How to Use ChatGPT to Write an Email in 2026 - The GTM with Clay Blog
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How to Use ChatGPT to Write an Email: A Guide for Sales Pros
It takes time and effort to put together an effective outreach email. If you're still doing it manually, you're missing out on a massive opportunity to streamline your workflow. A much better alternative is to let AI take the first shot, after which you can tweak the email if needed.
With a solid prompt that includes all the relevant data and instructions, you can get a first draft that minimizes the need for rewrites. Better yet, you can boost the conversion potential of each email to increase your response rates with less work.
We've seen such results first-hand. Using AI, we halved the number of emails we sent while doubling positive responses. 💌
In this guide, we share some of our secrets to show you how to use ChatGPT to write an email that maximizes the chance of a positive response. Specifically, you'll learn the following:
TL;DR
- ChatGPT can draft outreach emails faster than any human, but prompt quality determines output quality. Generic prompts produce generic emails.
- Four prompting techniques make the biggest difference: providing context, assigning a role, stating the end goal, and including detailed prospect data.
- ChatGPT works best when you have a defined target audience, proper human oversight, and rich prospect data to feed into your prompts.
- Pairing ChatGPT with Clay's OpenAI integration and waterfall enrichment lets you automate hyper-personalized email sequences at scale.
Why You Should Use ChatGPT To Write Outreach Emails
Using ChatGPT for writing emails can bring plenty of benefits, most notably:
To enjoy these benefits and use ChatGPT for sales emails effectively, you need to understand how the platform works and how to master it. We'll start with the basics, after which we'll go over some prompting tweaks that make a big difference to your email creation workflow.
💡 Bonus read: For more ways to leverage AI to help your sales team, read our guides on AI in B2B sales, AI sales training, and using AI for cold calling.
How To Ask ChatGPT To Write an Email
If you use ChatGPT as a standalone solution, you can ask it to write an email through a prompt, a set of instructions that tell the platform what it should write and how to do it.
A sales email prompt can look something like this:
"Write a 100-word sales outreach email introducing [product name], a solution tailored for the [industry] sector. Start by addressing the recipient's pain points in their industry and how [product name] can solve these challenges. Highlight 2–3 key product benefits or features relevant to the recipient's needs. Mention a success story or client from the same industry, and end with a call-to-action for a meeting or demo to discuss how the product can help their business."
If you give ChatGPT such a prompt, you'll get a response like this one:
As you can see, the email is quite basic. What you get is a generic message most prospects will ignore. That's why you can't use any prompt to get the email you want. You must follow the right prompting practices to get the most out of ChatGPT. 💪
How To Use ChatGPT for Email Writing: Essential Tips
ChatGPT's output directly reflects the quality of your prompt. To write effective emails that don't need heavy revisions, do the following:
Provide Sufficient Context
A "sales email" can mean a lot of things. Depending on your funnel's specifics, it can serve many purposes and be written from different viewpoints. Like any generative AI tool, ChatGPT needs to understand the context behind its task to ensure a solid output.
For example, if you have a new product feature you want to introduce, you can add something like this to your prompt:
"I have a [product] that primarily focused on [core feature] but was upgraded with a new feature, [specific feature], which helps with [additional nenefit]. I want existing customers to know about the new benefits and upgrade options."
By including this at the beginning of your prompt, you can help ChatGPT understand why it's writing the email, which can make the output more specific.
Assign ChatGPT a Role
Role assignment is an effective way to adjust ChatGPT's output to fit your preferred style. Telling ChatGPT what shoes it needs to fill will tweak its tone and phrasing to match your chosen one.
For example, if you want ChatGPT to act as an SDR, you can use the following prompt:
"You're an SDR at a fintech company offering [product], which was recently upgraded to include [new feature]. You should write an email to existing customers to notify them of the product upgrade and get them to try it out."
With a prompt like this, ChatGPT will understand that it should use a promotional and somewhat technical style. You can further finetune the prompt by explaining the exact purpose of the email and the target audience.
Role assignment goes beyond tone and style. ChatGPT will start thinking like an SDR (as much as possible), which means it can support your actual team members by aligning its thinking with theirs. 🧠
There's no one-size-fits-all technique when it comes to role assignment. You can prompt ChatGPT to assume any role you need for a specific email, which should help you get the desired output with less effort.
Explain the End Goal
Your emails can fulfill many goals, such as:
Explaining the goal to ChatGPT is essential to ensuring the output can meet it. It gives the platform direction and clarity, improving the output's contextual accuracy.
For example, if your email isn't aimed at hard selling but inviting the reader to engage with your resource, you can mention this in the prompt so that ChatGPT uses a less salesy tone. The prompt could look something like this:
"Write an email from the perspective of a fintech SDR. The email should be about a new feature we include in our product, [specific product]. The email is meant to encourage the recipient to read a whitepaper discussing the feature's benefits, so it shouldn't directly promote the product or the feature."
Include Enough Prospect Data
One of the main complaints surrounding AI is that it creates dry, generic content. This doesn't have to be the case as long as you tell ChatGPT who the email recipient is. And not just their name and role. You need as many details as you can find, such as:
By combining the other prompting tips with such abundant data, you can create a hyper-personalized email in no time. Include the prospect's information in the prompt, and ChatGPT can write a highly specific message. Here's what such a prompt might look like:
"You're an SDR at a fintech company that recently added a [new feature] to [product]. Write a promotional email aimed at [prospect name], who works as a [role] at [company]. The goal of the email is to invite the prospect to sign up for a free trial of the product and test the new feature. The prospect recently shared a LinkedIn post discussing [relevant topic], so make sure to include this in the email and connect it to the product."
Comprehensive prospect data is critical to effective outreach campaigns whether you use AI or not. Still, you can get the most out of each data point by adding AI-powered process automation to your workflow.
The key challenge here is finding the data you need. ChatGPT can help with this to an extent, though there's a more streamlined way to collect all the necessary information (more on that later).
💡 Bonus read: For more prompting tips and examples, read our guides on ChatGPT prompts for sales emails and prompts for sales in general.
When Is It Bad To Use ChatGPT for Emails?
You may want to steer away from ChatGPT (and AI in general) when writing emails in the following three cases:
The above issues can impact your entire sales process, from lead generation and data enrichment to email creation. If you need a platform that pairs with ChatGPT to overcome these challenges, check out Clay. 🌟
Get the Most Out of Each Outbound Email With Clay
Clay is a comprehensive data enrichment and sales automation solution that streamlines various processes throughout the sales cycle. It integrates with Open AI, so you can go beyond ChatGPT's native interface to write effective emails effortlessly and ensure each message is tailored to the prospect. 📬
Specifically, Clay's OpenAI integration lets you complete the following actions:
Most importantly, Clay's AI message writer can leverage ChatGPT to create highly personalized emails at scale. It automatically pulls your Clay data to tailor each message accordingly. All you need to do is fire up the tool after collecting the relevant data, and it can automate entire sequences in no time.
Want to see Clay's AI email writing in action? Check out this video:
To further streamline your workflow, Clay also offers plenty of AI email writing templates for different tasks, such as:
You may be wondering where all that prospect-specific data in Clay comes from. The answer is simple: robust, hands-off data enrichment. 🚀
Find All the Data You Need for Outreach Emails With Clay
Clay integrates with over 50 data providers, letting you scour their databases for prospect data without ever leaving Clay or creating new accounts.
Such robust data coverage is paired with Clay's waterfall enrichment feature to make data collection as streamlined as possible. Here's how it works:
With waterfall enrichment, you only pay for successful searches. This means you don't waste money on empty hits and can get the most out of your investment. 💲
All your data is added to the Clay table, from which it can be turned into hyper-personalized emails on autopilot thanks to Clay's AI message writer and OpenAI integration.
If you want to pull data from pages as you visit them, you can also use Clay's Chrome extension. It offers two ways to get the data you need:
Finally, you can leverage AI during the prospecting phase through Claygent, Clay's comprehensive AI researcher and assistant that can search virtually any page on the web to get the data you need.
Claygent works similarly to ChatGPT. Give it a prompt, and it can perform plenty of actions, such as:
Start for Free, Upgrade Without Risk
Thanks to Clay's robust free plan, you can use the core features without time limits. You get 100 monthly data credits to find prospects, enrich data, and create emails in seconds. As you scale your workflow, you can get more data credits and expand Clay's functionality through four paid tiers:
Unlike many platforms, Clay doesn't require annual contracts, so there's no risk of vendor lock-in. Each plan comes with varying data credit amounts, so you can choose one that fits your outreach needs and workflows. This further contributes to Clay's cost-effectiveness, making it an excellent option for budget-conscious users. 📈
Frequently Asked Questions
Can ChatGPT send emails directly?
No, ChatGPT cannot send emails on its own. It generates the email copy, but you need to copy the output into your email client or connect it to an automation platform. Pairing ChatGPT with a tool like Clay lets you automate the full workflow, from drafting to sending, through integrations with email sequencers.
What should I include in a ChatGPT prompt to write a good sales email?
The four most important elements are context (why the email is being sent), a role assignment (e.g., "you're an SDR at a fintech company"), the end goal (booking a demo, sharing a resource, etc.), and detailed prospect data (job title, company, recent activity). The more specific your prompt, the less generic the output.
Does ChatGPT work for follow-up emails too?
Yes. The same prompting principles apply to follow-ups. Provide context about the prior interaction, specify the goal of the follow-up (e.g., re-engage a prospect who didn't reply), and include any new information or angles you want to introduce. Keeping the tone consistent with your original email also helps.
When should I not use ChatGPT to write emails?
Avoid relying on ChatGPT when you don't have a clearly defined target audience, when you lack sufficient prospect data to personalize the output, or when there's no human review process in place. Without oversight, AI-generated emails can miss the mark and hurt your sender reputation.
Create Your Clay Account Today
To write outreach emails effortlessly and explore Clay's advanced data enrichment features, you can get started with Clay in three quick steps:
If you want to learn more about Clay's features, feel free to explore Clay University for more information and tutorials. You can also join Clay's ever-growing Slack community to see how others are leveraging the platform. For product updates, industry news, and actionable outreach tips, sign up for Clay's newsletter.
💡 Keep reading: Want to learn more about leveraging AI beyond email writing? Check out these articles:
It takes time and effort to put together an effective outreach email. If you're still doing it manually, you're missing out on a massive opportunity to streamline your workflow. A much better alternative is to let AI take the first shot, after which you can tweak the email if needed.
With a solid prompt that includes all the relevant data and instructions, you can get a first draft that minimizes the need for rewrites. Better yet, you can boost the conversion potential of each email to increase your response rates with less work.
We've seen such results first-hand. Using AI, we halved the number of emails we sent while doubling positive responses. 💌
In this guide, we share some of our secrets to show you how to use ChatGPT to write an email that maximizes the chance of a positive response. Specifically, you'll learn the following:
TL;DR
- ChatGPT can draft outreach emails faster than any human, but prompt quality determines output quality. Generic prompts produce generic emails.
- Four prompting techniques make the biggest difference: providing context, assigning a role, stating the end goal, and including detailed prospect data.
- ChatGPT works best when you have a defined target audience, proper human oversight, and rich prospect data to feed into your prompts.
- Pairing ChatGPT with Clay's OpenAI integration and waterfall enrichment lets you automate hyper-personalized email sequences at scale.
Why You Should Use ChatGPT To Write Outreach Emails
Using ChatGPT for writing emails can bring plenty of benefits, most notably:
To enjoy these benefits and use ChatGPT for sales emails effectively, you need to understand how the platform works and how to master it. We'll start with the basics, after which we'll go over some prompting tweaks that make a big difference to your email creation workflow.
💡 Bonus read: For more ways to leverage AI to help your sales team, read our guides on AI in B2B sales, AI sales training, and using AI for cold calling.
How To Ask ChatGPT To Write an Email
If you use ChatGPT as a standalone solution, you can ask it to write an email through a prompt, a set of instructions that tell the platform what it should write and how to do it.
A sales email prompt can look something like this:
"Write a 100-word sales outreach email introducing [product name], a solution tailored for the [industry] sector. Start by addressing the recipient's pain points in their industry and how [product name] can solve these challenges. Highlight 2–3 key product benefits or features relevant to the recipient's needs. Mention a success story or client from the same industry, and end with a call-to-action for a meeting or demo to discuss how the product can help their business."
If you give ChatGPT such a prompt, you'll get a response like this one:
As you can see, the email is quite basic. What you get is a generic message most prospects will ignore. That's why you can't use any prompt to get the email you want. You must follow the right prompting practices to get the most out of ChatGPT. 💪
How To Use ChatGPT for Email Writing: Essential Tips
ChatGPT's output directly reflects the quality of your prompt. To write effective emails that don't need heavy revisions, do the following:
Provide Sufficient Context
A "sales email" can mean a lot of things. Depending on your funnel's specifics, it can serve many purposes and be written from different viewpoints. Like any generative AI tool, ChatGPT needs to understand the context behind its task to ensure a solid output.
For example, if you have a new product feature you want to introduce, you can add something like this to your prompt:
"I have a [product] that primarily focused on [core feature] but was upgraded with a new feature, [specific feature], which helps with [additional nenefit]. I want existing customers to know about the new benefits and upgrade options."
By including this at the beginning of your prompt, you can help ChatGPT understand why it's writing the email, which can make the output more specific.
Assign ChatGPT a Role
Role assignment is an effective way to adjust ChatGPT's output to fit your preferred style. Telling ChatGPT what shoes it needs to fill will tweak its tone and phrasing to match your chosen one.
For example, if you want ChatGPT to act as an SDR, you can use the following prompt:
"You're an SDR at a fintech company offering [product], which was recently upgraded to include [new feature]. You should write an email to existing customers to notify them of the product upgrade and get them to try it out."
With a prompt like this, ChatGPT will understand that it should use a promotional and somewhat technical style. You can further finetune the prompt by explaining the exact purpose of the email and the target audience.
Role assignment goes beyond tone and style. ChatGPT will start thinking like an SDR (as much as possible), which means it can support your actual team members by aligning its thinking with theirs. 🧠
There's no one-size-fits-all technique when it comes to role assignment. You can prompt ChatGPT to assume any role you need for a specific email, which should help you get the desired output with less effort.
Explain the End Goal
Your emails can fulfill many goals, such as:
Explaining the goal to ChatGPT is essential to ensuring the output can meet it. It gives the platform direction and clarity, improving the output's contextual accuracy.
For example, if your email isn't aimed at hard selling but inviting the reader to engage with your resource, you can mention this in the prompt so that ChatGPT uses a less salesy tone. The prompt could look something like this:
"Write an email from the perspective of a fintech SDR. The email should be about a new feature we include in our product, [specific product]. The email is meant to encourage the recipient to read a whitepaper discussing the feature's benefits, so it shouldn't directly promote the product or the feature."
Include Enough Prospect Data
One of the main complaints surrounding AI is that it creates dry, generic content. This doesn't have to be the case as long as you tell ChatGPT who the email recipient is. And not just their name and role. You need as many details as you can find, such as:
By combining the other prompting tips with such abundant data, you can create a hyper-personalized email in no time. Include the prospect's information in the prompt, and ChatGPT can write a highly specific message. Here's what such a prompt might look like:
"You're an SDR at a fintech company that recently added a [new feature] to [product]. Write a promotional email aimed at [prospect name], who works as a [role] at [company]. The goal of the email is to invite the prospect to sign up for a free trial of the product and test the new feature. The prospect recently shared a LinkedIn post discussing [relevant topic], so make sure to include this in the email and connect it to the product."
Comprehensive prospect data is critical to effective outreach campaigns whether you use AI or not. Still, you can get the most out of each data point by adding AI-powered process automation to your workflow.
The key challenge here is finding the data you need. ChatGPT can help with this to an extent, though there's a more streamlined way to collect all the necessary information (more on that later).
💡 Bonus read: For more prompting tips and examples, read our guides on ChatGPT prompts for sales emails and prompts for sales in general.
When Is It Bad To Use ChatGPT for Emails?
You may want to steer away from ChatGPT (and AI in general) when writing emails in the following three cases:
The above issues can impact your entire sales process, from lead generation and data enrichment to email creation. If you need a platform that pairs with ChatGPT to overcome these challenges, check out Clay. 🌟
Get the Most Out of Each Outbound Email With Clay
Clay is a comprehensive data enrichment and sales automation solution that streamlines various processes throughout the sales cycle. It integrates with Open AI, so you can go beyond ChatGPT's native interface to write effective emails effortlessly and ensure each message is tailored to the prospect. 📬
Specifically, Clay's OpenAI integration lets you complete the following actions:
Most importantly, Clay's AI message writer can leverage ChatGPT to create highly personalized emails at scale. It automatically pulls your Clay data to tailor each message accordingly. All you need to do is fire up the tool after collecting the relevant data, and it can automate entire sequences in no time.
Want to see Clay's AI email writing in action? Check out this video:
To further streamline your workflow, Clay also offers plenty of AI email writing templates for different tasks, such as:
You may be wondering where all that prospect-specific data in Clay comes from. The answer is simple: robust, hands-off data enrichment. 🚀
Find All the Data You Need for Outreach Emails With Clay
Clay integrates with over 50 data providers, letting you scour their databases for prospect data without ever leaving Clay or creating new accounts.
Such robust data coverage is paired with Clay's waterfall enrichment feature to make data collection as streamlined as possible. Here's how it works:
With waterfall enrichment, you only pay for successful searches. This means you don't waste money on empty hits and can get the most out of your investment. 💲
All your data is added to the Clay table, from which it can be turned into hyper-personalized emails on autopilot thanks to Clay's AI message writer and OpenAI integration.
If you want to pull data from pages as you visit them, you can also use Clay's Chrome extension. It offers two ways to get the data you need:
Finally, you can leverage AI during the prospecting phase through Claygent, Clay's comprehensive AI researcher and assistant that can search virtually any page on the web to get the data you need.
Claygent works similarly to ChatGPT. Give it a prompt, and it can perform plenty of actions, such as:
Start for Free, Upgrade Without Risk
Thanks to Clay's robust free plan, you can use the core features without time limits. You get 100 monthly data credits to find prospects, enrich data, and create emails in seconds. As you scale your workflow, you can get more data credits and expand Clay's functionality through four paid tiers:
Unlike many platforms, Clay doesn't require annual contracts, so there's no risk of vendor lock-in. Each plan comes with varying data credit amounts, so you can choose one that fits your outreach needs and workflows. This further contributes to Clay's cost-effectiveness, making it an excellent option for budget-conscious users. 📈
Frequently Asked Questions
Can ChatGPT send emails directly?
No, ChatGPT cannot send emails on its own. It generates the email copy, but you need to copy the output into your email client or connect it to an automation platform. Pairing ChatGPT with a tool like Clay lets you automate the full workflow, from drafting to sending, through integrations with email sequencers.
What should I include in a ChatGPT prompt to write a good sales email?
The four most important elements are context (why the email is being sent), a role assignment (e.g., "you're an SDR at a fintech company"), the end goal (booking a demo, sharing a resource, etc.), and detailed prospect data (job title, company, recent activity). The more specific your prompt, the less generic the output.
Does ChatGPT work for follow-up emails too?
Yes. The same prompting principles apply to follow-ups. Provide context about the prior interaction, specify the goal of the follow-up (e.g., re-engage a prospect who didn't reply), and include any new information or angles you want to introduce. Keeping the tone consistent with your original email also helps.
When should I not use ChatGPT to write emails?
Avoid relying on ChatGPT when you don't have a clearly defined target audience, when you lack sufficient prospect data to personalize the output, or when there's no human review process in place. Without oversight, AI-generated emails can miss the mark and hurt your sender reputation.
Create Your Clay Account Today
To write outreach emails effortlessly and explore Clay's advanced data enrichment features, you can get started with Clay in three quick steps:
If you want to learn more about Clay's features, feel free to explore Clay University for more information and tutorials. You can also join Clay's ever-growing Slack community to see how others are leveraging the platform. For product updates, industry news, and actionable outreach tips, sign up for Clay's newsletter.
💡 Keep reading: Want to learn more about leveraging AI beyond email writing? Check out these articles:
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