AI cold emails.

A question I get asked all the time:

Reader: “Tom, how do I use AI in my cold emails?”

Here’s my response:

Me: “You are lazy”

Let me explain:

AI has allowed a generation of so-called ‘marketers’ to grift a living from generating terrible AI copy.

You see it everywhere.

Look at the comment section of any popular Linkedin or X post.

It’s swamped with AI trash.

This doesn’t mean I’m an AI hater or don’t see value in it.

I use it in different ways.

We’ve been using AI since early 2023 for lots of different functions.

In that time I’ve noticed a few key areas that AI excels in.

Those are:

1. Research:

One of the key areas we separate ourselves from other cold email firms is that we take a lot of time to understand our client’s prospects.

This understanding gives us the key edge we need to craft hyper-relevant campaigns.

To speed up this process we have created custom GPT bots trained on endless data to scrape, research and produce custom reports on the key areas our client’s product or service solves issues.

2. Qualification:

Most lead lists are built on the backs of very basic lead filters (industry, headcount, revenue).

This leads to poor-quality lists that contain lots of unqualified leads.

Using Clay we’ve created custom-prompted AI scraper’s to automatically qualify leads based on custom criteria.

This extra level of lead list management allows us to build quality lists that pre-qualify prospects, saving our client’s sales team a lot of time and headaches on discovery calls.

3. Writing parts of cold emails:

If you ask AI to write a cold email, it will suck.

If you ask AI to write a question or statement based on 5-6 data points and 5 examples 99% of the time it will write something great.

This has allowed us to treat the composition of our cold emails like a Ford production line.

We start with a signal and then build the email using custom prompted outputs to create hyper-personalised emails at scale without sounding like a bot.

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These are the key areas we’ve been using AI effectively in the past 12 months.

I’m sure as further developments come out in the next year, we’ll be adding a lot more.

Remember, don’t be a smooth brain and ask GPT to write your cold email.

Put the effort in, leverage AI and win.

-Tom

P.S. If you’re curious about applying any of the above to your business, go to this page, find out more and book a discovery call. As we scale up our firm we have 1-2 new spots for clients opening up in April.