How to Use AI for Cold Email and Top Tools to Get Started
A lot of salespeople don’t like the idea of using AI in cold outreach:
“Sales needs a human touch.”
“Prospects won’t engage with a faceless bot.”
“AI can’t lead a meeting.”
All true. But all based on a misunderstanding of the role of AI in outbound email.
If your sales team were running a kitchen, AI would be the prep cook beavering away in the background, doing the repetitive but still important preliminary tasks.
That’s what AI does for cold email. It automates the early stages of your outbound workflow: prospecting, personalization, and follow-up.
What’s more, AI is excelling at sales. According to McKinsey, 70% of businesses that use AI say it’s increased their sales earnings.
And the fact you’re here reading this article suggests you want in.
So let’s look at how they do it.
What is AI in Cold Email?
AI in cold email is simply the use of generative AI to manage parts of your outbound email cycle. It has a range of applications, from initial research of potential customers all the way through to when the time comes to close deals.
AI in cold email automates three main areas:
Prospecting. AI will use your ICP to filter and enrich leads in your database.
Qualification. AI will use your scoring criteria to find the most promising leads.
Personalization. AI will craft personalized opening lines, tailored offers, and calls to action (CTAs).
Follow-up. AI will send personalized follow-up emails at the right time.
Keep in mind these are only the primary tasks AI handles. Aristan’s AI sales rep, Ava, also takes care of email warmup, ICP refinement, split-testing, and more. Get in touch with the sales team if you’d like to see how Artisan can boost your sales revenue.
How AI Enhances Cold Email Campaigns
AI has three main applications in cold email campaigns: personalization, automation, and database management.
Let’s look at each of those in more detail.
Personalized Cold Emails at Scale
Comparing traditional if-then automations to GenAI is like parking a 19th Century bicycle next to a Tesla. By adding a layer of human-like intelligence, AI can successfully handle complex personalization tasks that were previously out of reach.
AI can personalize all of the following elements based on detailed lead data:
Subject line
Opening line
Offer
Closing line
Follow-up emails
The crucial benefit of AI is the ability to provide sophisticated personalization at scale. In the past, companies often hired a copywriter who might spend 40 hours a week writing opening lines. Now, that same process takes minutes.
Let’s look at Artisan as an example.
Artisan’s virtual sales rep, Ava, scrapes a vast array of sources across the web. She then uses an iterative “waterfall” methodology to select the best form of personalization for individual prospects based on relevance and timeliness.
If you would like to see Ava in action, book a demo.
Automation and Time-Saving
Generative AI combines and improves on the abilities of traditional AI and if-then automation sequences. This means that AI can handle repetitive cold email tasks better than old-school email automation platforms.
AI automates the following repetitive jobs:
Lead filtering based on your ICP
Lead qualification
Sending based on time zones
Personalized follow-up
Email domain warmup
Meeting scheduling
Email copy A/B testing
Practical data analytics insights
What’s more, AI can typically handle all of these tasks with a minimum of configuration. Artisan’s sales rep, Ava, for example, will automatically take care of them after just a few set-up inputs. Ava will also A/B test and make changes on autopilot, optimizing open and response rates.
Database Management and Enrichment
The effectiveness of your cold outreach hinges on the quality of your lead data, and we’re not only talking up-to-date email addresses. Lead data is the basis of filtering, qualification, and personalization.
AI checks multiple sources to ensure the completeness, accuracy, and hygiene of your lead lists.
AI can handle the following database tasks:
Email address verification
Hygiene and accuracy checks
Supplementation of lead profiles (e.g., job titles, company size, social profiles)
Duplicate lead and old data removal
For example, Artisan’s sales rep, Ava, has access to a database of more than 300 million leads, the details of which are continually updated. If you would like to see Artisan’s database action, generating leads for your business, book a demo today.
How to Use Artificial Intelligence for Effective Cold Email Campaigns
Picking the right AI tool has five steps:
Select a tool with a complete feature set
Set up your AI-powered cold email campaign
Automate in-depth personalization research
Analyze and optimize campaign performance
Combine AI with human input
Let’s look at each of these in a little more depth.
1. Select a Tool With a Complete Feature Set
Make sure your chosen AI tool can handle all of the following tasks:
Multi-source personalization research
Email personalization
Database searches
Lead data hygiene
Lead data enrichment
Qualification and lead scoring
Warmup
Email text generation
Follow-up automation
A/B split testing
Optimization
In addition, pay close attention to the integration libraries of the tools on your shortlist. For optimal efficiency, your AI tool should integrate with all the apps in your tech stack or provide an API so you can build your own integrations.
Artisan has all of the features described above, along with a fully-guided setup process that takes most businesses less than twenty minutes. Want to see how easy outbound email is when our AI sales rep, Ava, takes charge? Get in touch and book a demo now.
2. Set Up Your AI-Powered Cold Email Campaign
Let’s use Artisan as an example of how to set up an AI-powered campaign:
Specify country and language targeting restrictions.
Enter the details of your customer ICP (pain points, size, demographics, etc).
Describe your product details and examples of client successes.
Connect your inbox and configure elements like your email signature and Calendly link.
Let the AI use the information provided to find leads and build your campaign.
After the initial campaign setup, once your lead list has been created, you’ll be able to pick from several email templates (based on playbooks of successful campaigns) and tweak copy.
3. Automate In-Depth Personalization Research
Once you’ve set up the preliminaries, AI takes over and automates the process of creating and sending highly personalized initial and follow-up emails.
An advanced AI tool achieves a specific and relevant personalization in several ways. Let’s look at how this is possible with the example of Artisan’s virtual sales rep, Ava, and her unique “waterfall” iterative process.
First, Ava scrapes data from a wide assortment of sources across the web. These include social media activity, hiring news, fundraising announcements, product and feature releases, and more.
Second, Ava chooses the most relevant and up-to-date forms of personalization based on the client ICP and creates tailored emails using pre-selected templates. She may include numerous personalized references multiple times in a single email.
4. Analyze and Optimize Campaign Performance
AI can perform campaign optimization without any human input, and this is one of its biggest benefits over traditional automation.
Specifically, an AI outbound platform tracks the following KPIs:
Open rates
Click through rates
Response rates
It will then use the data it gathers to tweak content and test email copy variations and templates, replacing poorer-performing alternatives and increasing the overall effectiveness of your campaign.
AI optimizes early-stage granular metrics, providing a firm basis on which you can pursue higher-level, revenue-oriented outbound sales KPIs like overall conversions and pipeline velocity.
5. Combine AI with Human Input
AI is powerful. It’s really powerful. The truth is you probably could use it to run an entire outbound campaign, from sending the first email to closing the deal. You might not see great results, but you could do it.
However, AI’s true power is realized when it’s combined with human input, either from your own team or an outsourced sales agency. And the top AI platforms understand this reality and make it easy for sales professionals to review campaign elements and make adjustments based on their experience and intuition.
Regularly review the following parts of your campaign:
Email templates
Details of your offer
Alternative offers
Proof like client case studies and testimonials
Ideal customer profile (ICP)
A/B split test variations
A platform like Ava provides you with regular performance reports, allowing you to identify those areas that would most benefit from human oversight and input. If you’d like to see Ava’s analytics tools in action, get in touch to book a demo.
5 Best AI Cold Email Tools
We’ve spoken a lot about what AI cold emails do, but not the tools themselves. So, let’s have a look at some of the best options available.
Keep in mind that functionality and pricing often differ substantially between platforms . Compiling a shortlist and taking free trials is the best way of making sure you find a platform that fits your business needs.
Artisan
Artisan is an AI-based outbound sales and cold email platform. Unlike many other email automation platforms, AI is built into the core of Artisan’s functionality.
This means that Artisan can automate all stages of an outbound campaign right up to when the recipient responds, including lead database searches, lead qualification, email delivery and follow-up, and ongoing optimization.
Key features
Full suite of AI automation features
Database of over 300 million B2B leads
In-depth personalization research and best-fit selection using waterfall methodology
Email warm-up and delivery automation
Advanced analytics
Pricing
Artisan uses a custom pricing model to make sure that clients receive the best possible deal and to avoid the subscription scales that are so often weighted against either small businesses or large enterprises. Contact sales to discuss pricing.
Copy.ai
Copy.ai focuses on content generation, rather than the complete outbound sales cycle. It’s a good tool for content generation across a variety of different formats, including webinars, LinkedIn social media posts, SEO articles, and, of course, emails.
If you use Copy.ai, you’ll need to integrate it with another tool to automate and streamline the parts of your email campaign that aren’t based on content generation, such as email delivery and optimization.
Key features
Unlimited content generation and use of AI writing tools
GenAI for a variety of content types
Integrates with ChatGPT and Claude
Private community of users
Large integrations library and API on Enterprise plan
Pricing
The Starter plan is $49/month and the Advanced plan is $249/month. Both a limited free plan and a custom enterprise plan are available.
SmartWriter
Smart Writer.ai is an AI email platform that automates lead generation and email personalization. However, lead searching is based on a credit system (with 400 leads per month on the basic plan), so you can only scale up to a certain point.
Key features
Email personalization
Email content generation
Credit-based lead database
Outreach from LinkedIn profile
Unlimited projects (campaigns)
Pricing
Pricing starts at $59/month and goes up to $359/month.
Instantly.ai
Instantly is an email warmup and delivery platform with a range of GenAI features for creating personalized content and optimizing lead-generation and outreach campaigns. There’s also the option to use its associated CRM for an additional fee.
Key features
Email warmup
Cold email templates customization
Outreach sequences
Lead database
Optional CRM
Pricing
Monthly pricing starts at $37/month and goes up to $358/month. An enterprise, without any sending caps, is also available.
Nureply
Nureply is an AI-based platform whose main selling points are its unlimited accounts and unlimited emails feature. However, you will have to provide your own leads. It’s a good option for foreign-language emails (though you’ll need to check your language is supported).
Key features
AI-generated emails
Unlimited accounts and campaigns
Analytics platform
Support for multiple languages
Pricing
Pricing isn’t published publicly. Contact sales for a quote.
Try Out Artisan to See AI-Based Email Outreach in Action
Finding the best cold email AI tool takes time, and it’s easy to become frustrated. However, the time you’re spending now will pay dividends. A tool suited to your personalization, lead database, and scaling requirements can transform your cold email marketing.
At Artisan, we’ve built AI right into the core of our platform. AI is much more than a nice add-on. If you’d like to see how Artisan’s virtual sales rep, Ava, can boost your email deliverability, reply rates, and conversion rates, get in touch today for a demo.
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