Dramatically Boost Marketing Productivity: Copy-and-Paste Persona & Email Prompt Examples

In this column, we’ll share ready-to-use prompts you can apply right away to streamline marketing work with generative AI.

Common pain points in day-to-day work

In hands-on marketing, it’s common to see team members overwhelmed by a wide range of tasks and gradually burned out.

The wide range of marketing tasks

Marketing teams handle everything from research and in-person events to digital marketing. Both in terms of the workflow required to plan and execute each initiative and the breadth of tactics available, you need to manage a diverse set of tasks.

Inefficiency in day-to-day marketing work

There are still many traditional manual tasks—such as drafting promotional materials one by one or aggregating campaign results in Excel.

Over-reliance on individuals

When experience with specific products or tasks is limited to only a few people, certain work can only be done by them—making it difficult to balance workloads across the team.

Generative AI can help reduce these challenges.

What generative AI can do for you

There are two key benefits to using generative AI in business: “gaining knowledge and insight” and “automating work.”

In marketing, you often need detailed information about your products—for example, when writing promotional emails or responding to customer inquiries. In some cases, that information exists only “in someone’s head.” If you can quickly retrieve knowledge and insight from AI in these situations, you can improve efficiency without relying on specific individuals.

There are also tasks that must be handled according to relatively simple rules, such as checking promotional content or replying to customer emails. If you can “automate” this kind of work with AI, you can reduce the burden on the people responsible.

To achieve these two outcomes with AI, it’s essential to write prompts thoughtfully.

Prompt basics (quick refresher)

Whether you use generative AI to “gain knowledge” or to “automate work,” you can apply the prompt framework introduced in “How to write prompts that get the answers you want: don’t ask “questions”—communicate “specifications.””

The prompt framework

That said, the details to watch for vary depending on your goal.
For “gaining knowledge,” you can ask the AI to think step by step, or have it explain in a dialogue between an expert and a beginner to get clearer explanations. For “automating work,” it’s important to provide sample answers so the output quality stays consistent.

Let’s use AI in real work: Persona creation prompts

From here, we’ll introduce prompts you can use in day-to-day marketing work.

As an example, we’ll assume the work of a marketer responsible for “promoting a premium toaster.” Both the product and the customer persona are fictional. Try running the prompts by replacing them with your own company’s product and persona.

What generative AI can and can’t do for persona creation

What is a persona?

There are two primary reasons for creating personas in marketing practice.

• Align the team on “who the target audience is.”
• Use them when creating materials such as emails and catalogs.

Challenges in persona creation

There are three common challenges in persona creation.

• Marketing requires an objective understanding of customers, but when creating personas, the creator’s subjective assumptions often creep in.
• A persona needs to go beyond basic demographics and be built with precision—capturing customer challenges and what they value. Still, gaps and omissions can easily occur.
• Persona creation is time-consuming. Since personas are only a means to improve marketing results, efficiency is essential.

Using generative AI can help address these issues.

Why persona creation with generative AI often falls short

When AI-generated personas don’t match real-world needs, the root cause is often insufficient instruction in the prompt. Generative AI is not a tool that proactively thinks through vague situations—so if you simply expect “AI will create a great persona,” you shouldn’t expect output quality that’s usable for day-to-day work.

What we want generative AI to do in persona creation

With generative AI, we expect it to take the persona hypothesis you provide and:

• Make it more concrete
• Fill in missing information
• Organize it into a consistent, believable profile

That’s the role we want it to play.

Persona creation prompt

Now, let’s create a persona using generative AI.

Generative AI understands basics such as “what a persona is” and “ideal sections and structure of a persona document.” However, it doesn’t know the marketer’s intent or the product information you want to promote. The key is to organize and communicate that intent clearly.

Summary

With the right context and clear instructions, you can create personas that are usable in marketing practice—in a short amount of time. Try it out in your day-to-day work.

Promotional email writing prompt

Next, using the same “premium toaster promotion” example, let’s generate a promotional email with generative AI.

Creating promotional emails with generative AI is not about making it “come up with copy,” but about converting product information into the structure of a “promotional email.”

What generative AI can and can’t do for promotional email writing

Challenges in promotional email creation

The following challenges are commonly seen in promotional email writing.

• It takes time to extract and rework information from multiple product-related materials—such as product brochures and planning documents—to prepare for writing.
• Writing and proofreading the email copy takes time.
• Differences in marketing experience and skill lead to inconsistent email quality—for example, missing key elements like “the problem, the value, and the product’s strengths.”

Challenges when using generative AI to write promotional emails

When you generate a promotional email with AI, you often don’t get the output you intended. Common issues include output in a non-email format that requires extra editing, copy that doesn’t meet the quality marketers need, and messaging that misses the brand’s nuance.

What we want generative AI to do in promotional email writing

As with persona creation, what we expect from AI is to “process and restructure information in line with the marketer’s thinking.” With well-designed instructions based on this approach, you can reliably draw out high-accuracy outputs.

The three components needed for promotional email writing

How the three components work together

To generate email copy for promotion, you combine three things: “content materials” (such as product information), an “email template,” and a “prompt.”

Why you need the three components: content materials, email template, and prompt

The key is to prepare each of the three components independently.

When you keep the “materials” separate, you can reuse the same setup for a different product simply by swapping the material content.

Using a “template” also helps prevent missing elements and standardizes the copy into a format your readers are familiar with. If you prepare templates by channel (email, social, etc.), you can switch formats simply by changing the template.

Content materials

As “materials,” prepare existing files such as sales decks used by your sales team or promotional seminar presentations owned by your marketing department. You may have materials in many formats—PowerPoint, Word, PDF, and more—and that’s fine as-is. One major benefit of using generative AI is that you can leverage your existing assets without reformatting them.

As a simplified example, we’ll use the sample text below as the content material.

Email template

By using a template, you can match the email format to the style your audience is used to reading. If you prepare additional templates, you can also create copy for other channels such as social media with ease.

In a template, it’s important to clearly distinguish the “fixed parts” you won’t change from the “variable parts” that will be changed based on the materials and prompt instructions. By using the symbol {}, commonly used in programming to indicate variable elements, you can clearly show the AI “what should be rewritten.” This is an effective technique for preventing unintended output.

Here, as a simplified example, we’ll use the sample text email format below.

Email-writing prompt

Create a prompt to instruct generative AI.

Workflow for creating promotional emails with generative AI

In real work, keep a human review step

In actual operations, you don’t use AI-generated copy as-is. People still handle the following:

• Whether anything poses legal risk
• Whether it matches the brand tone
• Whether numbers and product names are accurate

This helps ensure the quality of company communications and avoid risk.

Benefits of using generative AI for promotional email creation

Using generative AI to write emails can deliver four key benefits.

• Reduce time spent reading and reworking source materials
• Reduce time spent drafting email copy
• Prevent inconsistency in format and tone
• Reduce dependency on individuals

Try applying this approach to your own work.

Build prompt skills through practice to boost both efficiency and quality

With the approach introduced here, you can improve both efficiency and quality in your work. When you find yourself thinking “This is inefficient” or “This task is complex,” try proactively using generative AI in your marketing practice.