Why custom GPTs are game-changers for email marketing
Email marketing can be both a powerful growth tool and a significant challenge. You want your emails to engage, inspire, and ultimately drive customers to action—but creating content that consistently hits these goals takes a lot of time and effort. Many business owners find themselves caught between the demands of their day-to-day work and the desire to run compelling email marketing campaigns that convert. This is where a custom GPT for email marketing campaigns comes into play.
Benefits of a custom GPT for email marketing campaigns
This is where a custom GPT for Email Marketing Campaigns can make a huge difference.
Imagine having an AI assistant that knows your brand as well as you do—an assistant that can generate personalized, brand-consistent emails quickly and easily, saving you hours of work each week.
By using a custom GPT, you can have a powerful content partner that helps create, iterate, and optimize your email marketing campaigns based on your brand’s specific voice, values, and audience.
Without a custom GPT, you’re left with generic AI suggestions that often miss the mark in terms of brand tone or relevance.
These models don’t have the specific understanding of your customers and brand nuances, leading to content that feels disconnected from your brand story.
On the other hand, a custom GPT allows you to train the AI on your own data—past emails, campaign objectives, brand tone—resulting in much more relevant and effective content.
By investing the time to create a custom GPT, you, the small business owner, can create email marketing campaigns using AI that
- Resonate more deeply with your audience
- Reduce content creation headaches
- Focus your energy on other critical aspects of the business
All that sounds great, but how do I do it? How do I create a custom GPT for my email marketing campaigns?
Questions to help you develop a custom GPT for email marketing campaigns
To make the process of creating a custom GPT as smooth and effective as possible so that you can use AI in your email marketing campaigns, consider the following questions. Your answers will serve as the foundational elements for training the AI and ensuring it aligns perfectly with your brand’s needs.
1. What are your campaign objectives?
- What do you want your email marketing campaigns to achieve? (e.g., drive more sales, increase brand awareness, re-engage existing customers)
- Are there specific metrics you’re aiming to improve (e.g., open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate)?
2. Who is your target audience?
- Who are you trying to reach with this campaign? (e.g., existing customers, potential leads, specific demographics like young professionals or parents)
- What are your audience’s key challenges or pain points that your product or service solves?
3. What is your brand voice?
- How would you describe your brand’s tone? (e.g., friendly, professional, playful, authoritative)
- Are there specific phrases or terminology that your brand uses often?
- Are there any phrases or styles that should be avoided?
4. What type of content works best for your audience?
- Which kinds of emails typically perform well for your audience? (e.g., product launches, customer stories, promotional offers)
- Are there specific calls to action that resonate well with your customers?
5. What past campaigns have been successful?
- Can you provide examples of past successful emails or campaigns that could serve as inspiration for the custom GPT?
- What elements of these campaigns contributed to their success? (e.g., subject lines, body content, offers)
6. What common customer questions should be addressed?
- What are the most common questions your customers ask that you want your email content to address?
- Are there any recurring objections or barriers to purchase that the content should aim to overcome?
7. What are the unique selling points of your product/service?
- What makes your product or service stand out? (e.g., unique features, better value, customer service excellence)
- How do you want the AI to emphasize these points in your email marketing?
8. What are the specific campaign details?
- What products or services are being promoted?
- Are there any particular offers or promotions that should be highlighted?
Answering these questions before starting the process of creating your custom GPT will help you tailor the AI to meet your specific needs, resulting in content that speaks directly to your audience and drives action.
Spend time putting together a document that you will upload to your custom GPT – one that answers these questions, has past campaign examples and past campaign metrics.
Along with answering the questions above about your business and goals, pull together any information you have on your company. That can be:
- Your website copy
- Brochures
- News Articles
- Etc
The more information you can provide the GPT about your business, goals, and past campaigns the better.
Once you have these questions answered and have pulled together all the necessary information, its time to create a custom GPT using Chat GPT.
How do you create a custom GPT for email marketing campaigns?
Now it’s time to use the information we pulled together earlier and actually create a custom GPT we can use in our email marketing campaigns.
Here is a step-by-step guide walking you through how to create, test, fine-tune, and publish your custom GPT.
Create your custom GPT for email marketing
Now that you have gathered all the necessary information, it’s time to create your custom GPT
Step 1: Click on your profile.
Step 2: Click on My GPTs.
You might not have one – that doesn’t matter. Click here to move to the next step.
Step 3: Click on Create a GPT
Alright, you have a GPT created. Now it is time to customize it for your email marketing campaign.
Customize your custom GPT for your email marketing campaigns
We have a GPT created, but at this point, it is not really going to do anything for us. We have to customize it for our own brand and our own email marketing campaigns.
Here is how you customize your GPT step-by-step.
Step 1: Name your GPT
We suggest something that’s information that will tell you what the GPT is about at a glance.
Step 2: Add a description.
Here you will describe what the GPT does. In our case, a description would be something like: Creates brand specific email marketing campaigns.
Step 3: Add your instructions to your custom GPT
This is the meat of what we are going to be doing. If you have experience with large language models or are good at prompting ChatGPT, you can enter in your instructions in this box.
If you aren’t familiar with ChatGPT, you can have ChatGPT help you create the instructions. This is the route we like to go since ChatGPT will write the instructions for you. Then, all you need to do is refine them.
Click on the Create tab, then tell ChatGPT what you are wanting to do. In our case, you might tell ChatGPT the following:
“I need you to help me develop a GPT that helps me run my email marketing campaigns for my company.”
ChatGPT will then walk you through a series of questions. Your answers to those questions will fill in the description box on the configure tab.
Back on the configure tab, notice that ChatGPT has added instructions for itself, it has also added conversation starters.
This is how we like to start developing our own custom GPTs.
Once we are at this point, we upload our files and then test some more.
Step 4: Upload your files to your custom GPT
Attach the files you created earlier about your company. Remember to provide as much information as possible. This will help the GPT fine tune the email’s it creates specifically for your company, your clients, and your products.
Step 5: Click the Code Interpreter and Data Analysis button
We like to click this button, particularly if we are going to be providing any data to Chat GPT to analysis such as campaign analytics.
Step 6: Test and fine tune your custom GPT for email marketing
Start by asking the GPT to do something like:
“Let’s begin an email marketing campaign for a promotion I am running for my fitness gym. I am providing one free personal training session in the month of November. Help me create a campaign.”
See what information the GPT provides.
If something seems off, or it keeps providing you with the same wrong answers, you can add that to the instructions section.
Or if you need a specific format or length for the email, you can add those details to the instructions section.
Keep prompting and fine-tuning until you get the information delivered in your brand voice and in the format or order you want.
Step 7: Conversation starters (Optional)
This step is optional, but can be helpful. It is the questions that will show as examples when you first click on the Custom GPT to use it.
If you had ChatGPT help you create the GPT – See above, it will fill these Conversation Starters in for you.
Step 8: Upload an image to represent the custom GPT for email marketing (Optional)
You can upload an image to help your GPT stand out from others. Or you can have DAll-E create one for you. This is an optional step.
If you had ChatGPT help you create the GPT – See above, it will create an image for you. You can keep that image, or upload your own.
Step 9: Create the GPT for email marketing
Once you are happy with the outcome, click on the Create button.
After you click the create button, there will be a few options for you to choose from. If you have a team who will use it, you might leave the default option check – Anyone with the link.
If you are the only one who will use it, select the Only Me option.
In our case, the Only Me and Anyone with the link option would be our suggestions for selection since this is highly personalized to your company.
The custom GPT will be created and available for you to use in your next email marketing campaign.
Step 10: Use your custom GPT in your marketing campaigns
Use your custom GPT to create highly effective and brand specific email campaigns.
Step 11: Continue refining your GPT
If you notice your GPT is not providing you the outcome you want, you can always go back in and refine the instructions.
Refining is a necessary step as it is important to keep the GPT updated with the most relevant information about your company and how your campaigns are doing.
Conclusion
By following these steps, you can create a custom GPT for Email Marketing Campaigns that is specifically tuned to meet your company’s marketing needs. This allows you to generate consistent, brand-aligned content that speaks directly to your target audience while saving time and improving engagement.
