Using AI Tools for Writing Email Copy – A Deep Dive

Using AI Tools for Writing Email Copy – A Deep Dive

Using AI tools for writing email copy in 2026 is a strategy to accelerate content creation, overcome writer's block, and rapidly generate variations for testing.

Generative AI platforms like Jasper, Copy.ai, and ChatGPT are used to draft compelling subject lines, structure promotional emails, and brainstorm different calls-to-action (CTAs).

The process relies on effective prompt engineering, with the AI generating a first draft that the human copywriter then refines to ensure it matches the brand's unique tone of voice.

Understanding What Makes Email Copy Tick

Now, before we start utilising AI tools for email copywriting, it is vital that we first understand what the ingredients of a winning copy are. Come, let's take a look!

Lead The Way With Your Subject Lines

With as many as 347.3 billion emails being sent daily across the globe, one can only imagine the kind of traffic that grips the inboxes of email users.

Such a scenario makes it quite challenging for brands to call audiences' attention to themselves, let alone win them over with their products or services.

That said, they have one weapon in their armoury, which, if deployed effectively, can help them captivate their subscribers' imagination – subject lines (brownie points for everyone who guessed it right!)

Given that it's the first thing that recipients notice about your email, the onus on subject lines to be pitch-perfect is relatively high. So, what goes into crafting a winning subject line? Let's find out.

• Pay attention to the length of your subject line. Take into account the fact that your subscribers access your emails across both desktop and mobile devices. So, if your subject line is of a different length, it'll get clipped off, hugely impacting your readers' user experience. Studies reckon that the sweet spot lies somewhere around 70 characters. To be extra concise, brands sometimes craft subject lines ranging between 15-30 characters. The problem with such subject lines is that they are too brief to convey anything meaningful to the recipient. 
• Always strive to pique the subscriber's curiosity. Who doesn't like unravelling a mystery, after all? However, in the process, take care not to sound unnecessarily vague. 
• Keep the subject line relevant to the email content. While this might sound too obvious a directive, you'd be surprised to discover how many out there fail to come good on this. If your subject line talks about apples, your email body also HAS to talk about apples; that's non-negotiable (unless you're planning an offbeat April Fool's campaign or something, but that's an exceptional case, of course).
• While it's all right to go for witty and sparkly with your subject lines, ensure you offer clarity. For your subject lines to nudge your subscribers toward opening your emails, they must be clear before anything else. 
• Consider adding emojis to amp up the visual appeal of your subject line. However, you're strongly advised to exercise your discretion while doing so. This is because emojis are viewed as informal assets and thus may not align with all brand values. 
• Create a sense of urgency with your subject lines. Is the sale deadline approaching soon? Communicate it in your headline. Something's going out of stock? Communicate it in your headline. You get the drift, don't you?
• If your email carries any special offers or coupons, hinting at the same in your subject line will increase the likelihood of subscribers engaging with your email. 
• Consider addressing your subscribers using their first name. However, a simple personalisation manoeuvre can go a long way toward helping you catch your audience's eyeballs.
• Steer clear of using the “no-reply” sender name—emails from unfamiliar senders cue recipients to direct them to their spam. Adding the name of a real person is the wise way forward.
• Timing is essential; always keep that in mind. If you are a food brand, try delivering an email during lunch. If you sell winter jackets, consider emailing as winter approaches; get what we hint at. Emails delivered at the right time make their relevance highly apparent, amplifying their possibility of fetching engagement.

Besides ensuring that your subject lines hit all the right notes, focusing on your preview text is equally important. Write your review texts such that they add to the appeal of your subject lines and build on the context they are offering.

An impactful preview text in tandem with a compelling subject line can significantly skyrocket the engagement rates of your campaigns. 

Getting The Best Out of Your AI Assistant

Right, so we know what good email copy looks like. But getting an AI to write it is another matter entirely.

The quality of what you get out is directly tied to the quality of what you put in. Rubbish prompts get you rubbish copy.

To get genuinely useful results, you need to be a good manager. Think of the AI as a junior copywriter who is incredibly fast but has zero context about your business.

You need to provide that context with a clear, detailed brief. Here's what that looks like in practice.

• Define the Role and Goal. Don't just ask it to “write an email.” Tell it who to be. For instance, “Act as an expert email marketer with a witty, conversational tone.” Then, state the objective clearly: “The goal is to drive clicks to our new product page and get early-bird sign-ups.”
• Provide Heaps of Context. Give it the raw materials. Who is the target audience? What are their pain points? What is the product, and what makes it different from the competition? The more relevant detail you provide about your brand's voice and offer, the closer the AI will get to what you need.
• Specify the Tone and Style. Be explicit about the feeling you want to evoke. Words like “professional,” “empathetic,” “urgent,” “playful,” or “reassuring” give the AI clear guardrails. Without this guidance, it will likely default to a generic and bland corporate voice.
• Outline Structure and Constraints. Tell it exactly what you need. Specify the components like “three subject line options under 50 characters,” “a short preview text,” “a body of around 150 words,” and “a clear call-to-action.” This stops the AI from waffling and keeps the copy focused.

Make Your Content Accessible

As calls for building an inclusive world order get increasingly prominent every day, it has become imperative for brands to make their communication accessible. Apart from firing on all cylinders from the perspective of content, your email copy must abide by accessibility standards as well to be considered ideal. 

Wondering what measures you can take to make your copy accessible? The pointers below illustrate the same.

• Avoid organising your content into clunky paragraphs. Break your copy down, whenever possible, into brief sections of 2-3 sentences each. This way, individuals using assistive technologies to read emails can engage effectively with your emails. Besides, content that is organised into shorter blocks facilitates better readability.
• Try to reduce the usage of long and winding sentences while writing your email copy. Also, take care not to use a complex vocabulary. Above anything else, your copy must be primed for effective communication, and complicated sentences and inaccessible vocabulary can be the biggest impediments to you realising that.
• Get in the habit of writing descriptive hyperlink text. Shun run-of-the-mill phrases such as “Click Here”, “Find Out More”, and the like. Instead, write descriptive hyperlink text that tells the reader exactly where they will be led upon clicking on it.
• Use headings, subheadings, and bulleted lists to organise your copy. This will help make your content extremely consumable.

Keep The Customer at The Centre, Always

Often, brands fail to engage their subscribers because they are too busy waxing eloquently about their offerings' supposed prodigious capabilities rather than highlighting how these very features can make a difference in their customers' lives.

Putting the spotlight on the USPs of your products or services is, obviously, a part of the email copywriting gig, but what's critical is how you approach it. 

Always try to make your product's features about your buyers. Say you are selling a scooter. To make an impression, mention its mileage, the durability of its body, the battery's lifetime, and the like.

While all this is, no doubt, important information, a prospective buyer also needs to be told how these aspects will add value to their lives.

So, you need to connect the higher mileage with more significant savings, the durable body with lesser maintenance, and stuff like that. Unless the value proposition of your offerings is communicated to your customers, they can't be persuaded to care for it.

If you feel there's a need for detail, go for it. Even though the rule of thumb is to keep things crisp and concise while writing email copy, as long as you offer value, you can afford to skirt around that convention now and then. 

Say Goodbye to Jargon

This particular email copywriting best practice is aimed primarily at B2B and SaaS players who mostly dabble with complex, technical offerings.

While explaining the scope of your product or service to your subscribers, avoid jargon as much as possible. Sure, the occasional technical term is probably inevitable, and we perfectly understand that, but if your email copy reads like a white paper, you need to double-take it. 

Clarity and readability are the hallmarks of exemplary email copy, and frequent usage of jargon will take you in the opposite direction.

Ultimately, if the fundamental essence of your offerings is lost on your readers, they will be reluctant to engage with them. And the only way to do so efficiently is by writing email copy that is articulate, conversational, and jargon-free.

Focus on Your Word Choice

Since email copywriting is informed by brevity, it becomes all the more important for writers to populate this limited real estate with words that will impact the readers.

Your email copy can't strictly be practical; it must also elicit an emotional response from the readers. Thankfully, there are quite a few ways to achieve this. 

One method involves using analogies and metaphors. Other than offering greater clarity, these literary devices help your readers visualise the information you are trying to convey much better.

Then, there are sensory words, which, if used tactfully, can help make your copy highly evocative and, therefore, much more emotionally resonant.

While writing the CTA, using powerful words is generally encouraged- they help make your CTA highly persuasive, eventually nudging your readers to take the desired action.

Attention to word choice can elevate your copy, and by extension, your email, from functional to memorable. And trust us, in this day and age of inbox fatigue, you want to aim for nothing short of amazing!

The Merits of Using AI

Now that we have a proper idea of the benchmarks that define good email copy, we can satisfactorily delve into AI-powered email copywriting. It is only natural that we consider this approach's pros and cons a prominent part of this discussion. First, we take a look at the former. 

Break Free of The Writer's Block

For a writer, nothing is more unpleasant than being forced to stare at the blinking cursor on a blank screen, finding themselves, against their will, using the Backspace button on the keyboard more than anything else.

The much-dreaded writer's block entertains no whim and fancy, and when it announces itself amidst an extremely pressing deadline, it can cause significant stress and anxiety. Thanks to the advent of generative AI tools, however, the days of writer's block might soon be numbered. 

You see, all you have to do with these tools is enter the very kernel of an idea, and they will generate multiple drafts around it. These drafts may be far from what you seek, but they will provide the fodder you need to get your creative juices flowing.

On odd days, these tools can help you out of a lurch; on even days, they can take your already heightened productivity to astronomical heights! Rightfully, these tools are being touted as writers' assistants possessing a pedigree that has never been witnessed before. 

Produce Large Volumes of Content Instantaneously

Be it blog drafts, emailers, or social media posts- by feeding a few lines of instruction, you can generate whatever content asset you need in the flash of an eye.

The best part? There's no bar on the volume, either! This is extremely handy in cases where one must create multiple iterations of a particular brief while adhering to a fixed template.

Imagine the amount of time such a task would consume if it were attempted manually. By leveraging generative AI tools, you can immensely fast-track content creation that involves an element of repetition.

Think of all the hours that go into manually drafting similarly worded emails for your contacts during the holiday season.

With generative AI, all you need to do is prepare a master template and have it generate these analogous drafts for you instead; tweak and spruce them up a bit, and you are good to go!

Level The Playing Field

Suppose you are a small or mid-sized business.

In that case, you might often find your limited budget holding you back from realising elaborate content campaigns like the established players you are competing with in your domain. Generative AI tools can help you bridge this back to a significant extent.

By having your existing content team work with these tools, you can amp up your day-to-day content production volume and be as visible as the already recognised names in your industry. 

Raise The Overall Level of Your Communication

Take a moment to consider the bigger picture. At the moment, AI-fueled content might appear novel, but gradually, as more and more companies start embracing this route, it will eventually become the norm.

At that point, copywriters will focus extensively on making their content more personable and human than ever, ushering in a new level of qualitative achievement.

All said and done, no AI tool will have as nuanced an understanding of your customers' unique interests and preferences as you, who have spent considerable time observing them from close quarters and catering to them.

So, as AI tools attend to the grunt work of the content writing process, they will allow copywriters the space to hone their craft and evolve into highly mature communicators and storytellers.

This augurs well for the brand, enabling it to strengthen customer relationships and foster unprecedented brand loyalty. 

Enhance Personalisation at Scale

We all know that personalising emails works. But using just a first name in the subject line is old hat.

AI lets you take personalisation to a completely different level, and do it across thousands of contacts without breaking a sweat.

These tools can connect to your customer data and analyse behaviour like purchase history, browsing patterns, and past email opens. The result is a copy that feels like it was written for one person, not a thousand.

Think about generating tailored content blocks inside a single email campaign. A loyal VIP customer might see an exclusive offer for a premium product, while a new subscriber sees a welcome discount on a popular starter item.

It can also draft abandoned cart emails that don't just say “You left something behind,” but specifically mention the item and remind the customer why they wanted it in the first place.

This approach allows you to adjust the tone and message based on where the customer is in their relationship with you, making your communication far more relevant and effective.

The Downside of AI Tools

Though there are many possibilities that AI tools have helped uncover, the picture is not entirely rosy as well. In this section, we look at the disadvantages of using AI tools for email copywriting. 

The Quality of Content is Questionable

While AI tools are adept at producing large quantities of content in the blink of an eye, the quality of content often leaves much to be desired.

Even in cases where one has supplied detailed briefs, one has to contend with redundant, incoherent, and inaccurate content. More importantly, AI-generated content is found to be massively lacking in personality and spontaneity, things that only a human mind can infuse into a piece of content.

And you can't expect an audience to respond enthusiastically to formulaic content, right? 

Hence, one is strictly advised against using the drafts yielded by these tools as is for their content requirements.

These drafts must be subjected to human intervention to meet the quality benchmark. Only after they have been vetted and edited by an experienced content professional can we publish them. 

Plagiarism Looms Large

AI email writers yield content by repurposing and borrowing from millions and billions of sources on the internet. As such, they don't have any mechanism to distinguish between sources in the public domain and those governed by intellectual copyrights.

Hence, AI-generated content can often be found to be guilty of containing plagiarism. If you fail to review and address this while working with such content, you will inadvertently end up infringing copyrights, inviting a torrent of legal disputes.

Such incidents will invariably lead to customers losing their faith in your brand. 

Data Privacy and Security Concerns

Here’s a major red flag that many people miss. When you type a prompt into a public AI tool, you have to question where that information is going.

If you're feeding it sensitive data about an unreleased product or your internal marketing strategy, you could be adding it to the AI's training data for everyone else to access.

It's a serious risk. Using customer information or any personally identifiable data in your prompts could put you in breach of data protection laws like GDPR.

The fines for that sort of thing are no joke, and the damage to your brand's reputation could be even worse.

The smarter move is to use enterprise-level AI solutions or private APIs. These versions are built for business use and often come with guarantees that your data will not be stored or used to train their public models.

It keeps your company's secrets and your customers' data safe.

Content Contains Bias and Prejudice

The databases on which these models are trained are not free from stereotypes, biases, and prejudices.

Therefore, inevitably, these seep into the content that is subsequently generated by these tools.

Consequently, you must scrutinise such content with great rigour to weed out such tenets, or you will end up hurting or offending certain sections of your target audience.

Exercising ethical considerations while dealing with AI-generated content is of utmost importance.

Content May Betray Brand Identity

Your understanding of your brand's tone and personality, which contribute significantly to your brand identity, is quite tacit, developed over your years of attachment.

Articulating such a thing satisfactorily can always get challenging, let alone having it reproduced appropriately by an AI tool. For all their virtues, generative AI tools can leave a lot to be desired when it comes to writing content that aligns perfectly with your brand identity. 

Another department where AI tools can't compete with the human mind is concerned with providing truly original insights. This is because one's perspective is a direct function of one's lived experiences, something that can never be fed into an AI tool.

Of course, you can get them to imitate your writing style and persona to a certain degree by providing a decent amount of your writing samples, but even then, they won't be able to view the world through the unique lenses that you do.

It also provides compelling and original insights that help a brand establish itself as a thought leader in its domain.

The Smart Way Forward: A Human-in-the-Loop Workflow

So, with all these pros and cons, how should we actually use these tools? The answer isn't to hand over the keys and hope for the best.

It's about treating the AI as an incredibly capable assistant, not as a replacement for a skilled human.

A “human-in-the-loop” workflow is the most effective approach. It combines the speed of AI with the strategy and nuance of a human copywriter.

Here's how it breaks down:

1. Strategy and Briefing: It starts with a human. A copywriter or marketer defines the campaign's goal, identifies the target audience, and figures out the core message that needs to be communicated.
2. AI-Powered Generation: With a clear brief, the writer uses the AI to generate multiple drafts, subject line ideas, and CTA variations in minutes. This part handles the heavy lifting and gets past the blank page problem.
3. Human Curation and Refinement: This is where the real work happens. The writer sifts through the AI's output, cherry-picking the best bits and editing them heavily. They fact-check every claim, inject the brand's true personality, and add the kind of emotional resonance that a machine can't replicate.
4. Final Polish and Approval: The copy gets a final human review to catch any errors and ensure it's perfectly aligned with the strategic goal. Only then is it ready to be sent.

This process gives you the best of both worlds. You get the efficiency and scale of automation while retaining the quality, creativity, and strategic thinking that only a person can provide.

Wrapping It Up

As much as we all agree that AI-powered email copywriting is the future, there's no denying its uncertainties.

To understand this subject, we contacted a host of luminous experts in the email space to get a firm understanding. We compiled their responses in this neat infographic. Check it out now!