Good morning, Chase and Jimmy here.

AI doesn't write better emails than you… But it does let you write five times as many without sacrificing quality.

Now don’t get us wrong, this shift isn't about speed. It's about where you spend your time.

Instead of grinding through blank pages and first drafts, you're editing, refining, and shaping – the parts where human judgment actually matters and brand voice gets dialed in.

AI kills the dreaded blank page. It generates test variants in minutes. It personalizes at scale without doubling headcount.

But it can't replace taste. And it can't sound like you without your input.

Today we're breaking down how to integrate AI into your retention workflow without losing what makes your emails worth reading.

Also inside:
✔️ How one agency cut 351K emails and pushed open rates to 51.5%
✔️ Knowledge drop: Hotels cracked retention. Your CX policy probably hasn't.
✔️ DTC wins: Laird Superfood picks up Terrasoul Superfoods in $48M deal

Let’s get into it.

How One Agency Cut 351K Emails And Pushed Open Rates To 51.5%

Demo Agency took over Daily Spoon's email program and went against the usual retention playbook: they sent less. The problem they inherited will sound familiar to most operators... engagement was flattening, the calendar was stacked with promotional sends competing against each other, and volume was creeping up without results to match.

Their fix was to rebuild the automation backbone first, then layer campaigns on top with 3 to 5 segmented variants per send. A year in, the numbers:

• 51.5% open rate across the year

• 351K fewer emails sent than the previous period

• Automations generating a consistent share of monthly revenue while campaigns amplify

The core insight from co-founder Robertas Voroneckis: "The biggest mistake ecommerce brands make is starting with newsletters instead of automation. Campaigns should amplify a system that already works."

→ Read the full case study

Amplify email and SMS marketing with AI: Unlocking your creative potential

Retention marketers are working with a different toolkit than they had even a year ago. AI has moved from novelty to daily workflow, and the brands pulling real leverage out of it aren't using it to replace human creativity. They're using it to remove everything that gets in the way of human creativity.

This post walks through how AI is reshaping email and SMS marketing, how to actually integrate it into a retention workflow, and how some teams are producing five times the content output without sacrificing voice, quality, or strategic depth.

Break through the blank page

The biggest unlock AI provides isn't speed. It's the end of the blank page.

Anyone who's written a lot of email copy knows the feeling. You have the brief, you have the offer, you have the audience, and the cursor is still blinking at you. That phase, where you're grinding through the first draft just to get something on the page, is where most of the creative energy goes. And it's almost never where the best thinking happens.

AI changes where the work starts. Instead of building from zero, marketers begin with a structured draft they can react to. The entire first phase of work shifts from "invent something" to "edit something," which is where human judgment is actually sharpest. When the blank page disappears, the time you save doesn't disappear with it. It gets reinvested into the parts of the work that matter most.

The result is a creative process that feels less like squeezing a stone and more like sculpting marble that's already roughed out.

Adopt a dynamic AI workflow: five key steps

A good AI workflow isn't "type a prompt and hit send." It's a repeatable process that treats AI as a creative partner with clear responsibilities at each stage.

1. Start with a detailed brief

Everything downstream is only as good as the brief you hand the AI. A vague brief gets you vague copy. A specific brief gets you something you can actually use.

A strong brief names the audience (first-time buyers, VIPs, lapsed 60-day customers), sets a clear goal (drive first repeat purchase, re-engage, launch a new SKU), grounds the product or offer in real detail, and locks in the single key message you want the reader to walk away with. The more texture you give the AI up front, the less editing you'll do on the back end.

Treat the brief the way you'd treat a creative brief for a human writer. The rigor pays off every time.

2. Generate winning ideas

AI is a pattern-recognition machine, which makes it a very good brainstorming partner. Give it a brief and ask for 10 or 20 campaign angles, and you'll get back a mix of the obvious, the generic, and a handful of genuinely interesting takes you wouldn't have landed on yourself.

Run through the list and pull the angles that actually fit your brand. Problem-based hooks, seasonal tie-ins, transformation stories, myth-busting, founder POV, customer spotlight. The value isn't that AI picks the winner. It's that AI gives you 20 options in the time it would take you to brainstorm three.

Your job is to be the editor. Cut ruthlessly, and keep the angles that sound like your brand.

3. Ship the drafts faster

Once you've picked angles, AI can produce the actual assets in minutes. Subject lines, preview text, body copy, CTAs, SMS counterparts, all in a single pass.

This is where most teams get the "five times the output" number. What used to take half a day of writing now takes 20 minutes of generation and an hour of editing.

The editing part is non-negotiable. AI drafts are structurally sound but tonally flat by default. They'll miss the inside jokes, the specific turn of phrase your audience expects, the emotional beat that only a human familiar with the brand will catch. Your job at this stage isn't to type the email. It's to shape it.

4. Prioritize personalization

This is where AI creates leverage that used to be impossible at small-team scale. You can take a single core message and generate variants tuned to different segments in seconds.

A new customer gets a warmer, context-setting version. A VIP gets something tighter, with insider language. A lapsed buyer gets a softer reintroduction. Same underlying message, three different tones, all written in the time it used to take to write one.

Done well, personalization lifts engagement and deepens loyalty because subscribers feel like the brand is actually speaking to them, not at them. AI is what makes that feasible without doubling the team.

5. Test and learn at scale

AI collapses the testing cycle. Where teams used to test two subject lines because drafting more was expensive, they can now test five, six, or ten variants without meaningfully more effort. The same applies to CTA phrasing, opening hooks, and body structure.

More variants means faster signal. Faster signal means faster learning. And faster learning means the next campaign is already better than the last one, compounding over time.

The brands that adopt this loop early are the ones who pull ahead fastest, because their creative keeps improving on a curve their competitors can't match.

Scale personalization without losing quality

Mass personalization used to be a contradiction in terms. You could have scale or you could have personalization, and the teams who could afford both were the ones with enterprise budgets and dedicated data teams.

AI closes that gap. A three-person retention team can now produce dynamically adapted messaging across dozens of segments in the time it used to take to write one generic blast. Messages can adjust tone based on customer lifecycle stage, reference past purchases naturally, and mirror the language of the customers receiving them.

The results compound. Higher engagement rates, faster feedback loops, cleaner signal in the data, and a steady upward drift in ROI per send. None of it is magic. It's just what happens when creative capacity stops being the bottleneck.

Know where AI stops

AI is not a strategist. That's the line worth being clear about.

It doesn't understand your business goals unless you explicitly tell it. It doesn't know which launches matter this quarter, which customer segments are worth investing in, or which creative risk is worth taking to unlock a new audience. It can't replicate the intimate weirdness of a brand voice built over years. The inside jokes, the cultural references, the humor that lands because it sounds like a specific person wrote it. That part still has to come from you.

Treat AI as an extension of the team, not a replacement for it, and the whole equation works. The marketers getting the best results are the ones using AI to scale their own taste, not outsource it.

Pair AI with human creativity

The shift isn't from human creativity to AI-driven marketing. It's from human creativity alone to human creativity with a serious amount of leverage behind it.

The marketers winning with AI see it for what it is: a speed multiplier, a personalization engine, and a blank-page killer. They bring the strategy, the brand, and the taste. AI brings the volume, the variants, and the reach. Together, the output is faster, more personalized, and more tested than anything either could produce alone.

The storytelling still has to feel like you. That part doesn't change. What changes is how much of it you can do.

Put AI to work on your next campaign

The teams pulling ahead right now have figured out how to turn AI into a creative partner they actually trust, and built the workflow to match. That's the whole edge.

The opportunity is still wide open. Email and SMS are still the two highest-ROI channels in ecommerce, and the leverage AI adds to both is only starting to show up in real campaigns. The brands that move on it now will have a meaningful head start by this time next year, because the taste and process it takes to use AI well compound over time.

Start with one campaign. Write the brief, run the workflow, edit the output, and see how much further you can push what you already know works. Once the blank page stops being the thing slowing you down, the real question becomes how much more you can do with the same team.

Knowledge Drop:

Jimmy breaks down the $100 rule hotel front desks use to handle guest complaints on the spot, and why giving your support team the same authority turns your angriest customers into your most loyal ones.

DTC wins:

Laird Superfood just closed its $48M acquisition of Terrasoul Superfoods, a vertically integrated superfoods brand that pulled in $65.8M in net sales in 2025. The deal pushes Laird well beyond plant-based creamers into a broader functional nutrition platform, with owned global sourcing, processing, and fulfillment baked in.

Annnnd that’s a wrap for this edition! 

Thanks for hanging with Chase and me, always a pleasure to have you here.

If you found this newsletter helpful (or even just a little fun), don’t keep it to yourself! Share ecomemailmarketer.com with your favorite DTC marketer. Let’s get them on board so they don’t miss next week’s drops.

Remember: Do shit you love.

🤘 Jimmy Kim & Chase Dimond

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