The good news is that prompting is a skill you can pick up fast. It’s less about finding a magic phrase and more about giving clear, specific direction, the same way you’d brief a new team member on a task.

This post covers the habits that make any agent prompt more reliable, then shows how they play out in two agents built into Dotdigital: Segment Agent and Content Agent.

Why prompting matters

An AI agent isn’t a mind reader. It only has two things to work with: the instructions built into it and whatever you type. If your prompt is vague, the agent has to guess what you mean, and a guess is only ever going to be a guess.

This matters more with AI agents than with a general chatbot. A chatbot will go along with almost any request. An agent usually has one job, like building a segment or drafting an email, and it works best when you ask for things specific to that task. Ask it to go outside that lane, and you’ll get a workaround at best, or nothing useful at worst.

Five habits that make any prompt more reliable

1. Say exactly what you mean

A vague request forces the agent to fill in the gaps, and it won’t fill them in the way you would. “Find my best customers” means five different things depending on the day. “Contacts who’ve bought more than three times in the last 90 days” means one thing. Give the agent conditions, values, and dates it can act on, not ideas it has to interpret.

2. Build it in steps 

You don’t need the perfect prompt on the first try. Get one part right, check it, then add the next. Most agents are built for back-and-forth conversation, and a series of small, correct steps beats one long prompt trying to do everything at once.

3. Use your real field and list names, not general terms 

If your data has a field called “Loyalty tier” or a list called “VIP customers,” say that, not “important customers.” Agents built to work in your marketing platform are designed to match what you type to your account data, but they can only match what’s there. The closer your wording is to your real fields, the less room there is for a wrong guess.

4. Check the output before you use it

An agent can build something fast, but fast isn’t the same as correct. Read through the logic, the copy, or the rule it’s generated before you rely on it. Treat it like a first draft from a new team member: useful, but yours to sign off on.

5. Ask it to explain itself

If a result looks complicated or you’re not sure it did what you asked, ask the agent to summarize what it built or walk you through its reasoning. It takes ten seconds and catches a wrong assumption before it goes anywhere near production.

What does this look like inside Dotdigital

Dotdigital has two agents where these habits make a real difference. Segment Agent helps you build and edit audience segments, and Content Agent helps you draft and check email copy inside your email builder. Here’s what applying these habits looks like in each.

Segment Agent

Segment Agent builds and edits segments from a plain-language request and can summarize the logic in a segment you already have. It’s designed to match field and list names to your account data even if your wording is a little off. For best results, be specific and build your segment gradually rather than describing a complex segment in one go.

Start simple:

• Create a segment of contacts subscribed to email
• Build a segment of contacts whose country is the UK and who are subscribed to email

Then refine with follow-ups:

• Also include contacts subscribed to SMS
• Exclude contacts who purchased from any catalog in the last 30 days
• Limit this segment to contacts in the VIP list

Once it’s built, check your work:

• Summarize this segment.
• What rules are being used in this segment?

Worth knowing: Segment Agent is a doer, not a brainstormer. It won’t suggest ideas or scan your data to surface new segments, and it won’t tell you how many contacts match until the segment runs. But bring it a clear idea, and it’ll bring it to life and build it fast.

Content Agent

Content Agent lives inside our email builder and helps with the copy itself: brainstorming angles, drafting a first version, tweaking tone or length, checking a draft before you send, adding personalization, and generating or editing images. Nothing it produces goes into your campaign until you’ve reviewed and approved it.

The same habits apply. Start specific:

• Brainstorm ideas for a “we miss you” email after 90 days of inactivity
• Draft a paragraph explaining the benefit of signing up

Refine rather than starting over:

• Change the tone of the email to be friendly but not overly familiar
• Shorten this paragraph to two sentences

And use it to check your own work, not just generate new copy:

• Check my email copy against my brand voice
• Check whether this paragraph is too salesy for our brand voice

For the best results, set up your brand voice details in your Dotdigital account first. The more Content Agent knows about how your brand sounds, the less editing you’ll do later.

Start small, then build the habit

Treat AI agents like a new team member. Give them specific tasks, clear direction, and simple, step-by-step explanations, then check in before moving on.

Pick one prompt from this list and try it for yourself. These habits become second nature fast, and that’s how prompt writing goes from something that slows you down to something that helps you get through your to-do list faster.

Learn more:

• Segment Agent overview
• Use Segment Agent to build and edit segments
• Content agent overview | Dotdigital Marketing Help Centre
• Content agent prompt guide | Dotdigital Marketing Help Centre

That’s the idea behind human-to-human (H2H) marketing. Your audience is human first and customer second, whether you sell to businesses (B2B) or straight to consumers (B2C). A company has never bought anything; the people inside it do. 

In this guide, we’ll cover what H2H marketing means, how it fits alongside B2B and B2C, why it matters more in the age of AI, and how to put it into practice.

What is human-to-human marketing?

Human-to-human (H2H) marketing is an approach that treats every marketing interaction as a conversation between two people, rather than a transaction between a business and a target segment. Instead of asking “how do we message this audience,” it asks “how would we talk to this person?”

In practice, that means marketing built on empathy, plain language, honesty, and genuine two-way communication. You’re still meeting a customer’s needs, but you’re doing it in a way that shows there are real people behind your brand, and that those people can be trusted. It’s the model that responsible marketing is built on, which is relationships with customers and prospects based on long-term trust and respect.

H2H vs B2B vs B2C: what’s the difference?

Whether you’re B2B or B2C, a person makes the final call. The marketing manager choosing a platform and the shopper choosing trainers are doing the same thing: weighing up options, working out who to trust, and deciding who to buy from. So, B2B and B2C are your industries; H2H is your approach.

Why is human-to-human marketing important?

Our Customer trend index found that only 15% of consumers say marketing messages feel very relevant to them, down from 23% last year. When so few messages connect, every campaign has to work harder for a smaller share of attention.

The same research points to what people respond to instead. Friends and family are 45% more likely to influence a customer’s loyalty to a brand than they were a year ago, which tells us that when a recommendation comes from a real person, people trust it enough to act on it.

Your marketing can’t replace a friend’s recommendation, but you can move it closer to one by writing like a person, showing the people behind your brand, and talking to customers the way you’d want to be talked to. The more your marketing feels like a conversation with a real human, the more trust it builds along the way.

When you get this right consistently, three things happen:

• People trust you more. Trust builds one interaction at a time, and every message that feels honest and personal adds another layer of it

• People forgive you more. Everyone slips up from time to time, whether it’s a broken link, a mistimed send, or a pricing error. When your brand has a human voice, a genuine apology lands better, and people move on rather than heading for the unsubscribe button

• People buy from you more. Feeling understood is persuasive, and a message that speaks to someone’s situation will always outsell one aimed at a broad segment

Best of all, this costs you nothing extra. Your team is already full of humans who know how to talk to people, so human-to-human marketing is less about new investment and more about letting their personality show up in the work.

Standing out when everything sounds like AI

We first published this article in 2021, a year before AI platforms like ChatGPT existed. Back then, AI worked behind the scenes of your marketing, like deciding when to send your email or which products to recommend, but a human still wrote every word your customers read. Nobody was worried about their emails sounding like a machine wrote them, because machines weren’t writing them.

These days, it can help write your emails, design your creative, and build entire campaigns. And with AI now built into most marketing platforms, almost every brand is using it to some degree.

The thing is, though, your customers have noticed. They’re wading through AI-written emails, AI-generated ads, and chatbots every day, and they’ve developed a sharp instinct for spotting them. People are getting tired of it, and when something feels automated, they scroll past without a second thought.

Which is exactly what makes the human stuff land better. A specific point of view or a bit of wit is what makes someone stop and think there’s a real person behind this brand. 

None of this is an argument against using AI. The point is to use AI the right way. Let it handle the work that eats your team’s time, like building segments, picking send times, running tests, and pulling reports, so the humans get those hours back for the work machines can’t do, which is: 

• Talking to customers
• Writing with personality
• Noticing what your audience cares about right now

How to build a human-to-human marketing strategy

1. Get your tone of voice right

Your brand voice is one of the first things customers notice about your brand. To build stronger connections with your audience:

• Be real: authenticity is about saying what the reader needs to hear, not what they want to hear
• Be empathic: let your audience know that you understand them, that you’ve been in their shoes
• Be personal: get to know your customer, know their names, likes and dislikes. It all goes a long way

Here’s an example:

Take the welcome email. Most are just a logo, a generic hello, and a discount code. Now imagine one that reads like a personal note: here’s what we’re about, here’s what you can expect from us, and if you fancy replying, a real human will read it. Nobody replies to a noreply@ address, but people will happily reply to a person, and those replies tell you more about your audience than any survey.

A helpful tip:

Before anything goes out, read it aloud, and if you wouldn’t say it to a customer, rewrite it until you would.

2. Ditch the jargon

Stuffiness, formality, and jargon put a wall up between you and your audience. Every acronym you don’t explain and every sentence that needs a second read is a small signal that you’re talking at people rather than to them. 

Write the way you’d explain something to a colleague or friend, using plain words, short sentences, and skip the fancy words. Talking to your audience as equals is one of the fastest ways to build connection, and it costs nothing.

3. Tell people what’s going on

Trust is built on openness, so tell your audience about the decisions that affect them. Explain why you’re collecting their data and what you plan to do with it. 

Here’s another example

KitKat showed how this works when thieves stole 12 tonnes of its chocolate in transit. The brand’s first move was a straightforward statement addressing what customers would want to know, which was that there were no concerns for consumer safety, and supply wasn’t affected. 

With the serious part handled, the brand had some fun with it, joking that someone had clearly taken the “have a break” slogan too literally, and eventually created a tracker that let people check whether their own bar came from the stolen batch. The post became the most-liked in the brand’s history, over 100 other brands joined in, and what should have been a supply chain headache turned into a Cannes-winning moment.

Now, you’ll probably never have 12 tonnes of chocolate go missing, but the same thinking applies to a broken link or a mistaken send: tell people about it openly, add a bit of personality (where it’s appropriate), and you’ll build far more trust than hoping nobody notices.

4. Make your automation feel personal

Use the data you hold to make experiences genuinely better, like:

• A well-timed reminder about something they left behind
• A recommendation that reflects what they’ve browsed
• A birthday message that arrives on the right day

A helpful tip:

The test for every automated touchpoint is whether it makes the customer’s experience smoother or more relevant. Let your customer journey data show you where you can add real value.

5. Make it easy to reach a human

In a two-way conversation, customers have a direct connection to the people behind your brand. Live chat, social media, and messaging apps all give people a direct line to your team, and how those conversations feel matters as much as how fast they happen. Let your support team write like themselves, sign off with their names, and drop the script when the script isn’t helping. 

A helpful tip:

If you’re using AI or bots, be upfront about it, and always give customers a quick way to reach a real person.

6. Join the conversation on social

Social media was built for conversations between people, which makes it a natural home for human-to-human marketing. Answer questions, reply to comments, share what your customers create, and post content that is both light-hearted and useful. Going live, showing your team, and joining conversations rather than broadcasting into them all remind people there are humans behind the logo. The brands that get this right are easy to spot because their replies could only have come from them.

One more example:

Duolingo turned its owl into one of the most-followed personalities on TikTok by being genuinely funny rather than brand-funny. You don’t need a mascot or a viral moment, though. You just need your replies to sound like someone on your team wrote them, because they did.

Marketing made human

Behind every open, click, and purchase is a person who can tell when a brand is talking to them and when it’s talking at them.

Human-to-human marketing is the decision to act on that. Write like you’d talk, be honest about how you work, let AI take the repetitive jobs, and give your team the room to bring some personality to the rest. None of it needs a bigger budget or a new strategy deck, because the humans who can do this are already there.

And with so much marketing now generated at the push of a button, sounding like a real person is your brand’s biggest advantage. 

We’ll cover:

• What AI does well
• Where human creativity still has the edge
• How to make confident decisions about when to use which

What AI does well in marketing

AI is at its best when the task is repeatable, data-heavy, or time-consuming. Here’s what we’ve found useful, based on our own research, and what customers tell us they use day to day.

Getting a first draft down

AI is great for getting something on the page quickly to avoid blank page syndrome – the anxiety caused by staring at a blank Word doc. Subject lines and first drafts take minutes instead of hours. The output isn’t always great, but having something to edit can spark more ideas and get the job done faster.

Repurposing content across channels

Taking a piece of content and rewriting it for a different channel takes time, and it’s easy to deprioritize. A lot of marketers use AI to edit copy, keeping the core message intact while adjusting for character limits and channel context. It’s one of those tasks that’s easy to hand off once you’ve tried it.

Personalizing across a large contact list

When you have a large mailing list, building personalized, relevant marketing messages can feel daunting. But AI can help add personal product recommendations to campaigns without the extra workload. Using insights like a customer’s purchase history or browsing behavior, AI-powered product recommendations can boost conversions by over 53% and help increase revenue by around 20%.

Making sense of your data

AI spots patterns in your campaign data in seconds. It can highlight underperforming segments, predict when customers are likely to churn, and recommend the best time to send, so you spend less time searching for insights and more time acting on them.

Testing more without doing more

AI can generate different subject lines, different CTAs, and different content angles, so you can run more tests without doubling your workload. Experimenting with new subject lines can help keep your emails feeling fresh and improve engagement. Mountain Warehouse used AI to generate and test new ideas, increasing open rates to 50%, up from a typical baseline of around 35%.

Where human creativity still matters most

While AI is speeding up a lot of day-to-day tasks, there are some areas where the human touch cannot be replaced.

Knowing your audience on a human level

AI can tell you what the data says about your audience, but it can’t tell you what it means. Only you can interpret those insights to understand where someone is in their journey, why one message resonated more than another, or what your audience needs next. That’s the kind of context AI still struggles to replicate.

Brand voice and personality

AI can be trained to write in your brand voice, and with a good voice guide, it’ll get impressively close. But sounding like your brand and knowing what your brand should say are two different things.

Say you’re a retail brand with a playful voice, and your summer sale campaign is ready to go. Then your delivery partner has a meltdown and half your customers are waiting on late orders. The AI will happily write you a cheeky, on-voice sale email, because that’s what it was trained to do. It takes a person to see that the sale email should wait, and that what customers need first is a plain, honest update about their orders.

That call sits nowhere in a voice guide. It comes from someone who knows what’s happening with your customers right now and can judge how the brand should show up for it. Get it wrong and the same voice that usually feels charming suddenly feels tone-deaf. So let AI keep your copy consistent with the voice you’ve defined, and keep a person deciding how that voice meets the moment.

Creative ideas that feel original

AI is very good at producing content that’s technically correct and structurally sound. It’s less good at the kind of creative leap that makes a campaign memorable. The unexpected angle, the cultural reference that lands perfectly, and the idea that makes someone stop scrolling all still come from human creativity.

When a news story breaks, or your audience suddenly cares about something, the brands that land it are the ones where a person spotted the opportunity, judged whether it was theirs to join, and found the angle only their brand could take. AI can help you draft fast once you’ve had the idea, but the instinct for when to act, when to stay quiet, and what only you could say is human through and through.

The human touch in the process

Even the most AI-assisted campaign is full of human fingerprints, and that’s what keeps it feeling genuine:

• Someone edits the draft, catching the sentence that’s technically fine but doesn’t sound like you, and cutting the paragraph that says nothing
• Someone plans the campaign, deciding what to send, who should receive it, and what you’re trying to achieve beyond this week’s revenue target
• Someone sets the triggers and journeys, choosing which behaviors matter and what the right response to each one looks like

None of that work is visible to the customer, but all of it shapes what lands in their inbox. It’s the difference between a message that exists because a system could send it and one that exists because a person decided it was worth sending.

Audiences can’t see the process, but they can feel the result, and they’re getting better at telling the difference between communication with a person behind it and content that was generated.

How to decide when to use AI and when not to

The marketers we see getting the most from AI are the ones who’ve worked out where it saves them time without costing them quality, and where it doesn’t.

Use AI when:

• The task is repetitive and time-consuming
• You need help getting started or planning your content
• You’re generating ideas to test
• You need to create a first draft you can edit and improve
• Analyzing large volumes of data to uncover patterns and trends

A human touch matters most when:

• You need to understand your audience’s current mood or context
• Your message needs to feel distinctly like your brand voice
• The goal is to build an emotional connection, and not just share information

Where to go next

If this has got you thinking about how you’re using AI, these are some helpful reads to check out next, depending on what’s most relevant to you right now.

• See how marketers are using AI to create better campaigns

• Learn how to use AI without losing your brand voice

• Read our CMO’s take on the future of AI and human-led marketing

• Explore how Dotdigital’s AI helps you get more from every campaign

It’s your creativity, empathy, and strategic thinking that make your marketing stand out from others. By merging the best aspects of both AI and human input, you can create campaigns that are both effective and connect deeply with your audience.

Now, we’re navigating a new kind of hybrid. One that isn’t about where people work, but what they work with. Today’s marketing teams are made up of humans and their AI counterparts. The question of how to manage that handoff is the defining challenge for any business that wants to grow.  The prize for getting this right is a marketing team that goes from flat-out busy to strategic, with exponential results. 

AI at work. Human at heart

Strong brands grow revenue more than twice as fast as weaker ones, and are not built on technology alone. They’ve been built on insight, creativity, empathy, and a deep understanding of human behavior. Technology evolves. The fundamentals don’t. And that’s exactly why we knew it was the right time to build a human-first brand, reflective of a platform with AI at its core, where marketers lead the way. 

Our refreshed identity reflects a simple belief: marketing works best when technology gives people space to be human.

AI has already changed how marketers work, in a good way. It can analyze vast amounts of customer data in seconds, identify patterns that would take humans days to uncover, generate content, build sophisticated automations, and help brands communicate across multiple channels at a scale that would have seemed impossible a few years ago.

There are genuine advantages to building a marketing strategy that embraces AI. I encourage every marketer to spend time experimenting with AI, learning its strengths, understanding its limitations, and finding new ways to incorporate it into their daily work, while still leading their own skills and thoughts. Because there is a stark difference between using AI and outsourcing your thinking to it.

The marketers who succeed in the years ahead won’t be the ones who simply produce more content or automate more processes. They’ll be the ones who use AI to create the time and headspace needed for higher-value work. Understanding cultural context, spotting emerging shifts in customer behavior, building a distinctive brand voice, and developing creative ideas that people remember — the marketing elements that create real emotional connections, earning trust and attention.

Staying relevant 

Professor Byron Sharp’s work on mental availability reminds us that brands grow when they are easy to think of and easy to buy. Distinctive assets, memorable experiences, and consistent brand building remain central to that goal. All of which are built with humans at the helm.

AI can certainly help execute against those principles, but it cannot, as yet, create meaningful distinctiveness on its own. It can only draw from what already exists. This is becoming increasingly important as generative AI makes it easy for anyone and everyone to produce content. But unless that content offers a unique, authentic perspective – or includes stats, data, and information that people haven’t already seen or heard – it is just adding to the noise of a crowded market. When everyone has access to similar tools and uses the same prompts, it’s inevitable that marketing starts to become repetitive and risks losing relevance. We all see examples of this every day, everywhere. Polished copy that says very little, content that feels technically correct but emotionally flat.

Today’s hybrid team unites tech and talent 

This is what will shape the next chapter of marketing. And it’s what inspired our most recent Dotdigital developments – AI-assisted marketing. Our agentic AI proposition is fast evolving —  and marketers can now engage with AI in ways that serve them: through agents built directly into our marketing platform, and through Dotdigital’s MCP integrations, which let marketers retrieve information and take action inside their LLM of choice. 

The need for this couldn’t be clearer. Our recent Secret Lives of Marketers survey found that 99% of marketers are already using AI — but only 36% enjoy doing so. That gap matters. It tells us that AI has arrived in marketing, but it hasn’t yet earned its place. All while marketers risk losing their seat at the table because businesses haven’t yet felt the full cost of human displacement.

We want to change that.

The future we’re building is one where AI handles complexity, so marketers can focus on what only they can do. We want to help marketers spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time creating meaningful experiences. Understanding customer behavior, building smarter automations, personalizing experiences, and creating content that’s rooted in real customer insight, with marketers firmly in the driving seat.

The brands that succeed will be those that find the right balance between automation and authenticity. Your customers deserve communication from brands that stand for something. Technology provides speed, scale, and intelligence, but it is marketers who provide the creativity and direction. Technology and talent are not competing forces; they complement each other perfectly.

The future of marketing isn’t human versus AI. It’s human plus AI. As we watch tools and technology continue to evolve over time, we must remember that the need to understand people and build real connections is here to stay. Let’s put AI to work, stay human at heart, and build brands worth remembering. 

But these tools sit outside your marketing stack, which means they don’t understand your campaigns, your audiences, or your performance data unless you manually feed it in.

That disconnect is exactly what a Model Context Protocol (MCP) is designed to solve.

So, let’s take a look at:

• How an MCP connects AI tools to your marketing stack
• What that means in real workflows
• What you can do with Dotdigital’s MCP server

What is an MCP server?

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It’s a standardized way (a protocol) to provide data and other information (context)to AI (models).

Instead of manually copying in information or uploading files, an MCP connects your marketing systems directly to the AI tools you’re already using, so, the context is there from the start.

This means your preferred AI tool can see what’s happening in your marketing in real time and you can ask it questions about your campaign data, such as: 

“What was my average campaign open rate in Q4?”

Or, get AI to take approved actions like adding a new lead into specific audience segments, or campaigns within your marketing platform.

This is exactly what the Dotdigital MCP server helps marketers to do.

The problem with ‘standalone’ AI tools

ChatGPT, and similar AI tools, are powerful, but on their own they’re missing something important for marketers. They don’t know your context. So, the answers you get are usually quite general, based on broad internet information rather than your actual campaigns.

Many marketers try to work around this by exporting reports, downloading CSVs, and pasting data into prompts to give the AI something to work with. And every time the question changes, you’re back doing the same thing again, re-explaining the context from scratch.

It also doesn’t really fit how marketing teams work day to day. In meetings, or while reviewing performance, you want answers quickly and not a process that involves pulling data, uploading files, and waiting to piece everything together. And even when you do get something useful out of it, you still have to jump back into your marketing platform to take action.

What you end up with is a lot of switching between tools and stitching information together manually.

An MCP removes that friction by connecting your marketing systems directly to your AI tools, so you’re working with live data in a single flow and not a disconnected process.

Why should marketers care?

You don’t need a technical background to start using AI directly with your marketing data. With an MCP in place, you can move from guessing, or manually pulling data, to working with it directly in your AI tool.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Answers at your fingertips: Instead of using AI just for ideas, you can ask questions and get real numbers straight from your marketing data, which is useful for when you’re in a meeting and need clarity quickly

• From insight to action in one conversation: Turn the insights from AI into actions in Dotdigital without leaving your workflow

• Use the AI tool you already prefer: An MCP isn’t tied to one platform. Whether you use ChatGPT, Claude, or something else, it works the same way

• Headache-free: Setup is simple and seamless. Paste the Dotdigital MCP URL into your chosen AI tool and follow the quick authentication prompts

What can you do with Dotdigital’s MCP server?

Get instant answers from real-life data

Ask questions of your Dotdigital email performance data and get answers fast. No need to export data and add it into your AI tools. You can ask questions like:

• What’s the YoY revenue growth from my emails?
• How much did our click-through rate increase in the past six months?
• Are there any anomalies in this week’s email campaign data?

Ask AI to spot trends that help you optimize

When you create hundreds of emails in a year, you don’t want to sift through each email to learn about what works and what doesn’t. Ask your LLM questions about what did well so you double down on your successes, like: 

• Did using emojis in my subject line improve my email open rates?
• What email length has the best impact on click-through rates?
• What did my best performing emails have in common?

Get insights from forms without digging through reports

Forms are a goldmine when it comes to understanding of customer intent, but analyzing them usually takes time. With an MCP, you can simply ask:

• Which volunteering interests were most popular on my form?
• How have form responses changed month by month this year?
• Which forms in my account are getting the most engagement? 

Your AI assistant pulls the data and summarises it for you.

Build and update marketing lists quickly

You can use your prefered LLM to turn queries into actions in Dotdigital, such as:

• Add all satisfied survey responders to a Brand advocates list in Dotdigital
• Add these webinar attendees to our VIP list
• Update the country for alex@domain.com to Germany

Make AI part of your everyday workflow

Marketers spend a lot of time switching between tools just to get answers.

With Dotdigital’s MCP server, your AI tool connects directly to your marketing data. So instead of jumping between platforms, you can ask questions, get context, and act on it in one place.

Connect Dotdigital to your AI tool of choice and start having real conversations with your marketing data.

You’ve used AI to write copy. We know, because we all have. And you’ve felt that specific kind of disappointment when it comes back sounding like every other brand in your inbox. Technically fine but completely forgettable. The kind of copy that could belong to anyone – and so, really, belongs to no one.

That’s not an AI problem, that’s a brand voice problem. Most AI tools are built to generate content that’s fast and functional but they’re not built to sound like you. AI doesn’t know the specific nuances of your brand voice or language preferences. It doesn’t know that your brand is sharp and dry, not warm and fuzzy, or that you’d never say “leverage” or “revolutionize.” 

There’s a better way to use AI

61% of marketers identified good taste and brand point of view as a priority. So, we’ve created Dotdigital’s brand voice to help teams shape a consistent brand style and personality across all their content.

Here’s what makes Dotdigital’s AI brand voice different

1. It learns your brand, not a generic version of one

Feed Dotdigital your brand guidelines or a sample of your existing content, and our in-platform AI engine gets to work understanding your tone, your style, and your boundaries in a deep, structured way, across 10 researched brand voice categories such as:

• Brand identity
• Audience
• Voice and tone
• Language accessibility (jargon or not)
• Do’s and don’ts
• Language and style
• Terminology to use or avoid

If you don’t have a set of brand guidelines ready to go, don’t worry, you can use our free template to create them and then let AI get to work.

2. It keeps your voice consistent across every channel

One of the hidden ways brands erode trust is by sounding different across channels. While websites are carefully crafted to match the brand’s tone, things like emails, landing pages, and social posts can feel disconnected. This mismatch, often caused by different people managing different touchpoints, weakens cohesion, authority, and conversion rates.

Our AI brand voice works across your entire Dotdigital account, so whether you’re sending an email or an SMS – the voice stays consistent. No other platform does this across all these channels in a single account. We checked.

3. It catches the moments you miss

Even the best marketers have off days. You’re rushing and you copy-paste from an old campaign, or perhaps someone new to the team writes something that sounds slightly off but you can’t put your finger on why.

The ‘Check Brand Voice’ option scans your copy for brand voice inconsistencies before anything goes live – and gives you an on-brand rewrite on the spot. Think of it as a second pair of eyes that never gets tired, never has a bad day, and never lets “leverage” slip through unchecked.

The results speak for themselves

Dotdigital customers are already seeing what happens when AI works with your brand and not against it:

• Mountain Warehouse: 15% increase in open rates using AI subject line suggestions
• 4Cabling: 20% increase in revenue from AI product recommendations
• Goodwood: 2x sales increase from AI-generated SMS

Why this drives better results

AI isn’t slowing down, and neither is your workload. The marketers who win won’t be the ones who use the most AI – they’ll be the ones whose AI actually sounds like them.

Our very own Head of Content once said:

“If your brand voice is generic, your content will be too. Make it uniquely yours.”

Copy that sounds like you – specific, consistent, authentic – that’s what gets read, clicked, and remembered. Our AI brand voice tool is built for exactly that.

Ready to sound like yourself again?

Book a demo today and see our AI brand voice in action. Or, if you’re already a Dotdigital customer, head to your account and try it now.

So, we’ve pulled together six practical ways Dotdigital customers are using AI in their campaigns, along with the outcomes they’ve seen, to give you a clearer picture of what’s working in practice.

1. Subject lines that get opened

Coming up with fresh, compelling subject lines week after week isn’t easy. Over time, it’s natural to fall back on familiar patterns like reusing similar phrases or sticking to the same formats that have worked before. The challenge is, your audience notices when subject lines start to feel similar, which can influence how they respond.

AI helps you break out of that cycle by quickly generating multiple subject line variations you can test and refine. Instead of starting from a blank page, you’re working with a range of options that you can repeat and optimize.

What happened when brands made the switch

Mountain Warehouse was stuck in exactly that cycle. The team started using Dotdigital’s AI to generate and test subject line options, and campaigns hit open rates of 50%, well above the usual baseline of around 35%. 

Rodalink Bike Store saw a 54% increase in open rates bydoing the same thing. It’s not that AI writes better subject lines than you do; it just gives you more options to test, faster, without the blank-page problem.

2. Copy that sounds like you and not like everyone else

A lot of AI-generated content sounds the same right now; the same filler phrases and the same vague enthusiasm, like:

• In today’s fast-paced world
• Game-changing
• Unlock new possibilities

If you’ve spent time building a distinctive brand voice, that can be frustrating.

Our AI tool’s new brand voice feature is designed to fix that. Train it on your guidelines, share examples of your best work, flag the words you would never use, and it writes campaigns that sound like you rather than a generic AI output. The more context you give it, the better the results.

3. Adapting your message for every channel

Managing email, SMS, and WhatsApp alongside everything else means the challenge isn’t usually having the right message. It’s having the time to adapt it properly for each channel.

Goodwood’s race against the clock to lift ticket sales

Goodwood, one of England’s greatest sporting estates, needed to drive last-minute ticket sales for its August Bank Holiday race meeting. Since SMS marketing is well-suited to urgent, time-sensitive messages, they turned to it for this campaign. With 160 characters, a tight deadline, and no margin for error, they had to create four messages, each tailored to different audiences like families, regulars, and casual racegoers.

What happened when they let AI do the heavy lifting

The team used AI to write and A/B test these SMS messages. On the day the campaign went out, Goodwood sold twice as many tickets as the previous week. They also replaced a general post-event email survey with targeted SMS feedback requests, and survey completion jumped from 10% to nearly 25%. 

See the strategy in action

4. Product recommendations that convert

Most marketing newsletters are sent to broad audiences, which means the content won’t always resonate with every recipient.

Adding tailored product or content recommendations helps make those messages more relevant and engaging, and AI can support this by helping you generate and deliver those recommendations.

Making newsletters more personal

4Cabling, an Australian D2C (direct-to-consumer) manufacturer of cabling and electrical accessories, added AI-powered “best next” product recommendations to its newsletter. Rather than having the same product lineup for everyone, each contact now sees a personalized section based on their purchase history and browsing behavior.

What happened when 4Cabling made the switch

The result was a 20% increase in revenue and a 53.6% jump in newsletter conversion rate. 4Cabling applied the same personalization logic to its abandoned cart program, which went on to drive 54% of total email revenue. It was a relatively small change to an existing program, but the numbers speak for themselves.

5. Smarter A/B testing beyond just subject lines

Most marketers test their subject lines, but few go further than that, mainly because running more tests manually just adds to the workload.

What happens when AI makes campaign testing easier

Mountain Warehouse used AI to test more than just its subject lines. The team experimented with lifestyle imagery and the order of content in emails. It’s the kind of testing that’s easy to push down the list when you’re doing everything manually, but becomes much more manageable when AI helps handle the heavy lifting.

Rodalink took a similar approach with CTAs. Based on AI’s suggestions, the team tested “Check Service Fee” against other options and found it drove a 60% click-through rate, well above industry benchmarks. 

Get the full story here

6. Asking your data questions in plain English

This one is less about campaigns and more about how you interact with your data day-to-day.

Dotdigital’s MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server lets you connect external AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude directly to your account. From there, you can ask plain-language questions about your marketing data and get real answers without building reports or digging through dashboards.

For example, you might ask:

• Show me our email open rates for the past three months, broken down by week
• How does our open rate compare to the industry average in retail?

Questions like these become straightforward to answer, which frees up time to actually act on the insights. 

Build your business case for AI marketing

When you’re evaluating AI, it helps to think in terms of the outcomes it can support your marketing. From saving time to improving performance, AI can play a role across different parts of your workflow.

Save time on repetitive work

AI can help handle tasks like audience segmentation, tagging, scheduling, and reporting. This can reduce manual effort and free up time for more strategic work.

Deliver more relevant customer experiences

By analysing behavior and preferences, AI can help tailor messaging across channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, and web. This supports more relevant recommendations and more personalized journeys.

Improve campaign performance

AI can support audience targeting, suggest optimizations, and help you test and refine campaigns over time, giving you more visibility into what’s working and where to adjust.

Make sense of your customer data

AI can highlight patterns and trends in your data, helping you understand behavior, identify opportunities, and inform future campaigns.

Support consistent cross-channel execution

AI can help align messaging and timing across channels, making it easier to keep campaigns coordinated without adding extra manual effort.

Where to start

The marketers seeing the most value from AI are using it in a few specific areas where it can make a real difference. Things like speeding up repetitive work, generating ideas they wouldn’t have time to explore manually, and testing more variations without adding extra pressure on their team.

If you’re deciding where to begin, pick one area from this list that feels most relevant to your current challenges. It could be subject lines, testing, or something like product recommendations. Start small, see what works, and build from there.

And there’s a lot worth exploring. Dotdigital was recently named a G2 Leader in 13 product categories in the latest rankings, recognized by the marketers who use the platform every day. So, we’ve rounded up Dotdigital’s top features that often fly under the radar but will help you get campaigns up and running faster.

Get campaigns out the door faster

Keep your messages sounding just like you

Generic AI copy is easy to spot, and marketers are usually the first to call it out. The good news is that Dotdigital’s AI doesn’t have to sound generic. You can train it on your brand‘s verbal identity, so it sounds authentic. All you need to do is upload your guidelines, share examples of content you’re proud of, or just answer a few questions about your writing style, and from there, it writes and checks your campaigns so they always sound like you.

For a brand with a sharp, distinct tone that’s been spending more time editing AI drafts than using them, this is a big turning point. When first drafts start sounding right, the editing gets lighter, and the content actually feels like it came from your team, helping you get campaigns ready to send faster.

Fix links after you’ve sent a campaign

Sending a campaign to thousands of people and realizing something is wrong is one of the most stressful parts of the job. Dotdigital’s link manager takes most of that stress off the table.

With Dotdigital’s link manager, you can:

• Check links before you send: catch any broken or incorrect URLs upfront
• Update links after sending: fix mistakes quietly without bothering your audience
• Keep your links accurate: like CTAs pointing to last season’s sale instead of your new collection

Edit images without leaving the platform

Chasing down a designer to make last-minute image changes can be a real roadblock when you’re trying to get a campaign out, fast. The good news is you probably don’t need to. Dotdigital’s image manager has a full editing suite built right in, so you can crop, resize, apply filters, and add text overlays yourself without leaving the platform.

It also makes it easy to apply big changes without factoring in additional admin time. For example, you can update an image’s alt text in the manager, and it carries over to every campaign where that image appears. So if you’ve used the same hero image across multiple sends, you’re not hunting them down one by one.

And finding the right image in the first place is easier than you’d think, too. The image manager uses AI to search based on what’s actually in your images and not just the file name someone gave it. Search for “Easter,” and it’ll pull up every Easter-themed image in your library, even the ones that got saved as “IMG_4823” and never renamed. So, when a last-minute seasonal campaign lands on your desk, and you need a specific shot fast, you can search by scene, find it, make your edits, and drop it straight into your campaign. 

Turn an email into an SMS in one click

Whether you’re testing SMS as a marketing channel or your boss wants an SMS version of your top-performing email by the end of the day, Dotdigital’s one-click email to SMS tool helps you get up and running faster. 

After all, starting from scratch is the last thing you need when your to-do list keeps growing. Dotdigital’s built-in AI reads your email, strips it back to what matters, and suggests SMS copy that matches your original message, all in a single click.

So, next time your Black Friday email is done and approved, and you need to build an SMS touchpoint to catch anyone who misses the email, AI is on hand to draft it in seconds. All that’s left for you to do is tweak, approve, and move on.

Personalize with confidence 

Skip the awkward merge tag fail

“Hi {First_Name}” is the kind of thing that ends up screenshotted in a very unforgiving LinkedIn post. It happens when personalization data is missing, and there’s no fallback in place. Using Dotdigital’s dynamic content blocks can safeguard your campaigns against this. By adding dynamic content blocks to host your personalized content, you can ensure customers see content when you have the data and skip it gracefully when you don’t. 

That means a repeat customer gets “Hi Jenna,” while a brand-new sign-up whose name you haven’t collected yet gets a greeting that reads just as warmly, without a broken placeholder in sight. It’s a small thing that makes a big difference to how polished your campaigns feel.

Segment without a preference center

Building a preference center takes time, and you’ll have a handful of subscribers who never fill it in anyway. But you don’t always need one to send relevant, targeted content (though, of course, it’s super useful in the long run). Dotdigital’s link groups and campaign tags let you build segments based on what people actually do, like the links they click, the campaigns they engage with, rather than waiting for them to tell you what they’re interested in.

A charity wanting to reach supporters most likely to respond to a fundraising appeal, for example, could group donation links across recent campaigns and build a segment of contacts who clicked more than once. No preference data is needed; it simply uses real subscriber behavior to help you reach the right person with the right message.

Find more customers like your best ones

When you come across a contact who represents exactly the kind of person you want more of, you don’t have to manually recreate their profile in a segment builder. You can generate a lookalike segment based on them with a single click, putting Dotdigital’s AI to work.

So, if your highest-value customer has a specific combination of purchase history, location, and engagement behavior, a segment of customers who share those attributes will be ready to use in seconds. This makes sure your high-value campaigns reach the right people every time.

Reach more people, in more places

WhatsApp: the channel your customers are already on

WhatsApp is available in Dotdigital and gives you more ways to connect with your customers than you might expect. You can reach 180 countries with rich two-way conversations and no character count restrictions, and all managed from the same place you run the rest of your marketing channels.

For brands sending time-sensitive updates, like travel companies, this makes a real difference. Booking confirmations and trip reminders land on an app customers already use every day. Response rates go up, and the volume of inbound customer service queries tends to go down as customers have immediate and easy-to-find access to the information they need. 

Two-way SMS: the conversation doesn’t have to end

Most marketers know Dotdigital does SMS. It’s a powerful channel we’ve been giving marketers since 2017. Fewer realize it goes both ways. You can view and reply to SMS responses directly inside Dotdigital, in the same place you manage your WhatsApp and chat conversations, so you’re not jumping between tools to keep track of who said what.

For example, a retailer running an SMS campaign that asks customers to reply with their nearest store for a personalized offer, that’s a meaningful difference. Instead of responses disappearing into a system nobody monitors, they land in Dotdigital alongside every other conversation. Your team can reply, route, and follow up without ever leaving the platform.

There’s a lot more where this came from

The best way to find your next favorite Dotdigital feature is to get curious and start clicking. If any of the features in this post caught your eye, your customer success manager can walk you through them, or explore the Dotdigital knowledge base to dig in yourself.

(Scroll to part two below if this is the only reason you’re here. We won’t judge).

Whether you call it a tone of voice, brand voice or verbal identity, the language, tone and style of writing used within your organization, from emails, to web pages, to adverts and beyond – is how your audience build a connection with your brand – or not, as the case may be. 

Taking a well thought through and consistent approach to your brand voice also ensures your audience can recognize you across all channels and content formats, and helps them decide if they can/should trust you.

A strong, relevant, memorable brand voice is also the difference between content that gets lost in the noise, and content that actually drives conversions. 

Creating brand voice prompts

AI can be a great content creation tool, when used smartly. But, if your brand voice isn’t clearly defined and laid out in a way that can be used to train AI engines, the AI won’t magically figure it out in its own. 

AI engines are only as good as the prompts you give them. So, if you’re using vague prompts like:

“Write a blog about email marketing”, you’ll get an instantly forgettable, slightly robotic, bland blog that is unlikely to offer any unique perspectives or key takeaways. 

But if you use a prompt specifically designed with your brand voice guide, the AI starts sounding like you. The content becomes more unique, and the take-aways get much more relevant for your audience.

Obviously, in order to create these very specific prompts, you need to start by creating a brand voice guide.

What does a good brand voice guide look like? 

It’s not a long, boring document that no one reads. It has to be a punchy, simple, clear and cohesive content operating system, that your entire organization understands and buys into.

It should tell humans and AI:

• How your brand sounds
• What your brand stands for and believes in 
• What you would never say (including individual words that you want to stay away from because they’re over used or too AI-sounding)
• Why your content exists in the first place
• What makes you unique 
• What makes you authentic, trustworthy and likeable

Without those clear brand voice principles, your content becomes guesswork that’s all a bit messy. And your customer journey becomes less of a joined up story, and more a complicated puzzle.

Start with a strong foundation

Before creating your guide, or any individual content, answer this:

Why should anyone care about your content?

If you can’t answer that clearly, your audience won’t know either.

Your guide should define:

1. Your purpose

• What is this content trying to do?
• What should the audience think, feel, or do after reading?

2. Your audience (be honest)

• Who are they really?
• What do they care about?
• What do they hate reading/watching/hearing?
• What do they love reading/watching/hearing?

Your content principles (non-negotiable)

If your content doesn’t do at least one of these things, don’t publish it:

• Inspire → make people want to be better
• Inform → teach them something useful
• Entertain → earn attention
• Have a clear purpose → no filler
• Offer a unique perspective → not the same take as everyone else

If it does none of the above – it’s just noise.

Define your brand personality (the fun bit)

This is where most brands go wrong. They describe themselves like this:

“Professional, innovative, customer-centric”

Which translates to:

“Exactly the same as everyone else”

Instead, define your voice in contrasts:

• We’re human – not corporate
• We’re clear – not complicated
• We’re confident – not arrogant
• We’re playful – not try-hard
• We’re memorable – not safe

Make it impossible to confuse your voice with someone else’s.

Bring it to life (this is what AI actually needs)

This is the part most guides miss, and the part that makes AI useful.

Show it how you write

Not just what you believe. Tell it what phrases and sentences you want to avoid and what to replace them with instead. Example swaps:

Set clear writing rules

• Write how you speak (if you wouldn’t say it to someone in your office, don’t expect them to read it on your website)
• Keep sentences short (but not too short. Multiple short sentences start to sound like an old-school advert)
• Cut anything that feels like filler (be really ruthless with your editing)
• If it doesn’t make sense, instantly rewrite it (if it confuses you, your audience have no chance)
• Read it out loud (if it doesn’t sound human, it’s not ready to publish)

Every word counts 

There are certain words that AI tools LOVE and readers hate. This is because they’re not conversational, they don’t add value and they’re incredibly over used. So be clear on what words you want to ban (yes, actually ban) from your organization’s copy at all levels (not just marketing materials but 1:1 emails too) and make every single employee familiar with that list, as well as your AI engine of choice.

Some examples of overused AI words include:

• Leverage
• Transform
• Supercharge
• Revolutionize
• Best-in-class
• Empower
• “In today’s world…”

Without boundaries, AI defaults to clichés and cliché kills credibility.

Don’t publish anything without a human authenticity test

Whether you’ve used AI to create your content, or written it yourself, before anything goes live, ask:

• Would I actually read this?
• Would I understand it instantly?
• Would I share it?
• Could this be written by any other brand?

Depending on the answers to the above, you may need to do some human editing, or refine your AI prompts and try again.

So where does AI fit in?

AI is an amazing content amplifier, ideator, and junior copywriter. It’s also great at repurposing content for multiple channels. When used well, it can:

• Speed up production
• Remove blank page anxiety
• Help you scale content at pace, without extra resource or budget

But only if it understands your brand.

The problem with generic LLMs

If you’re using AI without training it on your tone of voice, you’ll get:

1. Safe, middle-of-the-road content

• Nothing offensive
• Nothing memorable

2. “AI voice”

You’ve seen it:

• Overly polished
• Slightly unnatural
• Weirdly enthusiastic
• Robotic sounding words that no one has used since 2012

3. Inconsistent brand identity

Every piece of your content will sound different:

• No recognition
• No consistency
• No trust
• No brand tone
• No joined up journey 
• Just content chaos 

This is where Dotdigital’s AI changes the game

When you upload your brand voice guide into Dotdigital, you’re providing context, boundaries and a gold standard of brand voice etiquette. In return, you’ll get email and SMS content that is on-brand, consistent, uniquely yours, recognizable and ready for light refinements if needed (not entire rewrites or heavy editing).

*Other AI engines are available if you’re not yet a Dotdigital customer – but we’d really love to work with you, so check out the Dotdigital platform here.

How to make your brand voice guide AI-ready

Before uploading, make sure your guide includes:

• Your brand identity
• An overview of your audience
• Your voice and tone principles
• Language do’s and don’ts
• Preferred words and phrases
• Banned words and phrases

To make this really easy, we’ve included a template below that you can copy and paste, and have fun completing it. 

Final reminder

If your brand voice is generic, your content will be too.

Make it uniquely yours.

Part 2: Your brand voice template

Copy, paste, and fill this in, with a strong coffee and positive attitude! 

1. Purpose of our content

Our content should make the audience:

We create content to: Add your purpose here 

Think:

Feel:

Do:

2. Our audience

Our audience is:

They care about:

They’re tired of:

Their level of knowledge is: Are they expert, intermediate, or just getting started?

3. Our content principles

Our content must, add examples of how you’ll achieve the following:

☐ Inspire

☐ Inform

☐ Entertain

☐ Have a clear purpose

☐ Offer a unique perspective

4. Our brand personality

We are:

We are not:

5. How we write

Tone guidelines

We say:

We avoid:

Word swaps

Don’t say:

Say:

6. Banned words and phrases

We never use:

We use sparingly:

7. Content checklist

Before publishing we ensure all content has:

☐ A clear purpose

☐ Is easy to understand

☐ Follows our brand tone

☐ Avoids jargon

☐ Adds unique value to our audience

8. Our AI methods

When using AI:

We will:

• Use this guide as input
• Refine outputs, not blindly publish
• Maintain human oversight

We will not:

• Generate generic content without guidance
• Ignore tone of voice
• Publish without editing

9. The authenticity test

 Before the content goes live, we ask ourselves:

• Would I actually read this?
• Would I understand it instantly?
• Would I share it?
• Could this be written by any other brand?