Writing cold emails with ChatGPT? - Here are 3 prompts you should know

The arrival of ChatGPT has had a significant impact on industries worldwide. And, a high potential for its use has been posted by Sales teams and SDRs that are going cold outreach and writing email templates and content daily.

We've previously put ChatGPT to the test and concluded that it can be a very handy tool for content creation when used properly. However, although created by AI, ChatGPT has a bit of a learning curve when it comes to using it for cold emails, especially when it comes to the prompts you'll be using for your email content.

Can ChatGPT help you write converting cold emails?

So, we've learned that giving insufficient information to ChatGPT can lead to generic content in a very similar format each time, whereas inputting a highly-specific prompt will make your life much easier, and get you the exact results you need when creating your next email campaign.?

In this article, we are sharing the 3 prompts that worked the best for creating a long email template, a short email template, or even a highly personalized opening line for a cold email.

How to use ChatGPT for creating cold email templates?

A prompt is essential for writing cold emails using ChatGPT. It provides the AI software with information about what you want it to do, allowing for a new and fresh conversation. Prompts help the AI software understand the context of the email and formulate an appropriate message.

A successful cold email relies heavily on crafting a well-thought-out prompt. For example, if a user wants to send a cold email for marketing purposes, they could use Prompts such as "I need to help writing a Cold Email about X product" or "I want to send a Cold Email introducing my company". By giving detailed information with the prompt, ChatGPT can produce content quickly and accurately that corresponds exactly with what the user wanted. But are these enough?

ChatGPT offers an added level of efficiency by applying Natural Language Processing techniques that enable it to understand complex strings without previous much previous context, although we already know some context needs to be provided, and in fact, can be crucial to the results of your query.

3 ChatGPT prompts for cold emails

Now, having that out of the way, let's see which prompts turned out to be the best for the creation of emails with different purposes.?

Before starting with any of these, your would need really, really detailed input information on the subject, so that ChatGPT can play with as much information as possible when writing your email content.?

And, what more would you need if not the full contact profile including the company information for the prospects that you'll be targeting??

We got every data point we could find in our database for a prospect and used this as input information for our prompt.

The input information can look something like this:?

First name: John, Last name: Doe, job title: CEO, website: https://company.com, contact LinkedIn URL: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/johndoe/, Company: Company Name, keywords: core company activity, company description, LinkedIn company activities

After you give the insights, you'll need to give a very detailed prompt to ChatGPT, to sum up this information as best as possible with the purpose you need.

1. Prompt for creating a long email template

We tested a couple of different prompts for long email templates and something that created a solid long email template each time was a prompt that contains the instructions:?

"Given this input, write a description/email/email template that will highlight the contact's expertise in the industry and ask them about challenges and pain points regarding [[the problem you solve]]. Introduce a new strategy for [[your solution]] that can cover their [[your value proposition]].?

The result that we got highlights exactly what we were asking from ChatGPT.

2. Prompt for creating a short email template

We've stumbled upon a challenge when using the same input information to get a different length or purpose of the email template. Each time we tried a similar prompt, ChatGPT returned a long email template with an opening paragraph, a specific description, even a sales pitch within the first emails, a CTA, and proper greetings.?

However, if we wanted to cut out some of the content and make a very short email template that will take the role of the legitimate assessment step in our cold outreach, we needed to do some tweaks. So, instead of asking ChatGPT to write a description or an email template, we asked it to write a quick sentence or an opening sentence of an email.?

Here is our prompt:?

Given this input, as [[your name]], [[your job title]] at [[your company]] write an informal opening sentence of an email that will highlight the contact's expertise in the industry and ask them about challenges and pain points regarding [[the problem you solve]]. Introduce a new strategy for [[your solution]] that can cover their [[your value proposition]].

Just by changing the command, ChatGPT summed up a short email with proper greetings, highlighting the expertise of the contact, introducing the solutions, and a quick CTA in one paragraph, which can be used both for email campaigns and LinkedIn messaging.

3. Prompt for an email opening sentence

Sometimes, when doing email personalization the so-called one-liners, or icebreakers of an email are the only things you need to have dynamic for each prospect, and your value proposition, greetings, and CTA can stay the same for each email recipient.?

So, we wanted results that can be dynamically incorporated as personalization elements in each of our email templates as custom text, without having ChatGPT write an entire email template within an email template (feels like an emailception).

To use ChatGPT for this purpose, we needed to give it ultra-specific instructions for it to create only a sentence that can be included in each email template dynamically, and not create a full email template each time.?

So, we needed to add ultra-specific instructions to improve the results. Telling ChatGPT to write only a sentence, or a fraction of an email, or a message didn't do the trick, as it recognized this to be a prompt for a whole email and returned a full email template each time.

Besides the initial command to write us a sentence with the given input information, we needed to specify that this should be a quick sentence or a message and shouldn't include any greetings or introductions.?

Our prompt looked something like this:?

Given this input, write a quick sentence, no introduction, and greetings, that will highlight the contact's expertise in the industry and ask them about challenges and pain points regarding [[the problem you solve]]. Introduce a new strategy for [[your solution]] that can cover their [[your value proposition]].

And, here is the result:

Wrapping up

When writing prompts for ChatGPT, make sure they are as detailed as possible. For your email templates, include relevant keywords such as target group or objectives, and as much information for a prospect as you can get, including their job titles, company activities, etc.

To get the results you need, you also need to make sure ChatGPT understands your command as best as possible, so working with different words, and phrases on your prompt is very important for desired results.

Also, ensure that the language used is courteous, yet friendly enough to make recipients respond in the desired manner.

Keep in mind that these emails will not only represent your brand but also create an impression on the potential leads you are targeting. Therefore, always pay special attention when crafting customized prompts with ChatGPT so that every email hits its intended goal without seeming like a generic template!