It’s one of those cliches that turns out to be true: “AI isn’t coming for your job, but someone using AI is.”
Artificial Intelligence will turn out to be the next real “killer app”. The last one that completely transformed the Internet and the way you work was Social Media. Before that, it was email. Putting AI in the same category as email and social media should give you a sense of just how transformative this technology is and will become.
But how to incorporate it into your daily DtC efforts is the subject of regular debate and discussion. We believe it is best used not to write copy for your website or email campaigns but rather to fuel your creative juices. It turns out that while AI’s current copywriting capability is good, we don’t think it is yet so good that it can authentically communicate the uniqueness and personal voice that is so important to successful communications and campaigns. However, it sure can generate great ideas for communications and DtC campaigns.
Whether you are using ChatGPT, Claude, Bing AI, Google Gemini, or another AI tool, they all excel at assisting in brainstorming. It’s this process of coming up with creative ways to position, sell, market, and communicate the unique qualities of your wine brand that most commonly set you apart from your competitors and keep you’re your customers engaged.
The key to using AI to help generate idea for a DtC email or marketing campaign is precise prompts. “Prompt Engineering”, as some refer to the practice, is the process to providing the AI tools with proper context and direction: From what perspective should the AI respond? What is the specific context that the AI should consider? Exactly what task should the AI perform. In practice, that kind of prompt created by a DtC-oriented winery might look something like this:
Respond as a consumer marketing expert in the wine industry. You work at a small, 5,000 case winery located in Napa Valley with a reputation for producing single-vineyard Chardonnay and Cabernet from the Coombsville sub-appellation. Create a series of email campaign for past buyers that will utilize the theme of the coming of Spring. The goal of the campaign should be to generate interest in visiting the winery over the next three months.
Using Microsoft Co-Pilot, our AI provided five different email themes including:
- “Spring Awakening at [Winery Name]”
- “Unveiling Our Spring Releases”
- “Exclusive Spring Cellar Tours”
- “Picnic Among the Vines”
- “Personal Invitation: Visit Us This Spring!”
With each above idea came underlying suggestions on how to make the overall theme compelling. However, none of the Co-Pilot Theme suggestions focused specifically on the winery being in the Coombsville region of Napa. This is where revision and “conversation” comes in. As you brainstorm with the AI it is always important give your AI partner further guidance. For example, we responded to Co-Pilot with this: “Provide more options focusing on the fact that the winery resides in the Coombsville region of Napa Valley.
The result were five more campaign suggestions, all focused on the winery being in the Coombsville region. Among them was this:
Email 4: “Picnic Among Coombsville Vines”
- Subject: “Picnic Among Coombsville Vines”
- Describe the Coombsville vineyard landscape in Spring: rolling hills, budding vines, and wildflowers.
- Suggest a Spring picnic experience with Coombsville wine pairings.
- Highlight secluded picnic spots with breathtaking views.
The notion of “Secluded picnic spots with breathtaking views” was a particularly appealing idea. And no doubt a Coombsville winery could run with this idea, utilizing their knowledge of the region.
Prompt. Refine the Prompt. Refine Further. These are the keys to directing your AI tool of choice to drill down exactly to where you need your brainstorming session to go. Moreover, the more detailed context you can provide in your original and subsequent prompts, the more useful the ideas that will be generated.
It will be tempting if you are working to generate an email campaign to ask the AI to generate the copy for the email. We recommend keeping this “in-house”. Few things are more important to your outreach efforts than maintaining the authentic voice of your brand. That voice has been developed as a direct result of real people intimately connected to your winery, your location and your culture personally crafting honest and real messages.
Besides using AI tools to help uncover effective themes for email campaigns, you can also use the AI to help develop protocols for post-visit outreach, creating concise lists of requirements for new positions at your company, ideas for unique communication assets for the tasting room, compelling names for a new wine made of a proprietary blend of grapes, and much more.
Take time to learn how to manipulate and generate prompts and how to direct the AI to dive deeper, then use your own voice to generate the final product. This is how the new generative AI tools can help make your customer outreach and marketing effective without compromising your authentic brand voice.
