How to Use AI to Write Emails in 2026 - The GTM with Clay Blog
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How to Use AI to Write Emails: Top Techniques and Tools
You've done your research and gathered data on your leads. Now, it's time to use this data to craft messages that will win them over and result in conversions. This critical activity can make or break your sales campaign. Without effective outreach, all your preparation was in vain.
Considering the importance and time it takes to craft emails at scale, turning to AI is a smart move. The technology can help you reach out to leads with precise messaging without stretching your resources or sacrificing quality.
Our team has used AI for writing emails for years and managed to:
To help you get similar results, we've put together this guide to show you how to use AI to write emails.
TL;DR
- AI can help you write emails in bulk, correct grammar, adjust tone and style, optimize subject lines, personalize outreach, and create drafts.
- The best results come from tools that combine AI email writing with lead data, enrichment, and integrations in one place.
- Clay's AI email drafter uses your lead data and custom prompts to generate hyper-personalized emails at scale, going well beyond basic name or title insertion.
- Clay's waterfall enrichment and 200+ integrations give you the data foundation that makes personalized AI-written emails actually land.
How to Use AI to Write an Email: Top Techniques
AI can be used in various email writing scenarios. To help you maximize the technology's potential and improve your sales campaigns, we'll go over the most popular and creative ones:
Writing in Bulk
Manual email writing makes sense when you want to reach out to only a few leads. As your business grows, their numbers will increase, and at some point, you won't be able to handle writing effective emails to everyone.
This is where AI comes in. With its help, you can write hundreds of emails with just a few prompts or clicks. Here are some appealing benefits you'll get if you decide to use AI for bulk email writing:
💡 Bonus read: AI can help with more than email writing. Read our extensive guides on AI in marketing and sales and how to use AI in sales to learn different ways to leverage it in your workflows. For specific use cases, read about AI sales enablement and AI SDRs.
Correcting Grammar
With email writing, every detail matters, and proper grammar is at the top of the list. Bad grammar can cost you business. If your emails are full of mistakes, your leads could see you as lazy or incompetent, making it harder to hit your targets.
You don't need to hire a professional proofreader and editor to ensure your emails are grammatically perfect. Instead, you can leverage AI tools with grammar-checking options. These tools analyze elements such as:
AI grammar-checking tools highlight mistakes and offer suggestions to help you polish your emails. Although they don't help you write emails per se, they ensure the content is free of mistakes so that you can leave an excellent first impression. ✨
Adjusting Style and Tone
Even if your emails are grammatically flawless, they can still leave the wrong impression on your leads due to style or tone issues, such as:
Some AI tools can ensure your style and tone are on point. Like grammar-checking platforms, these tools can analyze any text (including emails) to highlight potential mistakes and offer suggestions for improvement.
Optimizing Subject Lines
The subject line is the first thing people see when they receive your email. Based on its wording, they will determine if your email is worth opening and if they should prioritize it.
Every subject line should be:
Instead of investing precious time in optimizing email subject lines for each lead, you can rely on an AI tool. A quality tool can offer suggestions on incorporating keywords and adjusting the language to catch your recipients' attention and boost email open rates. ⬆️
Personalizing Emails
Generic emails may be easier to write, but they won't resonate with your leads. You need to focus on personalization to capture their attention, offer an excellent experience, and create a foundation for building strong business relationships.
For example, you could:
The problem is that personalizing every email takes time and effort. Luckily, AI tools offer a shortcut. They can create hyper-personalized emails within seconds. Using prompts, you tell the tool what data to use to write messages that will resonate with your leads and drive engagement.
Some AI solutions offer basic personalization options, like mentioning a lead's name, job title, or company. Others are more advanced, allowing you to cite research or mention specific info like podcast appearances, and this is what you should aim for. Bringing up such details shows your lead that you've done your research and are determined. 🕶️
Creating Drafts
If you need to write an email manually (for a particularly high-value lead, to re-engage a cold one, or as a follow-up after a conversation), AI tools can help you with that, too. Based on your input, they can create email drafts you can later refine and adjust to your style, preferences, and goals. Your AI tool can lend a hand by:
💡 Bonus read: ChatGPT can be a solid tool for creating email drafts. Read our guide on how to use ChatGPT to write emails to learn more. To discover ChatGPT's other uses in sales, take a look at our articles covering ChatGPT prompts for sales and ChatGPT lead generation.
How to Choose an AI Tool for Writing Emails
There are plenty of AI tools that can help you write emails, from chatbots to specialized writing software. ✍️
While these can be excellent options, they aren't sales-oriented and don't offer functionalities that help you manage multiple processes. So, if you have a specialized writing tool, you'll still need platforms for lead generation, data enrichment, and outreach.
To keep work under one roof, look for a sales tool with a dedicated AI email writing option. If you're unsure which platform to choose, focus on the following criteria:
Based on these criteria, one platform stands out as the best: Clay. This sales automation solution offers options covering the entire sales process, from generating leads to AI email writing. 💯
Clay: Your Go-To AI Email Writing Tool
Clay is an AI-powered sales automation platform with options focusing on effortless lead generation and outreach. In terms of email writing, Clay offers an AI email drafter that prioritizes personalization while ensuring you're in control of the content. 💪
The drafter relies on OpenAI and the data you've collected on your leads to craft messages that stand out. With the drafter, you can do much more than basic personalization and have it:
Clay gives you absolute control over your emails. You can write custom prompts to get the desired results. To save time, leverage some of Clay's powerful AI email writing templates, such as:
Once you've created your emails, send them to a preferred email sequencer or CRM platform and set your campaigns in motion. You can also download the email as a CSV file and upload it to any tool. 📤
More Clay Features: Enrichment, Integrations, and Automation
What sets Clay apart from many other AI email writing tools is its feature versatility. Writing personalized emails is only one part of high-performing sales campaigns and requires comprehensive lead data as the basis. Without it, your emails can come off as generic and bland.
Clay ensures this doesn't happen with its rich feature set focusing on lead generation and data enrichment, such as:
Claygent
The email drafter isn't the only AI-powered option you'll get with Clay. Another valuable one is Claygent, your new sales assistant that can automate virtually any aspect of a sales campaign, allowing you to put your work on auto-pilot.
Claygent works similarly to ChatGPT. You enter prompts, and it delivers results. Its use cases are versatile and include:
Claygent can also answer questions about companies and people by searching every corner of the internet. Here are some questions that Clay users ask Claygent to answer:
Clay's Valuable Integrations
Another reason Clay is a must-have sales automation platform is its integrations with 200+ tools that help you centralize work and boost your campaign's performance.
You'll appreciate Clay's OpenAI integration, which can help you write efficiently. Here are some examples of what you can do with the integration:
Besides the OpenAI integration, Clay offers integrations with over 75+ data providers. This is one of Clay's main advantages. It can tap into dozens of databases to get you the data you need to personalize emails and ensure the info in them is accurate, reliable, and up-to-date.
But wait, there's more! Here are some other valuable integrations you'll get with Clay:
Waterfall Enrichment
We've mentioned that Clay integrates with dozens of data providers. The platform gives you two options for taking advantage of these integrations:
The second option is possible thanks to Clay's waterfall enrichment feature. It automates the enrichment process by going through databases one by one to dig up the info you need. For maximum control, you're in the driver's seat. In only a few clicks, choose the data you want to retrieve and the providers Clay should search.
Clay's Flexible Pricing Plans
Clay comes with a free forever plan, so you can try out its options without spending a dime. If you'd like to fully take advantage of the platform's functionalities, choose one of the paid options:
All plans include unlimited users, so you can expand your team without worrying your subscription will skyrocket. 🚀
Thousands of users enjoy Clay's multifunctionality and ease of use. Here's what one user has to say about the platform:
Get Started With Clay and Ace Email Writing
You're only minutes away from giving your sales campaigns a boost with Clay's fantastic functionalities. Set up your account in a few simple steps:
If you'd like to know more details about all of Clay's options before signing up, check out Clay University and see every feature in action.
To find out how others use Clay and get inspired, join the Slack community. You should also subscribe to the Sales Prospecting Newsletter, which provides ongoing tips on creating high-performing sales campaigns that will help you make the most of the platform.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an AI email writer?
An AI email writer is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to generate, draft, or improve email content based on your inputs and prompts. Depending on the tool, it can handle everything from grammar correction and tone adjustment to full hyper-personalized email generation at scale.
How does AI generate a personalized email?
You provide the AI tool with data about your lead (name, company, job title, recent news, social posts, etc.) and a prompt describing what you want the email to say. The tool uses that context to produce a message tailored to that specific recipient. More advanced tools, like Clay's AI email drafter, can reference podcast appearances, press clips, or company mission statements to go well beyond basic personalization.
How do you get the best results from an AI email writing tool?
The quality of your output depends heavily on the quality of your input. Give the tool specific, accurate data about your lead and write clear prompts that describe the goal, tone, and key points you want covered. The richer your lead data, the more relevant and personalized the resulting email will be.
Which AI email writer works best for cold outreach?
For cold outreach at scale, you need a tool that combines AI email writing with lead data and enrichment in one place. Standalone writing tools require you to manually supply context for every email. A platform like Clay connects your lead data directly to the AI drafter, so personalization happens automatically across hundreds or thousands of records.
💡 Keep reading: Want to know more about the role of AI in sales? Read our in-depth guides:
You've done your research and gathered data on your leads. Now, it's time to use this data to craft messages that will win them over and result in conversions. This critical activity can make or break your sales campaign. Without effective outreach, all your preparation was in vain.
Considering the importance and time it takes to craft emails at scale, turning to AI is a smart move. The technology can help you reach out to leads with precise messaging without stretching your resources or sacrificing quality.
Our team has used AI for writing emails for years and managed to:
To help you get similar results, we've put together this guide to show you how to use AI to write emails.
TL;DR
- AI can help you write emails in bulk, correct grammar, adjust tone and style, optimize subject lines, personalize outreach, and create drafts.
- The best results come from tools that combine AI email writing with lead data, enrichment, and integrations in one place.
- Clay's AI email drafter uses your lead data and custom prompts to generate hyper-personalized emails at scale, going well beyond basic name or title insertion.
- Clay's waterfall enrichment and 200+ integrations give you the data foundation that makes personalized AI-written emails actually land.
How to Use AI to Write an Email: Top Techniques
AI can be used in various email writing scenarios. To help you maximize the technology's potential and improve your sales campaigns, we'll go over the most popular and creative ones:
Writing in Bulk
Manual email writing makes sense when you want to reach out to only a few leads. As your business grows, their numbers will increase, and at some point, you won't be able to handle writing effective emails to everyone.
This is where AI comes in. With its help, you can write hundreds of emails with just a few prompts or clicks. Here are some appealing benefits you'll get if you decide to use AI for bulk email writing:
💡 Bonus read: AI can help with more than email writing. Read our extensive guides on AI in marketing and sales and how to use AI in sales to learn different ways to leverage it in your workflows. For specific use cases, read about AI sales enablement and AI SDRs.
Correcting Grammar
With email writing, every detail matters, and proper grammar is at the top of the list. Bad grammar can cost you business. If your emails are full of mistakes, your leads could see you as lazy or incompetent, making it harder to hit your targets.
You don't need to hire a professional proofreader and editor to ensure your emails are grammatically perfect. Instead, you can leverage AI tools with grammar-checking options. These tools analyze elements such as:
AI grammar-checking tools highlight mistakes and offer suggestions to help you polish your emails. Although they don't help you write emails per se, they ensure the content is free of mistakes so that you can leave an excellent first impression. ✨
Adjusting Style and Tone
Even if your emails are grammatically flawless, they can still leave the wrong impression on your leads due to style or tone issues, such as:
Some AI tools can ensure your style and tone are on point. Like grammar-checking platforms, these tools can analyze any text (including emails) to highlight potential mistakes and offer suggestions for improvement.
Optimizing Subject Lines
The subject line is the first thing people see when they receive your email. Based on its wording, they will determine if your email is worth opening and if they should prioritize it.
Every subject line should be:
Instead of investing precious time in optimizing email subject lines for each lead, you can rely on an AI tool. A quality tool can offer suggestions on incorporating keywords and adjusting the language to catch your recipients' attention and boost email open rates. ⬆️
Personalizing Emails
Generic emails may be easier to write, but they won't resonate with your leads. You need to focus on personalization to capture their attention, offer an excellent experience, and create a foundation for building strong business relationships.
For example, you could:
The problem is that personalizing every email takes time and effort. Luckily, AI tools offer a shortcut. They can create hyper-personalized emails within seconds. Using prompts, you tell the tool what data to use to write messages that will resonate with your leads and drive engagement.
Some AI solutions offer basic personalization options, like mentioning a lead's name, job title, or company. Others are more advanced, allowing you to cite research or mention specific info like podcast appearances, and this is what you should aim for. Bringing up such details shows your lead that you've done your research and are determined. 🕶️
Creating Drafts
If you need to write an email manually (for a particularly high-value lead, to re-engage a cold one, or as a follow-up after a conversation), AI tools can help you with that, too. Based on your input, they can create email drafts you can later refine and adjust to your style, preferences, and goals. Your AI tool can lend a hand by:
💡 Bonus read: ChatGPT can be a solid tool for creating email drafts. Read our guide on how to use ChatGPT to write emails to learn more. To discover ChatGPT's other uses in sales, take a look at our articles covering ChatGPT prompts for sales and ChatGPT lead generation.
How to Choose an AI Tool for Writing Emails
There are plenty of AI tools that can help you write emails, from chatbots to specialized writing software. ✍️
While these can be excellent options, they aren't sales-oriented and don't offer functionalities that help you manage multiple processes. So, if you have a specialized writing tool, you'll still need platforms for lead generation, data enrichment, and outreach.
To keep work under one roof, look for a sales tool with a dedicated AI email writing option. If you're unsure which platform to choose, focus on the following criteria:
Based on these criteria, one platform stands out as the best: Clay. This sales automation solution offers options covering the entire sales process, from generating leads to AI email writing. 💯
Clay: Your Go-To AI Email Writing Tool
Clay is an AI-powered sales automation platform with options focusing on effortless lead generation and outreach. In terms of email writing, Clay offers an AI email drafter that prioritizes personalization while ensuring you're in control of the content. 💪
The drafter relies on OpenAI and the data you've collected on your leads to craft messages that stand out. With the drafter, you can do much more than basic personalization and have it:
Clay gives you absolute control over your emails. You can write custom prompts to get the desired results. To save time, leverage some of Clay's powerful AI email writing templates, such as:
Once you've created your emails, send them to a preferred email sequencer or CRM platform and set your campaigns in motion. You can also download the email as a CSV file and upload it to any tool. 📤
More Clay Features: Enrichment, Integrations, and Automation
What sets Clay apart from many other AI email writing tools is its feature versatility. Writing personalized emails is only one part of high-performing sales campaigns and requires comprehensive lead data as the basis. Without it, your emails can come off as generic and bland.
Clay ensures this doesn't happen with its rich feature set focusing on lead generation and data enrichment, such as:
Claygent
The email drafter isn't the only AI-powered option you'll get with Clay. Another valuable one is Claygent, your new sales assistant that can automate virtually any aspect of a sales campaign, allowing you to put your work on auto-pilot.
Claygent works similarly to ChatGPT. You enter prompts, and it delivers results. Its use cases are versatile and include:
Claygent can also answer questions about companies and people by searching every corner of the internet. Here are some questions that Clay users ask Claygent to answer:
Clay's Valuable Integrations
Another reason Clay is a must-have sales automation platform is its integrations with 200+ tools that help you centralize work and boost your campaign's performance.
You'll appreciate Clay's OpenAI integration, which can help you write efficiently. Here are some examples of what you can do with the integration:
Besides the OpenAI integration, Clay offers integrations with over 75+ data providers. This is one of Clay's main advantages. It can tap into dozens of databases to get you the data you need to personalize emails and ensure the info in them is accurate, reliable, and up-to-date.
But wait, there's more! Here are some other valuable integrations you'll get with Clay:
Waterfall Enrichment
We've mentioned that Clay integrates with dozens of data providers. The platform gives you two options for taking advantage of these integrations:
The second option is possible thanks to Clay's waterfall enrichment feature. It automates the enrichment process by going through databases one by one to dig up the info you need. For maximum control, you're in the driver's seat. In only a few clicks, choose the data you want to retrieve and the providers Clay should search.
Clay's Flexible Pricing Plans
Clay comes with a free forever plan, so you can try out its options without spending a dime. If you'd like to fully take advantage of the platform's functionalities, choose one of the paid options:
All plans include unlimited users, so you can expand your team without worrying your subscription will skyrocket. 🚀
Thousands of users enjoy Clay's multifunctionality and ease of use. Here's what one user has to say about the platform:
Get Started With Clay and Ace Email Writing
You're only minutes away from giving your sales campaigns a boost with Clay's fantastic functionalities. Set up your account in a few simple steps:
If you'd like to know more details about all of Clay's options before signing up, check out Clay University and see every feature in action.
To find out how others use Clay and get inspired, join the Slack community. You should also subscribe to the Sales Prospecting Newsletter, which provides ongoing tips on creating high-performing sales campaigns that will help you make the most of the platform.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an AI email writer?
An AI email writer is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to generate, draft, or improve email content based on your inputs and prompts. Depending on the tool, it can handle everything from grammar correction and tone adjustment to full hyper-personalized email generation at scale.
How does AI generate a personalized email?
You provide the AI tool with data about your lead (name, company, job title, recent news, social posts, etc.) and a prompt describing what you want the email to say. The tool uses that context to produce a message tailored to that specific recipient. More advanced tools, like Clay's AI email drafter, can reference podcast appearances, press clips, or company mission statements to go well beyond basic personalization.
How do you get the best results from an AI email writing tool?
The quality of your output depends heavily on the quality of your input. Give the tool specific, accurate data about your lead and write clear prompts that describe the goal, tone, and key points you want covered. The richer your lead data, the more relevant and personalized the resulting email will be.
Which AI email writer works best for cold outreach?
For cold outreach at scale, you need a tool that combines AI email writing with lead data and enrichment in one place. Standalone writing tools require you to manually supply context for every email. A platform like Clay connects your lead data directly to the AI drafter, so personalization happens automatically across hundreds or thousands of records.
💡 Keep reading: Want to know more about the role of AI in sales? Read our in-depth guides:
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