AI email campaign best practices

AI emails are just like emails from humans–if they are boring, long, or have uninteresting subjects nobody will read them.

We did a how-to video series on outbound which is worth watching.

Choose contacts who are like your customers. The more specific the better. There are lots of tools out there to do this, or you can code your own in Cursor or other AI powered code tools. We like Apollo.io and Clay for finding contacts. You can also use PromptLoop and other AI-enabled tools to gather your own lists at scale.

We highly recommend never using a paid list. These lists are usually all terrible. Your emails will not work and worse, you'll be marked as "SPAM" by the email providers because these lists usually contain a lot of stale or old emails that are non-deliverable or generic emails like "Sales@" or "info@".

The subject line is the most important ~5 words of your email. Make sure it is gripping and it gets the users attention, without being offensive or off brand. This is your hook–treat it that way. People get 200-300 emails per day, so if it's not compelling they simply won't open your email and nothing else you do matters.

The body of your email should be exceptionally short. You should be uncomfortable with how short it is. Look at it on your mobile–is it short enough to read most of it on your phone screen? The body is typically composed of some kind of opener, a bit on the customers' pain and your solution, and a "Call to action" or CTA at the end. That is all.

Successful emails have 1 call to action (CTA). This might be to "book a meeting" or "read an article" or "join a webinar" or "start a free trial". If you mix multiple CTAs you will confuse the reader an they won't do anything. Skyp limits CTAs to one or two per email at the most.

You want your emails to sound like you. By fine tuning the tone of the email, and even providing examples, you can achieve a human-sounding email without much extra effort.

Some personalization is great. If you know something about your prospect–perhaps you found a recent X or LinkedIn post, or a YouTube video–this is excellent to include in your email if it is relevant. The problem is that many AIs out there generically grab useless content and then add it to emails, so useless personalization has come to be synonymous with AI. A great example is "Hi, Alex I see you're in Oakland–Go A's!" Not only is this totally generic, it also shows that whoever wrote it has no idea about the A's situation. Instead, get real data on your prospect or that is valuable to your prospect and use that to personalize your emails.