Newsletter is a burdensome business. You have to be able to come up with new content ideas weekly or even daily to satisfy your audience.
ChatGPT can help you in the repetitive publication process.
It can scale your email writing process, to deliver compelling and consistent messages to your audience.
Here’s the process that I use myself to generate results that reflect my brand and resonate with my readers.
Why use ChatGPT to create emails and newsletters?
Among the many professionals I meet, most of them don’t imagine just how much ChatGPT can generate high-quality content pieces. When you provide it with the right instructions, it can generate content that can fit any of your editorial expectations. And that’s especially true for newsletters.
Here’s why ChatGPT is a versatile tool for newsletter writing :
- Streamlined production process: newsletters and emails are made to be published regularly. Using ChatGPT, you ensure you always hit your publication deadline and consistently deliver your content to your audience.
- Engaging tone and style: if you prompt ChatGPT correctly, you can craft compelling emailing pieces without prior writing skills.
- Easy content recycling: Do you already have existing content materials? ChatGPT enables you to turn this existing content into regular email campaigns to engage your audience and leverage the high retention channel that is emailing.
Generate emails with ChatGPT: a 5-step prompting process
Since the release of GPT-4 in March 2023, I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT to automate my content creation process. Through this research, I’ve found ways to leverage it to produce high-quality and on-brand newsletters for my clients.
Here are the exact prompts I use to instruct ChatGPT to generate compelling emails. Adapt it to your own editorial guidelines and brand identity :
1. Define the writing persona
The first step of an effective prompting process is to set up the persona of your LLM. Instruct ChatGPT to with this structure of prompt :
You’re *the name of your company or author*, a company that sells *your product/service. You want to write newsletters that regularly address *your audience* who needs to *the pain point of your audience*. You want to share with them information, advice, and ideas to help them to *the goal of your audience*. For each e-mail, you aim to grab the audience’s attention and get them to become loyal readers. Answer “OK” if it’s clear to you.
2. Set up the editorial guidelines
Then it’s time to tell ChatGPT your expectations in terms of writing style and tone. Use a chain-of-thought (COT) structure to help it better memorize your guidelines :
Every time you start writing an email, follow these 4 instructions:
1. Keep sentences short and easy to read
2. Be familiar with the reader and tell it like it is.
3. Give concrete advice and feedback
4. Jump every 2 or 3 sentences.
3. Provide a sample
ChatGPT will be able to get much closer to your expected result if you provide it with a meaningful sample of your writing. Here’s one taken from from Robert Rose, author of the Content Marketing Institute weekly newsletter :
Here’s a writing sample to help you determine what kind of writing style and tone we expect:
“Don’t blame yourself (or anyone else)
Regardless of your specific intention or word for 2024, you probably think about it in terms of fixing or improving something you think is wrong.
I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with people who vow to “fix themselves” this year.
They want to do better, think smarter, feel guilty less often, or change a habit.
Introspection can be positive.
But it’s easy to fall into a trap, blaming yourself for where you are and punishing yourself with the equivalent of a performance improvement plan.
Unfortunately, even when you focus on yourself, it’s easy to blame others, even subtly, for getting in the way. “
Reply “ok” if that’s clear for you.
4. Feed on existing ideas or content
You want to draw from your existing material to create your newsletter ? ChatGPT is great at recycling and mixing ideas from various pieces of content. For example, you could leverage all your LinkedIn posts to make compelling newsletters that combine common themes and insights. Here’s the prompt you would use :
I want to draw on the content of existing LinkedIn posts to produce this newsletter. I’m going to give you my list of existing LinkedIn post titles, and you’re going to give me topic ideas for my newsletter by combining at least 2,3 posts together. Here it is: *your list*
5. Build the outline
It’s better to generate a structured outline before starting to generate the content from scratch. This will help you make sure you cover the subject and have the right ideas set in the right order :
Based on the previous instructions in terms of tone and style, write an outline for a newsletter on *topic*, rearranging these ideas in the most compelling structure
6. Generate sections by sections
ChatGPT won’t produce your newsletter in a single go. You have to instruct it to generate it section by section. Specify the length and level of details for each generation :
Strictly following the previous instructions on tone, style and ideas from the newsletter outline, write the introduction/Section 1/Section 2/Conclusion in 200 words.
7. Review and edit
The result won’t be necessarily perfect on the first try. Refine the output by giving specific feedback to ChatGPT :
Rewrite this text while addressing directly to the reader with “you”/using shorter, more simple sentences/ using no more than 3 sentences per paragraph/ skipping a line in each paragraph/ using concrete, less metaphorical language
You’ll also have to do some manual editing to handle some LLM-specific redundancies and :
- Remove repetitive, redundant and unnecessary sentences, especially the ones at the beginning or end of a sentence.
- Get rid of irrelevant metaphors or comparisons that LLMs love to do
- Add more variety in the writing structures -subsections, bullet points, paragraphs of various length…
- Optimize titles and subtitles
By applying these prompts, you’ll be able to generate compelling, on-brand email pieces. Just try it out by yourself!
