With ChatGPT and other AI tools you can create large volumes of content quickly. But how do you use it wisely?
19. april 2025
When I started with email marketing in 1999, you could not use images, formatted text or hyperlinks (that is, where you highlight some text and insert a link) in your emails.
Even so, we were already working with advanced flows and personalised content back then. We built newsletters in many variants, sent to both small and large segments of recipients. And we reused content across different emails.
The technology was relatively expensive and required specialists for the setup, even more so than today.
So it was mainly large companies that worked with automation and personalisation in their emails.
Today, 25 years on, the technology has become much easier to work with, and on price even the smallest companies can join in.
Even so, many companies still spend a large part of their time setting up emails manually – even though most e-commerce businesses can at least insert products into their emails automatically.
It can of course make sense not to focus much on automation if you only send a single newsletter a month with 2–4 sections, in one language and one variant.
But if you want to send a lot of mail and at the same time build loyalty in the inbox, it requires you to keep getting better at delivering the right message to the right recipient at the right time.
If you have many recipients and a lot of content, the only profitable way to reach that goal is to work more and more with automation.
This is not about getting AI or other tools to make it easier for you to build your mails. Instead you should make sure you do not have to build mails at all – they should build themselves through automated processes that you control.
Making the most of the potential in email marketing requires you to start by rethinking your process. Whether you work with inspirational emails, a product focus, services or something else entirely, one thing always holds:
Almost all the content worth sending by email is also worth publishing in other channels. So you need to be able to reuse content across channels easily.
Start by creating an overview:
Make a list of all the content you already have or produce on an ongoing basis.
Make a list of your recipients – both those you already communicate with and those you would like to reach.
Make a list of the content you do not produce today but which would make sense to produce.
Make a list of the channels where you would like to publish your content.
Then put it together in a matrix, with your content types and channels in the rows and your audiences or segments in the columns. Then mark in the cells which content should be sent to which audiences in which channels.
Your overview should therefore include every channel – from your own website to social media (both organic and paid), catalogues, print media and any other relevant form of communication.
Before you think: "There is no point making a list of content I do not have the resources to produce", remember:
If you cannot already automate enough of your work today to produce all the content that makes sense – you probably can quite soon.
A gradual move towards more automation
You are the one who knows what content makes sense for both your recipients and your company.
So you can also automate a large part of the process and still deliver content that is both good and distinctive.
Once you have your content sorted in relation to your recipients' wishes and needs, you can move gradually from your current working process to a more automated one.
The more you automate the work of creating content and setting up emails, the more time you get to improve your content, test, analyse your results and optimise as you go.