Updated: May 07, 2025 By: Marios
Today, 63% of email marketers and content creators constantly use artificial intelligence as a junior assistant for their daily tasks, from brainstorming, coming up with subject line ideas, refining copy, and generating images, to more. But specialists still face challenges like emails that feel impersonal and AI tools that only offer generic outputs.
The key to generating personalized and relevant emails? Context. When AI tools are able to take into account your brand’s tone of voice and terminology, subscriber segments, product or service information, and the unique goals of each campaign, they can create more than just well-written newsletters; they can generate personalized and on-brand email experiences.
In this article, we will explore why context matters in AI-generated emails, go over how to guide AI tools with better context, and offer some tips on combining AI with human expertise to strengthen your email marketing efforts and save time.
Why Context Matters in AI-Generated Emails
AI can minimize routine tasks for you and speed up the email production process, but it’s not a magic wand. If you want your emails to feel on-brand, provide valuable information, and appeal to recipients’ needs, AI tools need your guidance with the right context. Before exploring specific tips, let’s find out why context is so critical and how a lack of it can hurt your email marketing efforts.
The impact of poor context:
- Lower conversion and engagement rates—Generic emails with a robotic tone of voice won’t evoke interest or drive conversion.
- Lack of brand recognition—Without consistent branding in tone of voice, terminology, and imagery, it is challenging for subscribers to associate emails with your company and notice them in flooded inboxes.
- Poor subscriber experiences—If emails don’t consider recipients’ preferences, past behaviors, and customer journey stages, subscribers will eventually feel like just another address in your email list and unsubscribe.
How to Guide AI with Improved Context
To enhance your AI-generated email content, it’s essential to equip your preferred AI tool with better data, especially the specific characteristics of your recipients. Here, we will explore how “feeding” AI with information about your company, subscribers’ needs, and campaign goals can enhance your emails’ effectiveness.
- Brand tone of voice and terminology
Think about what sets you apart from competitors and how subscribers can recognize your emails in flooded inboxes without seeing your name. For example, if your brand tone of voice is friendly and humorous but AI outputs are too formal and corporate, your emails will feel off.
Besides essentials like your logo and color scheme, it’s also important to offer AI examples of your successful email campaigns, alongside subject lines, slogans, and typical phrases you use. It could be a consistent greeting (“Hey, friends!”), your calls to action that convert (“Let’s get started now!”), or emojis you use often. These seemingly small elements set you apart from the competition and build brand recognition. You can also highlight phrases or tones to avoid—this will help you save time on editing.
Don’t forget to add specific terminology you prefer. For instance, how do you refer to your clients—subscribers, users, or members? Do you use the term “subscription” or “plan”? “Dashboard” or “workspace”? Provide clear instructions on these details (or create a glossary) to make AI-generated newsletters feel consistent and natural.
The more accurately you define your brand’s tone of voice and terminology, the less time you must devote to refining AI-generated copy. If you use AI tools like ChatGPT, you can set custom instructions to specify the preferred tone of voice, output length, terminology, etc. This means you won’t have to repeat these guidelines with each prompt, and such information will improve output quality.
- Subscriber segments
It’s much easier to create content when you know who you are creating it for, isn’t it? The same applies to generative AI tools. Share as many details as possible about your subscriber segments—whether you want to target new recipients, loyal customers, inactive users, or those using a free subscription plan.
Different subscriber segments expect different content from your brand. For example, a new customer might expect an informative welcome email with guidelines on using your products or services. Conversely, loyal subscribers already know the basics and would be happier receiving brief emails with exclusive offers or updates.
You can also share the context regarding your personas with AI tools. Besides demographic data like location, age, and gender, focus on behavioral information (preferences, pain points, needs, purchase histories, or engagement levels).
Bonus: Use AI tools to create effective email personas and conduct interviews for each customer profile. For instance, the persona Jane Bouldry, an email marketer with 2 years of experience, struggles with exporting emails from an email builder to the preferred ESP. Then compare AI responses with feedback from actual customers from each group. As a result, you will understand what content resonates with each persona, and the AI will already know your audience’s preferences to generate email content.
- Product or service information
AI tools won’t generate relevant email content if they don’t understand what products or services your company offers. You can start with the simplest information—describe what problem customers can solve with your product and what makes it stand out from the rest. Then add details like pricing plans, basic and advanced features, updates you are currently working on, and questions customers ask the most often.
Now that the AI tool knows the basic information about your products or services, you can apply a more advanced approach and use your landing pages, data sources, and feeds to pull data for your email campaigns:
- Landing pages. Offer your AI tool a landing page with a detailed description of an event or a sale. Ask the tool to analyze this page, and mention what information you want to include in your newsletter.
For example, if you want to promote a winter sale, share the link to a landing page with featured products, time limits, and key discounts. Or if you want to generate an event invitation email, offer a landing page with the time and date, speakers' information, agenda, and location. You can also ask AI to analyze your website to find additional information (e.g., if your event is dedicated to email localization, your tool can look for blog posts on this topic).
- Feeds and data sources. Think about your product cards as data sources and your blog as a feed. Provide detailed guidelines on what you want to see in your emails so AI can analyze and pull the necessary materials from your website (e.g., banners, product descriptions, and speakers’ photos and names). Using this information as input ensures your newsletters stay on-brand across all channels and helps AI pick up certain styles, imagery, and calls to action to reflect the campaign in question.
- Email campaign goal
Even the most well-written email copy aligned with your brand voice and glossary of terms won’t be effective if it isn’t connected to your specific campaign goals. Whether you want to invite subscribers to a webinar, promote a holiday sale, or reengage inactive recipients, AI has to be aware of these goals to generate email content that drives the actions you want.
For example, if your main goal is conversion, ask AI to focus on a strong value proposition, effective CTA copy, and the fear of missing out. If you want to create a nurturing email, instruct your AI tool to concentrate on educational content that helps recipients on their customer journeys.
Combining AI with Human Expertise
While AI tools can speed up the email creation process and limit mundane tasks for email marketers, you can get the most effective results by combining AI and human expertise. Even at Web Summit, The New York Times shared that they actively use GenAI in their workflows—but it's the humans who make the final calls. You are here to lead the way while AI supports your creative efforts.
- Let AI handle the groundwork and add the final touch: AI is good at brainstorming ideas, drafting engaging text, generating subject line options, and creating appealing visuals. After these steps are complete, idea refinement, text proofreading, and image tweaking still require human expertise. Your task is to make sure the tone and style feel on-brand and the content matches your campaign goals.
- Use real-life examples to train your AI tool: AI learns from mistakes, relevant data, and your constant feedback. Your brand guidelines and examples of successful email campaigns will help AI train on your specific context.
- Benefit from modular email design: The combination of AI and modular email design helps marketers use prebuilt and brand-consistent modules (e.g., headings, footers, and product cards). These serve as building blocks that GenAI fills with content to produce a full-fledged email. With GenAI working with copy and modules responsible for an email’s structure and design, email marketers can create relevant, on-brand newsletters faster.
Wrapping Up
Improved context is the key to generating personalized and relevant emails. It’s crucial that your AI tool considers your unique tone of voice and preferred terminology, subscriber segments, product or service information, and goals of each email campaign to generate relevant emails tailored to your recipients’ needs.
Constantly offering AI data about your company, subscribers’ needs, and campaign goals will improve outputs and help you save time on post-editing. You can ask AI to analyze your landing pages, data sources, and feeds to pull relevant data for your email campaigns.
Remember to benefit from the powerful synthesis of AI and human expertise—use AI to brainstorm your product ideas and generate copy and visuals. Then apply human expertise to refine outputs and add a creative spark to generated ideas.
