Is Email Marketing About to Be Automated?

Artificial intelligence may be ready for a prominent role in corporate copywriting, suggest experimental results from Chicago Booth’s Jean-Pierre Dubé and Booth PhD student Ariel Xu. The researchers worked with an online wine retailer to test how automation might affect the performance of its daily marketing emails. Across three experiments using different AI models, the AI-based approaches consistently generated the highest projected annual net profit.

In one experiment, they compared messages drafted by humans with others written by a large language model trained on five years of the company’s most successful emails. Human- and machine-written messages performed similarly to each other, but the AI emails cost far less to produce, the research finds. Dubé and Xu argue that the results should encourage companies to consider the potential for this and other aspects of marketing communications to be automated. (For more on this research, read “AI Is Coming for Marketing Copywriters.”)

In a randomized controlled trial, customers of Wine Access, an online wine retailer, received daily promotional emails featuring curated wine offers.

The newsletters were either composed by staff writers, composed by AI and reviewed by a writer, or composed by AI and edited by a writer. A control group received no newsletter.

The two-week trial included about 27,500 customers.

The AI-generated newsletters tended to be shorter and moved readers to the Buy Now button more quickly . . .

. . . while sharply reducing writing time.

Customers responded similarly to all three newsletter styles, which roughly doubled purchase rates and gross profit per customer relative to sending no newsletter.

But AI newsletters cost far less to produce.

Lower production costs gave AI a financial edge in projected annual profits.

Works Cited

Jean-Pierre Dubé and Ariel Xu, “Large Language Models and Creative Content Design: A Case Study of Email Marketing at Wine Access,” Quantitative Marketing and Economics, January 2026.

Infographic Is Email Marketing About to Be Automated?

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