AI Email Assistants: Are they ready?

As the technological landscape evolves, AI Email Assistants are emerging as powerful tools for sales and recruiting teams. Apollo.io's AI Assistant is helping businesses craft personalized messages at scale, increasing their competitive edge. In this article, we delve into how AI Email Assistants can be used effectively, identify their missing features, and speculate on future improvements.

Understanding AI Email Assistants

AI Email Assistants hold the promise of enhancing sales teams and recruiter engagement. They can generate personalized messages at scale with exceptional speed and precision. These assistants can respond to customer inquiries, provide contextualized replies, and answer common questions from candidates and clients. They significantly reduce time-consuming manual tasks, streamlining operations, increasing efficiency, and bolstering customer loyalty.

However, finding one that can generate a solid cold email from scratch is a challenging task.

Bridging the Gap: Expectations vs. Reality

While AI Email Assistants have immense potential, there can be a discrepancy between our hopes and reality. We often imagine these AI tools fully automating tasks like crafting personalized messages at scale. However, the reality can fall short—some messages may be too long or lack substance. Even when there is an attempt to provide some context, AI emails can land your message in the spam box, or worse, get you blasted on LinkedIn like this guy.

To maximize the benefits of AI Email Assistants, businesses need to understand their strengths and limitations. This new technology can produce some eerily good copy, but it's still not able to create great sales copy on its own. AI needs data and inputs to build.

Most outreach products today incorporate some form of AI writing integration. However, they often fall short due to their overly broad, verbose, salesy, and self-serving nature. They tend not to reference successful emails, have little functionality on email platforms like Gmail, and focus heavily on LLM generation vs. coaching on what you wrote. Tools like Lavender do solve that, but wouldn’t it be great if it could actually write cold emails for you?

That's where I was hoping Apollo was heading.

Apollo.io's AI Assistant: A Game Changer or More of the Same?

When I was told Apollo would be launching an AI writer, I was very excited. Apollo is a platform that is user-focused and popular. With the amount of data at their disposal, the potential for something great is afoot.

Unfortunately, Apollo's AI Assistant shares many of the shortcomings mentioned earlier. On the upside, they do have the idea on the right path by allowing users to tweak some of the inputs.

The results just aren’t spectacular when creating a whole email from scratch.

This doesn't mean that Apollo failed. It's their version 1, and knowing how product-driven Apollo is, I know these issues are in the queue.

For now, it can still be a valuable tool in your toolkit due to one of their key features & differentiators, the personalized opener variable. This feature, while not perfect, can act as a good starting point for your emails. See the test message I created below.

However, I still wouldn’t recommend using it in an intro email or blindly sending without an edit. Where it can come in handy is in relevance-based follow-up emails and candidate outreach. For many I coach, they have a hard time generating that opening line based on a prospect or candidate’s LinkedIn.

AI Email Assistants like Apollo.io's have considerable potential to revolutionize the sales and recruiting landscape. However, they are not without their limitations. It's crucial for businesses to embrace these tools, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and leverage them strategically to optimize operations and client engagement. As we persist in refining and advancing this technology, we forge ahead on the path toward harnessing the power of AI, transforming the way we communicate, and unlocking unparalleled opportunities for success.

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