What to tell the AI before it writes your next marketing email
AI email marketing on Pro drafts a broadcast in seconds, but it only knows what you hand it. Eight lines of brief decide the rest.
You open Email in your dashboard, click Write with AI, and type six words: “email about my new course”. Ten seconds later a draft is sitting there. It is grammatical. It is friendly. It says almost nothing. No price, no date, no reason to read it today. So you delete half, rewrite the rest, and decide the AI is not much use. The AI was fine. The brief was six words.
Why a short prompt gives you a hollow draft
The generator does not read your account. It cannot see the product row, the file you uploaded, the price you set last Tuesday or the fact that your course opens on the 14th. Everything true about your business has to arrive through the box you type into. Give it six words and it fills the gap with the safest average of every promotional email ever written, which is exactly what a hollow draft is.
That is not a flaw you can prompt your way around with clever wording. AI email marketing is fast at sentences and blind to facts. The division of labour is simple: you supply the facts and the judgement, it supplies the paragraphs, the transitions and the tidy ending you would have spent twenty minutes on.
Here is the genuinely hard part, and it is worth saying plainly. Writing a brief means deciding the offer. What is this, who is it for, what do you want them to do, by when. Most people stall on the email because they have not settled the offer, and no tool can settle it for you. The two minutes you spend on the brief are the two minutes you were avoiding.
Six words versus eight lines
The comparison worth making is not AI against writing by hand. It is a blank page against a page with a brief on it. Both end in an email; only one of them ends there quickly.
| Writing from a blank page | A brief plus the store.fan composer |
|---|---|
| Forty minutes staring at an empty message field | Two minutes on a brief, then a full draft to react to |
| Tone drifts because every email starts from nothing | Tone is a chip you pick before generating: friendly, professional, exciting or casual |
| Prices and dates get half-remembered and half-wrong | They sit in the brief, so they land in the draft, and you check them once |
| One email goes to the whole list because segmenting is a chore | Audience is a dropdown: everyone, all buyers, leads only, members only, or the buyers of one product |
| Personal touches mean manual find-and-replace | {{name}}, {{creator}} and {{store_url}} fill themselves in when it sends |
| Rewrites happen in the email, over and over | Rewrites happen in the brief, and the next draft arrives in seconds |
The eight lines
Write these in a note, or straight into the prompt box, one per line. Plain words. No formatting. The order matters less than the completeness.
- 1Who it goes to, named as the segment you will pick in the composer. “The 260 people who bought the Lightroom pack” is a brief; “my audience” is not.
- 2What you are selling or announcing, using the exact product title as it appears on your storefront, so the draft and the page agree.
- 3The price in full, including anything the reader must know before clicking: the delivery fee on a physical item, whether a membership bills monthly or yearly.
- 4The single action, as one verb and one link. If you cannot name one action, the email is not ready to be written.
- 5The deadline, or the honest absence of one. Vague urgency is where generated copy goes wrong fastest, because it will happily invent “this week only”.
- 6What this reader already knows. A lead who downloaded a free checklist and a member two years in need different first sentences, and only you know which you are writing to.
- 7The one specific detail nobody else could supply: the page count, the session length, why you made it, what changed in the file since the last version.
- 8The shape and the limits: roughly how long, whether it opens with the news or a story, and what must not appear. “No discount, no promises about results” is a useful line to type.
A brief for a workshop replay, in practice
Say your customer list holds 780 people: 190 have bought something, 590 arrived through a free lead magnet. You recorded a live workshop, and the replay plus the worksheets is now a $29 product. The lazy prompt is “promote my workshop replay”. The brief is: goes to the 590 leads who have never bought; product is The Two-Hour Portfolio Workshop (Replay); $29; one action, buy the replay; open until Sunday night, then it goes to $39; they signed up for a free posing checklist in April and have never paid me; the replay is 96 minutes with the three worksheets I used on the call; keep it under 200 words, open with the news, no discount codes.
The second version produces a draft you can edit in ten minutes rather than rewrite in forty. It will still need your hand on the opening line and probably a trim in the middle. But the facts are right, the ask is single, and the deadline is real. If eight of those 590 buy, that is a normal outcome for a first send to a cold segment, and it tells you something useful about the offer rather than about your prompt.
You can build the storefront, the customer list and the products on the free plan first, then add email when you have something to say.
Create your storeThe mistake most people make
They edit the draft instead of the brief. The first output comes back too formal, so they soften three sentences by hand. The next one comes back too formal again, because the input has not changed. Treat the draft as disposable and the brief as the document you actually own. Keep the good briefs in a note; the ones for launches, restocks and price changes get reused more often than you would expect, and rewriting one line beats rewriting eleven. If you are weighing up whether the Pro tools are worth it yet, the plans page lays out what sits where.
AI email marketing is a Pro feature, with 5,000 marketing emails a month included. Order receipts and download links go out automatically on every plan, including Free, and are not part of that allowance.
No. It writes from the brief you type. Your customer list decides who receives the campaign through the audience dropdown, but the words come only from what you hand the generator.
Around 120 words, or eight short lines. Longer is not better. Specific is better. One exact price beats three sentences about how good the product is.
Change one line and regenerate rather than rewriting the whole thing. If it is wrong a third time, the problem is usually that the offer itself is unclear, and the email is not the place to fix that.
None of this is really about AI. It is about the fact that a clear brief is most of a clear email, and always was. The generator just makes the cost of a bad brief obvious within ten seconds instead of at the end of a wasted evening.
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