be wary of sacrificing authenticity just to get the job done or turn the whole process over to AI and automation.
If your business development program relies heavily on cold email, your message must be more personal and persuasive. It needs to be sincere. You need to include many signals that indicate you have a reason to reach out to your recipients.
Harvesting names and contact info from websites or LinkedIn isn’t a best practice for anybody. Gathering information from these sources might be an okay way to start researching prospects, but you must comb through your data to sift out the best potential contacts.
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Tell me how you know me
Like anyone who has ever used an email to download a white paper, sign up for a free intro to a paid service, enter a giveaway, visit a booth at a trade show, or even subscribe to email updates, I’m not offended when a salesperson from that company contacts me later to see if I’m interested in buying.
But an email that doesn’t indicate any previous content? Out it goes. And I didn’t do it, but I would guess another common reaction is to smash the spam-complaint button.
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Don’t just personalize — get personal
If you look back at the email I received, you’ll see it uses basic personalization:
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- My first name is in the greeting. It lists my company name.
- It mentions my accomplishments (author, award winner, speaker).
- It talks about companies I have worked with (the key point being that I worked with these companies. I didn’t see those brand names on the prospecting company’s website when I checked it out).
And no, flattery won’t get you anywhere with me.
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ChatGPT is a first-draft tool, not a final-copy generator
In reading over this email and the follow-up letter, likely generated because I clicked on a couple of the links in the original email for research for this article, I found several inconsistencies and odd wording choices, along with a typo or two.
The follow-up mixed first-person and third-person references in the same sentence. It’s a minor thing, maybe, but it sounded off — not a good thing for a prospecting campaign. Ultimately, the whole experience was confusing.
I don’t know whether the sender used ChatGPT or another writing bot to create the basic email or its follow-up or what rules they used to fill in the personal data. But I do know that somebody needed to review this message but didn’t. It doesn’t instill confidence or make me want to engage.
Also Read: Forget the ESP! 4 Email Marketing Initiatives That Drive Real Growth
A note about the technology
Once I sorted out the sender, I saw it used a third-party AI scheduling service. Upon closer examination, I saw references to “AI-optimized, spam-tolerant mailboxes“ for sending emails. What is a spam-tolerant mailbox? Is this a thing now?
This combination of AI and automation to send fill-in-the-blank cold emails with no context appears to be the latest iteration of the elusive silver bullet: the device that will solve all of your marketing problems.
Using AI for cold email outreach
Everything about this email confused and angered me. It raised more questions than answers. There’s no way you’ll get business from me because of that. Even if this company or the software they’re using observes the law, its poor execution is an example of AI technology gone bad.
I’m excited to see how we can use AI to streamline and handle the more mundane aspects of our daily business. But we need to exercise much more care in how we use it. Spam is still spam, even when it’s dressed up as AI.
