What to Share With AI to Draft a Marketing Email

The brief I got was a single sentence: “Write an email about our launch.” The draft that came back was polite, professional, and completely useless, because it could have been about anyone’s launch. The second brief I wrote for the same email filled half a page, and the draft that came back needed only small edits. Same tool, same product, same writer. The only thing that changed was what I shared before asking.

The tool is not the bottleneck, the brief is

Most people blame the tool when an AI draft reads generic. In my experience the tool is rarely the problem. An AI email draft can only work with what you hand it, so a thin brief produces a thin draft and a full brief produces something you can actually send. That is true for every tool I have used, and it is why I spend more time on the brief than on the draft itself. The drafting is fast. The thinking is the work, and the brief is where the thinking happens. I wrote about prompting for business separately, but an email brief is a specific case of the same discipline: tell the tool what the job is before you ask it to do the job.

Share the job before the words

Every marketing email has one job. It announces something, invites someone, reminds someone, or wins someone back. Tell the AI which one, and tell it the single action the reader should take after reading: book a call, reply, click through, buy, register. If you ask for “an email about our launch” you will get a summary of a launch. If you ask for “an email that gets past buyers to book a demo” you will get a pitch with a direction. One email, one job, one action. When a draft tries to do three things at once, that is usually a sign the brief never chose one.

Share who is reading

The same launch email reads differently for a new subscriber, a past buyer, and a cold list, because each group knows different things and worries about different things. Give the AI one plain sentence about the reader, such as “busy owners who bought once and never came back” or “subscribers who joined for the free guide and have not bought anything yet.” That single sentence changes the opening, the examples, and the call to action more than any adjective you could add. “Customers” is not an audience description. A sentence about a real person is.

Share the facts, not adjectives

The AI cannot know your offer, your dates, your guarantee, or your link, so list them as facts: what is launching, what it includes, the link, the deadline if there is one, and what happens after someone clicks. Adjectives without facts produce hype, and hype is what makes AI drafts feel empty. “Amazing” and “best” are not information. A price, a date, and a link are. And when a fact is missing, say so and leave a placeholder for it rather than letting the AI fill the gap. An AI tool asked to write around a missing detail will often invent a plausible one, and a plausible invented detail in a sent email is worse than a visible gap in a draft.

Share your voice

Paste one past email that sounded right, or write two lines yourself in the voice you want and tell the AI to match them. One sample beats ten adjectives, because “professional but friendly” means something different to everyone, while a sample shows the rhythm, the sentence length, and the words you actually use. If you have no sample, describe the voice in plain words instead: direct, warm, no jargon, short sentences. The goal is not to sound like a brand. The goal is to sound like you on a good day, writing to one person.

Share the shape

Tell the AI how the email should be built: how long it should run, how many subject line options you want, where the call to action sits, and whether there is one call to action or several. One is almost always better than several, because a reader given three choices usually picks none. Also tell it where this email sits in the sequence, because the first email in a launch, a reminder, and a last call are different emails even when they sell the same thing. Once the draft itself is right, the sending side is its own job, which I covered in my guide to automating email with AI, but no automation fixes a draft that never had a clear shape.

Never share these

Some things do not belong in an AI tool at all. Never paste a customer list, customer email addresses, phone numbers, passwords, internal documents, unreleased news, or private pricing into a drafting tool. You do not control how every tool stores or learns from what you paste, and a draft does not need real data to be good. Use placeholders instead, such as [First Name] or [City], and let your email platform fill in the real values when you send. The same rule applies to anything pasted from an internal thread: strip the internal notes and the forwarded history before you share the text, because everything you paste becomes part of the brief whether you meant it to or not.

The review pass before you send

A good brief still needs a human review, because the AI drafts and you decide. Read the draft once for facts: every claim, name, date, price, and link checked against the source, with invented details replaced by true ones or cut entirely. Read it once aloud for voice: if a sentence sounds like something you would never say, rewrite it. Then check the mechanics: the call to action works, the subject line does not promise what the body never delivers, and the email makes sense to someone who has never heard of you. That pass takes a few minutes and it is the difference between an email that reads as yours and one that reads as generated.

A brief you can copy

Here is the shape I use, filled in with placeholders so you can copy it and replace each line with your own facts:

• Goal: the single action the reader should take after reading this email.
• Reader: one plain sentence about who is reading and what they already know.
• Facts: the offer, the link, the deadline, and anything the reader must know to act.
• Voice: one past email that sounded right, or two lines written in the voice you want.
• Shape: the length, the number of subject line options, and where the call to action sits.
• Sequence: where this email sits, whether it opens, reminds, or closes.
• Do not include: customer data, passwords, internal notes, and anything unreleased.

Fill in those seven lines honestly and the draft that comes back will already be close. Leave them blank and no tool will save you, because the tool cannot know what you never told it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much detail should I put in an email brief?

Put in enough detail that a capable new hire could write the email without asking you a follow-up question, because that is roughly the level of context an AI draft needs to sound like it came from you rather than from a template.

Should I paste my customer list into an AI tool to personalize an email?

No, because customer data does not belong in a drafting tool, and placeholders combined with your email platform’s merge fields give you the same personalization without handing real addresses and names to a tool you do not control.

Can AI write a whole email sequence on its own?

It can draft a whole sequence, but each email still needs its own goal and a human review, because sequences fail when every email says the same thing in slightly different words instead of moving the reader one step at a time.

What do I do when the AI invents a detail I never gave it?

Treat an invented detail as a missing fact rather than a gift, and replace it with the true fact or cut the claim entirely, because sending a plausible detail you never verified turns a drafting shortcut into a trust problem.