In today’s ever-changing digital world, the need for top-notch content is never-ending. From writing catchy ads to brainstorming email hooks or creating trendy socials, marketers have their work cut out for them. However, with the help of AI, our toolbelts are filling up, and we couldn’t be more excited to dive in. That’s why for this month’s Lake One FieldNotes, our newsletter, we decided to walk and walk and solely use AI to write an email.
Why We Used AI to Write an Email
Lake One is nothing if not curious. The world of AI has been rapidly advancing, offering a plethora of tools designed to ease various marketing tasks. Curious about the impact of these tools on our creative processes, we decided to put them to the test and see how AI could help us generate, refine, and enhance content across different formats. In this case, Lake One FieldNotes.
AI Tools We Used:
To write the Lake One newsletter entirely with AI, we played around with a few popular AI tools. All platforms have different capabilities and strengths, so we utilized three different tools:
Our Process: Harnessing AI to Write an Email Newsletter
Building the Base: Our adventure kicked off with Waldo, the AI maestro of research. As is everything with AI, the prompt is king. So we gave Waldo the following prompt: “We are writing an email newsletter about the impacts of ai on B2B Paid Media. We want the entire newsletter to be created by AI so please find content about: The impact of ai on b2b online advertising Top AI tools to use for b2b online advertising Examples of how AI has been used in b2b advertising”
Waldo went to work sourcing information and organizing across 8 categories. Waldo cited nearly 20 great resources and summarized each section. As a start, it was a great set of research and content – but way too much to just drop into a newsletter. So we used Waldo’s overview and headed to Jasper.
Fine-tuning to fit the Lake One voice: With our groundwork firmly in place, it was Jasper’s turn to take the lead. We fed Jasper Waldo’s overview to capture the Lake One voice, using their customized brand voice feature. The brand voice was captured through a crawl of our website content. After a couple of runs, Jasper revised Waldo’s overview to work for us.
Adding flair with imagery: To liven up the newsletter, we enlisted Jasper to create fun imagery. We used their ‘Enhance prompt’ feature to turn our short guidance: things like “office workers using AI” into a thorough image description like “Create a photorealistic digital illustration with a close up on a woman using a computer with AI tools on the screen to generate content for advertising. The scene should be bright and well-lit, with computer monitors and modern office furniture prominently featured. Use a photorealistic style with crisp details, and consider incorporating a futuristic touch.” We did a few rounds of iterations on the prompts to get the outputs we chose (see below for a couple of funny examples we didn’t use!).
Adding in the final details: Now that the body of the newsletter was done, we just needed to write the email subject line, preview text, and an intro. We used Jasper once more to come up with creative subject lines and intriguing preview text based on our outline. John fed Chat GPT an outline to write his intro and Voila! AI wrote our email!
Our Takeaways From Using AI to Write an Email
We had a lot of fun trying out different platforms and pushing ourselves to rely on these tools. Here are some of the benefits and challenges we encountered.
Benefits of Using AI
- Channeling a subject matter ‘expert’: Getting loads of sourced information at your fingertips without needing to dig through search engines.
- Filling in the writing gaps: For those whose content writing isn’t necessarily in their wheelhouse, using AI is a great resource to get the juices flowing.
- Efficiency: Although you need to parse through outputs and refine searches, a lot of time can be saved using these tools.
Challenges of Using AI
- Finessing the right prompts for the best output: Oftentimes, getting the appropriate output takes some iteration. It is not as simple as describing the task to a coworker!
- Portraying personality: Although Jasper’s brand voice feature helps, the tone doesn’t always sound exactly like it usually would if a team member were to write it (I had to resist the urge to edit!).
Our experiment with AI-powered content creation for Lake One FieldNotes reaffirms our belief that technology is a tool to amplify our capabilities, not replace them. AI tools can be incredibly powerful assets. However, they are most effective when paired with human insight and creativity.
Going Forward
As the digital marketing landscape continues to evolve, we are excited about the possibilities that AI offers, but we’re equally committed to maintaining the authenticity and personality that define Lake One. With each step forward, we’ll remain curious, innovative, and dedicated to delivering top-notch content.
To learn more about what we are about, contact us today.
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