AI email writing software promises to automate your sales workflow without hurting your deliverability or reply rate.

But, does this AI technology really live up to the hype?

In this guide, we're going to look at how AI email writing tools can help you optimize your cold email process, the underlying technology behind them, what results you can expect from them, as well as showing you some of the best AI email assistants on the market right now.

Let's get started.

What Are AI Email Writing Tools?

AI email writing tools use machine learning to analyze text and generate new email copy for you.

The companies behind the software train their tools to deliver copy based on prompts you provide.

For example, some tools offer an "email opening line" generator. Based on the details you provide about your prospect, they'll generate a sentence or two that you can go ahead and use in your email as an icebreaker.

These tools aren’t truly “AI”, but they can still be a useful tool in your workflow.

How Do AI Email Writing Tools Work?

Despite the term AI being thrown around, most of these tools don't use true artificial intelligence and aren't ready to change the world.

Many of these tools rely on systems like OpenAI's GPT-3, which uses an “advanced autoregressive language model” that relies on deep learning to respond to prompts you provide it with.

In simple terms, that means when you give it a prompt (e.g., "write a cold email to pitch software development services to new clients"), it will autocomplete a sentence or section of text based on what it thinks you're looking for.

In practice, these tools synthesize text from a huge dataset, and then, using deep learning, figure out what the best response to the prompt is.

It's not uncommon for these tools to generate sentences with made-up facts and figures, or with wording that doesn't make complete sense. That means they’re still not ready to completely replace you, but they can still act as a useful assistant.

What Are the Benefits of Using an AI Assistant When Writing Your Emails?

1. Improve Your Email Writing Productivity

The first key benefit to AI writers for cold emailers is that they can speed up the time it takes to write your emails.

As you know, writing a personalized opening line in your cold emails is vital to getting replies. It proves you've done your research into your prospect.

Here are some examples of the level of personalization you need in your opening lines:

  • "Just read the case study you published with {{customer name}}. Awesome how you helped them increase conversions by 15% on their Facebook campaigns."

  • "Saw your talk at {{event}} – loved the unique insights and hoping to test some of those ideas over the next few weeks."

But, writing opening lines like these for each of your prospects is one of the most time-consuming parts of cold emailing.

These AI writing tools can help you automatically create your opening lines, which will save you a huge amount of time.

If you send 100 cold emails per week, and an AI tool saves you just 90 seconds per opening line, that's 2.5 hours of your valuable time saved per week.

2. Quickly Generate New Email Talking Points

As much as we enjoy cold emailing new prospects, it can get difficult to continually improve your email copy.

After a while, it's easy to settle into bad habits and you can find yourself repeating similar copy and talking points.

These AI tools can help you come up with new ideas that you may not have considered.

As one report on the technology behind AI writers explained, GPT-3 is like a "scrapbook created from millions and millions of snippets of text that it then glues together in weird and wonderful ways on demand".

Provided with the right prompts, you can use these tools to generate new subject lines, email copy, and talking points to help you start more conversations with your prospects.

9 High-Performing AI Email Writing Assistants and Tools

1. QuickMail (Best Overall)

Get AI-generated sentiments based on potential prospects' needs

QuickMail home page

QuickMail offers granular reply sentiment detection with AI. These insights go beyond positive/neutral/negative to tell you exactly what potential prospects want from you next and automate sending the right follow up.

Let's take an example. Our recent potential prospect was interested in starting a collaboration, but they had some doubts. So, logically they asked us for more information.

Based on what the prospect says, our AI sentiment tool analyzes the prospect conversation and recommends what steps you should take next to close the deal.

In this case, the prospect wanted more information, so our AI tool suggested: "Wants more information." 

Our AI-sentiment tool can also suggest the following:

  • unsubscribe request

  • not interested

  • no need

  • not the right person

  • not now

  • confused

  • booking request

  • more information

  • interested

Each of these sentiments can be used to launch a sub-campaign, a specific follow-up sequence for each scenario.

If you’re spending time marking unsubscribes or do not contacts, that’s time that could be spent selling. QuickMail's AI features helps you eliminate all of the administrative work that typically comes with cold outbound.

LET AI HANDLE THE ADMIN SO YOU CAN FOCUS ON CLOSING:

✓ Assign sentiment to responses & handle unsubscribe requests

✓ Detect out-of-office responses and follow-up once they return

✓ Start a prospect on a follow-up campaign based on their reply

Ready to get started?

Put QuickMail's AI and sub-campaigns to the test in a free 14-day trial.

2. Flowrite

Generate ready-to-send emails with short or no instructions.

Flowrite is an AI-powered email writer that saves you hours per month when it comes to daily messaging.

In simple terms, you choose a message template (e.g. follow-up email), add short instructions, and Flowrite uses the professional identity information you provide (like company name and your role) to generate highly personalized messages.

You can focus on the intention of the message and Flowrite takes care of the delivery, formatting, proper grammar, and professional tone.

Pricing: Free trial, paid plans range from $5-30/month based on number of messages you send

Key features:

  • Works in your inbox with 20+ integrations to apps like LinkedIn, Intercom and more

  • Smart email templates that have been trained to handle the most common daily messages

  • Automatically gives reply suggestions that allow for a 1-click reply experience

3. HubSpot

Email marketing is a powerful tool to engage and connect with your audience – no matter the size of your business. With HubSpot's AI Email Writer, you can create sales outreach emails with the help of AI. It combines the ingenuity of artificial intelligence (AI) with human expertise to revolutionize your email marketing experience.

Key features:

  • Utilize AI suggestions to generate email content that resonates with your audience.

  • Analyzes recipient data and offers insights on tailoring your emails to create more personalized experience 

  • Provides recommendations on variables to test, such as subject lines or CTAs

4. Lyne.ai

Generate 100s of opening lines at once using your prospects' LinkedIn profile or email address.

Lyne is a platform designed for one purpose: to generate highly personalized introductory lines for your cold email campaigns.

To create your opening lines, all you need to do is upload a CSV of your prospects with either their business email address or their LinkedIn profile. Then, Lyne will scan their company domain and LinkedIn profile for key information on them and generate an opening line.

You can choose if you want Lyne to generate short (1-2 sentences) or long opening lines (3-4 sentences).

There are also a few useful features for lead generation agencies, such as the ability to organize your opening lines into folders and label them so you know which lines to use for each campaign you're running.

Pricing: $99/month for 350 opening lines

Key features:

  • Only requires your prospects email or LinkedIn profile

  • Takes 4-5 seconds to generate an intro line

  • Manage opening lines for different clients with folders and labels

5. Magic Sales Bot

Generate personalized opening lines for sales emails using GPT-3.

Magic Sales Bot was developed by a former sales rep and is packed with helpful features to help you write personalized cold emails at scale using AI.

You add your prospect, and Magic Sales Bots will find articles, Tweets, and news stories about your prospect and company. It then uses OpenAI's GPT-3 to write custom blurbs for each prospect.

Even if you decide not to use the AI-generated email copy, Magic Sales Bot still comes in handy for quickly reviewing the latest news and social media updates from companies you're reaching out to.

Pricing: $49/month for unlimited sales email creations

Key features:

  • Generate email intros from social media or news stories

  • Uses OpenAI's GPT-3

  • Add your company details and they'll be used in your copy

6. Conversion.ai

Email subject line and body copywriting using GPT-3.

Conversion.ai is one of the larger companies in this space at the moment. The software has a wide range of templates you can use to generate new copy, but the most relevant ones for us are the 'Personalized Cold Emails' and 'Email Subject Lines' templates.

As the names suggest, these are used for two essential parts of your email: the main copy in the body of your email, and a compelling subject line.

Like some other tools here, Conversion.ai uses GPT-3. You provide it with prompts, such as your company name, what your product does, and context to include in the email. Then, it generates an entire email using that information. You'll need to research your prospect before generating your cold email, as you will need information to add to the 'Context' section of the prompt.

The output is relatively good, but it's still best to manually review each email.

Pricing: $29 per month for 20,000 words of copy

Key features:

  • Create entire emails and unique subject lines using AI

  • Access to a range of other AI copywriting templates

7. Snazzy.ai

Generate sales outreach emails, subject lines, and emails to pitch to investors.

Snazzy offers a wide variety of copywriting templates, including a Sales Outreach template, as well as email templates to pitch VCs and angel investors.

You create your profile on Snazzy, including key details about your company, brand keywords, your audience, and a description of your offering.

Then, Snazzy uses that information to create email templates that combine it all into a few short sentences.

Like most other tools here, the email output isn't always ready to use immediately, but it provides a good starting point for your email templates.

Pricing: Free plan available, paid plans start at $25/month for unlimited content generation

Key features:

  • Wide variety of copywriting templates, including several focused on writing emails

  • Generous free plan

  • Copy your templates in one click, save them for later, and provide feedback

8. Lavender

AI email assistant that suggests ways to improve and personalize your sales emails.

As of writing, Lavender isn't truly an AI writer. But, it is an AI assistant designed to help sales reps reduce their email writing time without it affecting personalization.

As you write your sales email, Lavender compares your copy against a database containing millions of effective sales emails to give you feedback and suggestions on making it more impactful.

It also helps you personalize your outreach by displaying social media posts, company information, and details on your prospect based on the email address you're reaching out to.

Despite not having an AI writer currently, Lavender does have an AI email writing assistant that relies on GPT-3 in the works.

Pricing: Free plan, paid plans start at $19/month

Key features:

  • AI email assistant with improvement suggestions

  • Integrates with Clearbit so you can quickly gather context on prospects

9. SmartWriter.ai

AI email writing software designed for cold emailing.

SmartWriter uses publicly available prospect data from news stories, LinkedIn profiles, case studies, and more, to create unique sales emails for everyone you're reaching out to.

Rather than offering a wide variety of copywriting templates, SmartWriter only focuses on email copy designed to be used in your cold outreach.

Their templates include personalized icebreakers (opening lines), entire cold emails, LinkedIn outreach messages, and backlink outreach templates.

Pricing: $59/month for 1500 outreach credits

Key features:

  • Create custom opening lines, cold emails, LinkedIn messages, and backlink request emails

  • Searches for up-to-date information on your prospects

  • Verify your emails before sending to improve deliverability

Do These AI Copywriting Tools Actually Work?

Now, it’s time to answer the big question: can these tools actually create copy you can use in your email outreach?

In our opinion, the verdict is still out. They can generate compelling copy at times, but the tools aren’t ready to handle all of your email writing needs.

Despite that, there is huge potential for these tools.

VWO, one of the most popular A/B testing tools out there, worked with their clients to test how AI-written content (using GPT-3) compared to copy written by humans.

So far, they've completed 17 A/B tests. Ten of those had inconclusive results.

Of the other seven tests, the human copy outperformed AI copy just once. There were three ties, and the AI copy won three times.

These weren't small A/B tests, either. They worked with huge sites like Booking.com, and a range of established e-commerce, fintech, and SaaS websites.

The key benefit of using AI is that it reduces the time you need to spend coming up with new experiments. The faster you can come up with new experiments, the sooner you can generate statistically significant results, and the sooner you can see the positive impact on your business.

If you want to test how your AI-written emails perform against your own handwritten emails, you can A/B test them using QuickMail (Get started with a free 14-day trial).

Head to your campaign, and choose the step you want to A/B test. Choose 'Add Variation'.

Then, you can add a new variation of your original email that you can test against the original.

When your campaign starts sending, you'll see detailed metrics for each email variation so you can track which one is getting more opens, clicks, replies, and unsubscribes.

Make sure to leave your A/B test running until you have enough results to make a data-driven decision about pausing your campaigns.

You'll quickly see whether or not your AI-written emails are working for your business and can make adjustments accordingly.

What's Our Verdict on These AI Writing Tools?

We're not associated with any of the platforms we've mentioned in this post, so we want to provide an honest opinion.

When you first start researching what these AI platforms are capable of, you get the impression that these tools will automate your entire cold outreach process.

In truth, they're still not ready to take over your sales work.

If you used these tools to generate your email copy and pasted it into your QuickMail campaigns without any editing, chances are, you won't get many replies.

The tools don't fact-check themselves and only rely on the inputs provided. They're also not trained copywriters, which can lead to strangely worded sentences or phrasing that doesn't sound completely human.

But, if you use these tools as an assistant, rather than using them to replace yourself, they can speed up your workflow, help you send more emails in less time, and start more conversations.

The key benefit is that you don't need to start from scratch.

You can then review each piece of copy and make any necessary edits to get it ready to send.

In the future, we're sure the technology is going to get even better. But for now, they're not ready to take over your email writing duties.

Wrapping Up

AI copywriting tools still have room to improve. Despite that, they can still be a valuable part of your workflow.

You can use them to generate personalized email opening lines and icebreakers, find relevant talking points to start conversations, and come up with intriguing subject lines that will get your email noticed in your prospects' inbox.

To make them work for you, ensure you always review the copy generated before using it in your sales outreach. You'll ensure the quality of your outreach emails remains as high as possible but still have the benefit of being able to automate part of the writing process.