Stop Using AI to Write Your TPT Emails

Your email open rates aren’t dropping because your audience stopped caring. A lot of the time, your emails are simply not getting a fair shot in the Primary inbox. I’m talking about the quiet shift so many teacher entrepreneurs are seeing right now: AI written emails that look “perfect” to us, but look suspicious to Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo spam filters that are also powered by AI. 

I walk through what I noticed when I used ChatGPT to generate a big chunk of my TPT email marketing, how both of my audiences started dipping at the same time, and why returning to human written emails helped my open rates bounce back. We dig into deliverability basics that actually matter for Teachers Pay Teachers sellers: inbox tab placement, sender reputation, and the engagement signals that influence where your message lands. 

Then we get practical. I share how to keep AI in your workflow without letting it replace your voice: use it for brainstorming subject lines, hooks, and outlines, then write the email yourself with real stories, specificity, and even a little messiness. We also talk about optimizing for engagement instead of “perfect delivery,” including simple ways to earn replies, run a reply based freebie, and break predictable patterns that filters can flag. 

If you want more actionable, step by step email marketing strategies for TPT sellers, subscribe to the podcast, share this with a teacher friend who’s struggling with opens, and leave a review so more creators can find it. What’s one change you’ll make to your next email?

Watch This Episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rBQI6IEItbg

Check Out My YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/laurenfulton  

My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurentschappler/ 

My Other YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LaurenATsch 

Free Rebranded Teacher Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/749538092194115  

Transcript

Welcome And What We Do

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Welcome to the Rebranded Teacher Podcast. My name is Lauren Fulton. I'm a full-time teacher author and seller on Teachers by Teachers, and I help other teacher entrepreneurs grow their TPT businesses in a way that's purposeful and sustainable. So if you're looking for actionable, step-by-step ways to grow your business, you're in the right place. Let's get started. Stop using ChatGPT to write your emails because it's just landing you in the spam folder. In this video, we're going to talk about why you do not need to be using Chat GPT or any other form of AI to write your emails for your TPT email marketing, how it's hurting you in the inbox, and what you shouldn't be doing instead. Because AI is not dead. There are definitely a lot of pros to helping, to using it as a tool to help you with your email marketing, but not to replace you in email marketing. When everyone first started using AI or Chat GPT, as most of us use, to write their emails, it was so incredible. You would just pull up a new chat, you would say, Hey, this is what I need to send. This is what I need to say. Could you write my email for me? Or could you write three or four or five emails for me, right? And it was really great. Except sometime last year, I started to notice that my open rates were dropping. And they were dropping at the same time and kind of like at the same rate with both of my audiences. And so it wasn't just like one audience started to fall off and then the other audience started to fall off, but I started to notice them both kind of dropping at the same time. Now, full disclosure, I was using ChatGPT to help me write a good chunk of my emails. Like I would say most of the emails that went out to my teacher author audience were AI generated. My assistant would take the transcript from the podcast that week and she would give AI or give ChatGPT a specific prompt, and he would create an email to say, go listen to the podcast, essentially, based off of that transcript. And so it was really handy because it was something that in my business for me was automated at that point. I record the video, I send it off to the editor, and at the same time that I'm sending it off to the editor, I send the transcript over to my VA, and all of everything else happens in the background. Everything gets uploaded, podcast email goes out, like all of that stuff then was handled for me. So this freed up some time, freed up some of the mental load and mental energy in the podcast creation process. However, in doing that, at first it worked really well and it did what it was supposed to do. And then over time, my open rate started to drop. Now I feel like that's kind of a no-brainer, right? At some point you're going to lose that bit of human touch. AI is not gonna highlight the bits of content that you feel like is gonna be best for your audience. And so sometimes there's just gonna be that mismatch there. But the drop in open rates across both kind of signaled to me like alarm bells started going off my head. Like, wait a second, I think something's going on here. Because at the time I was also very pregnant and expecting my third kid, and I was using AI to sort of like spruce up, like, hey, here's the email I sent last year. Could you just like rework it, right? And I thought that that was gonna be good enough. It was a human email, and then we just took it and we just changed it up a little bit so that it was a little bit different from the previous year, and that was my goal. But really, what I was doing was I was taking a human-written email and I was making it look like a robot wrote it, right? It lost the human element and it now just looked robotic. And to me, it didn't look robotic, but to the spam filters, it did. And once I returned to writing human emails, my open rates bounced right back up. And so here's the thing that has since come out is that Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, their spam filters are also run by, you guessed it, AI. So it's kind of like a battle of AI right now, where their filters are working overtime to detect AI written content or AI generated content, and they are placing them appropriately. They may not place them in the spam filter or in the junk folder. They might place them in the promotions tab, which largely goes overlooked, and or it may place them in the social tab or something like that, but it is not pulling them into the primary inbox, which is where we want to be. So here's what we need to do. We need to go back to writing our own emails. This doesn't mean that we can't use AI to make the writing process easier or to be more efficient, or even to develop some really good ideas. But in general, we just need to go back to the basics and focus on writing emails and talking human to human. And in a world where only approximately 13% of emails are written by humans, you are gonna start to stand out in a really good way in their inbox. So before we talk about how to use it, I'm gonna cover some really basic how not to use it. So we're not mass producing generic emails, like write me 30 emails about mass centers or write five emails for different game ideas for partnering students according to ability levels. We're not using it like that. We also wanna focus on not writing perfect emails. And this is what AI does it writes technically perfect emails. And a lot of the emails that they write, you know, five years ago, we would have thought it was just excellent copy. Now, copywriters might disagree with that, but for a lot of us, we would have thought it was fantastic. It was great. But a lot of them, they don't have that same human touch. I remember when I was dating my husband years ago, he was actually taking a copywriting class. He is somebody who has a lot of interests and he pursued many of them. And he flew out to California and he took this copywriting class from some copywriting guru. I don't know who it was. That was back before all things were all like virtual and everything. And so you would still kind of have to fly out to those conferences. And so he flew out to take this copywriting class and he sent me one of his first emails that he wrote. And he had written it for someone, someone had paid him a little about a little bit of money to write some emails for him. And he sent me the email was like, Hey, what do you think about this? And I was like, Oh, just FYI. There's a typo here, and there's a typo over here. And he was like, Don't worry about that. Like, people don't care about typos. And I was like, Yes, they do. What are you talking about? People don't care about typos. People are gonna charge you money and you're gonna have a typo in the email. Well, let me tell you something. That advice is more true today than it ever was before. Leave a typo in your email every now and then if it proves, if it helps prove that you're human. And I don't mean purposely misspell a word or purposely misconstruct a sentence, but don't feel like you have to have all of your coordinating conjunctions coordinating. You know what I mean? So don't feel like you need to have everything look all nice, neat, and orderly. Just write the email. Okay, so before we get into what to do instead, here's what you really need to understand about how inbox filters work. They are tracking open rates, which is a little bit less reliable now because especially with district filters, the district filter will open your email for you. Now, not all the time will it register as an open, and I'm sure probably it depends on a lot of factors that we really just don't understand. But I know for sure whenever I'm working customer support, I've told people before, like, I see you open this email, and they're like, I absolutely did not open the email. And then one day it happened to me where somebody called me and I was like, I never got an email from you. And they're like, I see where you opened the email. And I was like, I 100% did not open the email. And I pulled it up in my inbox and there it was, unread as unread could be, like it had never been opened. But a filter or something like that on my end behind the scenes opened the email and it triggered as it being open on their end. And so we know that this is happening in some way, shape, or form, especially when we're talking about district email filters and places like school districts where their inbox filters are going to be a little bit more strict. So it's tracking opens to see how many people are actually opening your email, how many people are interested in your email. It's also tracking clicks, how many people are clicking in your email and actually interested enough to click and feel safe enough to click. Okay. The next thing it's looking at is it's looking at replies and it's looking at deletes. And of course, it's going to be looking at how many people marked it at spam. We we already knew that one. So the more engagement that you could get, if you could think about your inbox's social media, which is what we've always said was so great about the inbox, is that it isn't social media, which is still true, it's still true. But in a sense, there is sort of an algorithm right now when we're talking about these filters and where your content or your email marketing content gets placed in these different types of tabs. And so if I can think about how I can get more clicks, more replies, replies were even better. How can I get more opens, more clicks, and more replies? Where replies are like the gold standard. So it's opens, clicks, and then replies, replies being the best. So I'm gonna do things, I'm gonna send emails that are going to spark conversation and engagement. Those are the two things that I want to spark. I really, if they open the email, that's great. Obviously, they have to open the email in order to have a conversation or to spark engagement, but I'm not gonna be so focused on that open rate because it's not nearly as important. So here's what we want to do instead. We want to use AI to generate ideas for us. So to brainstorm email hooks, maybe even subject lines to look at angles, outlines. We want the ideas that can come from AI. And so we want to use AI as a way to like brainstorm. So if you were sitting around a table with a group of people and everyone's throwing out ideas, and some of them you nix straight away, some of you put on a maybe list, and some of them are like, yes, that's what we're gonna do. We wanna use AI sort of like that, sort of like having a round table of business gurus in our corner who understand our niche, they understand our field, and they're throwing out ideas for us for emails that we can write about. So that is a really great tool. But then we want to actually write the email ourselves. So even if it gives us a generic outline of like, you just start with this, then hit this, then hit this, then hit this, that's great, but we want to write the email ourselves. Okay. And it doesn't have to be perfect. In fact, I would venture to say that if you write the email yourself and then you ask Chat GPT to generate an email for you, you're gonna look at your own email and you're gonna think, ugh, that doesn't look very good. I would rather send that email or I would rather read that email, is what you're going to be thinking. But here's the thing: even if your buyer or your lead would rather read the ChatGPT email, it doesn't matter if they never even get a chance to open it because it's in a promo tab, right? So we want to write this ourselves. So we're writing like a human. We're not asking Chat GPT to go through and to correct sentence structure to look for flaws or anything like that. We want the flaws in there. We're also going to be very specific. We're writing to a very specific person. We're writing about a very specific need. We're not writing generic. And then we're also gonna be story driven. So while I'm not gonna tell a whole long story, I am going to include personal tidbits of information about myself in order to create connection between me and the reader. The next thing that we're gonna do, and we can use Chat GPT or we can use AI to help us come up with ideas for this as well, is we are going to optimize for engagement, not just delivery. So we're gonna be thinking about how I can send emails that are going to encourage people to reply, encourage people to click, and encourage actual meaningful real interaction. Now, this doesn't mean that you have to have real long conversations. I've done things as simple, in fact, on a pretty regular basis. I will have people reply back to my email. So if you have a small audience, one of the ways that you can do this is you can say, I have this freebie for you. If you would like this for freebie, reply with this word, reply with this sentence. So rather than putting the link directly in the email, have them reply to the email to get the link. Is this more work for you? Yes, it is. But this is really helpful when we're talking about like establishing a great sender reputation and fostering some real interaction. They're actually hitting reply, they're saying something to you and they're engaging with your email marketing content, which signals to their inbox, hey, this person is interested in this content, which means I'm less likely to land in promotions from here on out. I'm also creating a conversation or opening up the door for a conversation. And I can even just reply back to them something simple as like, Hey, great. I hope you have a wonderful week. Here's the link to this. I think your students are really gonna love it. Let me know if your students love it, right? Open up the lines of communication a little bit more and to give them one more opportunity to see that I'm a human, it's an actual human being on the other end of this marketing email that they received. If you have a larger email list, I would still try doing this every now and then, but maybe just like once a year. In fact, I was even thinking, like, oh, I'll have, I've not done it for a freebie before. I've done it for other things, things that like if you want to enter this giveaway, reply with this. And so not everyone is going to want to enter the giveaway or and not everyone is going to want to do the step because I usually make the step a lot harder than just reply back with this one word. I'll say something like, reply back and tell me about your spiral review routine, or reply back with like the best piece of advice, you know, something that's a little bit harder in order to get entered to win. And so it's still getting people to reply to me, but it's not something that I have to reply back to every single one of them. So if you have a larger email list, you can try having them reply to get entered to win something. And then that way you're not having to answer every single one if you don't have the time or capacity to do that. And I've had them take a screenshot of the fact that they're following me on TPT and send me a screenshot as proof that they're following me in order to get entered to win. And so they're replying, plus they're following my store. So I've done things like that as well in order to get people to engage and to reply. The last thing is we want to break patterns on purpose. So if you have AI, write your outline for your emails, sometimes take a look at those out that outline and do a pattern interruption. Humans nowadays, we don't really sit down and we don't follow the letter outline or the outline for writing a letter that our teacher taught us in grammar school. It's just not really what we do. We kind of jump all over the place, and it really we don't usually tend to think in beginning, middle, bring it all back together. We don't usually tend to do that, but AI will. AI will follow a very logical train of thought. It will follow a very predictable pattern. So if we can change the structure, we can change the tone, we can add a personal story or personal little anecdote in there, or we could just end on a wrong note, right? Where normally you would bring it all back together. Maybe we just don't do that. And so even following sort of an outliner structure, make sure there's a human element to that outliner structure. And then lastly, one little test you can do before you send out an email, especially if it's an email that's not just a direct sales email, because sometimes we are just gonna have to write a sales email. And it is just gonna sound salesy, it's gonna sound like you're marketing. But if I'm writing an email that's designed to be helpful, then one of the things that I could do is I could say, would I send this to a friend? And so if I sit down and I write an email with the intention of saying, like, okay, I'm gonna send this to one of my best math teacher friends and I'm gonna write a lot more casually, I'm gonna be a lot less structured, and I'm gonna tell her the things that she actually wants to know and is interested in about whatever product that I'm trying to sell. And I'm gonna share about it like I'm talking to a friend. And this is gonna sort of be the litmus test. Because if you think about it, when we look at these chat, this chat GPT or this AI generated content, it looks pretty, it looks professional, it looks super polished, and it's punchy a lot of times. Like it's straight to the point, it's easy to read, it's skimmable, it's all the things that it's supposed to be on paper. But would I send that to a friend? No, I would never because I'm not making a sales pitch like that to my friend. Like I'm not speaking to my friend as though I'm a professional trying to sell her on something. I'm going to maybe put in one or two emojis, maybe. I'm probably not even gonna be using bolds and italics. I'm probably just gonna be like, hey girl, FYI, I just wanted to let you know about this conference that's coming up. I'm really excited about it. I'm gonna be one of the speakers at this conference. There are a lot of good stuff. I'm gonna let you take a peek at it yourself, but I just wanted to give you a heads up. If you want to come, I would love to see you there, right? We're gonna talk a lot more like that and less salesy. So if you have AI generated content sitting in your drafts folder right now or scheduled to go out, stop, go take a look at it, refine it, humanize it a little bit, and then click send. And I think you're probably gonna notice over the next couple of months your open rates are probably gonna go up. Because if you have not been affected by this already, you will be affected by it soon if you continue to use AI to write your content. All right, you guys, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you in the next episode.