The short version: Every business using ChatGPT to write emails, captions and website copy is converging on the same bland, competent, forgettable voice, and it's costing you opens, replies and sales without you noticing. The fix isn't to stop using AI, it's to feed it a proper written record of how you sound before you let it near a single sentence.
Worth reading next: Why All Your Competitors' AI Content Sounds Exactly Like Yours.
I noticed this on my own newsletter first
Last spring I got lazy. I was rebuilding parts of my business after a rough few years, I was tired, and I started letting ChatGPT draft my weekly email from a bullet-point brief. Not lightly edited, drafted. I'd tidy the top and bottom, add a joke, send it.
Open rates went from a steady 34 percent to 22 percent over six weeks. Nothing else changed. Same list, same send time, same subject line style roughly. I went back and read three of those emails next to three from the year before and the difference wasn't subtle once I looked for it. The AI ones were smoother, more organised, and completely missing the bits where I say something slightly wrong on purpose, or admit I got a client call badly wrong, or swear mildly at a software update. They read like a very good marketing graduate had written them. They read like nobody I know.
That's the trap. AI writing isn't bad writing. It's often better structured than what most of us produce on a rushed Tuesday. The problem is it's the same better structure everyone else is getting too.
What's happening under the hood
Large language models are trained to produce the statistically likely next word given everything they've seen. That means, left alone, they gravitate toward the middle of the distribution: clear, warm, professional, mildly upbeat, structurally tidy. It's the marketing equivalent of a hotel breakfast. Fine for everyone, memorable for no one.
When thousands of small businesses in the same niche run the same prompts ("write a friendly welcome email for a new customer") through the same three or four tools, you get thousands of welcome emails that share a rhythm, a level of enthusiasm and a set of go-to phrases. I read email marketing breakdowns the way some people read film reviews, and I can now spot AI-first copy in about four lines. So can your customers, even if they couldn't name what's off about it. They just feel less connected to you, and they open your next email a little less often.
This is the uncomfortable bit nobody selling AI tools wants to put in bold: the efficiency AI gives you is not a competitive advantage anymore, because your competitors have the exact same efficiency from the exact same handful of models. Being fast and tidy stopped being a differentiator around the same time everyone got access to it for free. What's left as your actual moat is the stuff that's hardest to automate, which is you being specifically, recognisably yourself on the page.
The fix isn't editing after the fact, it's briefing before
Most people try to fix AI copy by editing it once it's written, adding a joke here, softening a line there. That helps a bit but it's slow and it doesn't scale past one email. The better fix is building what I call a voice document, a written record of how you talk, and feeding that into every prompt before the model writes a word.
Here's the exact process I now use with consulting clients, and it takes about 90 minutes to build once:
- Step 1: Record yourself talking, not writing. Do a 10 minute voice note explaining what your business does and why you started it, as if you're telling a friend in a pub. Transcribe it. This is your raw material because writing and speaking use different vocabulary, and speaking is closer to your real voice.
- Step 2: Pull out five phrases you say. Not generic marketing lines, your specific verbal tics. Mine include "here's the thing" and "I'll be blunt." A bookkeeper client of mine says "let's just look at the numbers" constantly. Small, specific, repeatable phrases are what make copy sound like a person.
- Step 3: List ten words or phrases you're banning. For most small businesses this includes "unlock," "elevate," "," "game-changer," "in today's fast-paced world." Put them in the prompt as explicit exclusions every single time.
- Step 4: Write down three true, slightly awkward facts about how you work. Things like "I answer emails at odd hours because I don't sleep well" or "we're a two person team so replies take a day, not an hour." These are gold because AI will never invent them for you, and they're the details that make a reader trust you're real.
- Step 5: Save all of this as one document and paste it into every content prompt. Not a link to it, the actual text, every time. I keep mine at the top of a Google Doc titled "voice brief" and copy the whole thing in before any drafting session.
After I did this for my own newsletter, opens climbed back to 31 percent within four sends. Not magic, just the model finally working from my actual material instead of guessing at "friendly business owner" from thin air.
Where this matters most (and where it barely matters at all)
Voice matters enormously in anything a person reads expecting to hear from you directly: newsletters, LinkedIn posts, sales emails, About pages, video scripts. It matters far less in things that are meant to be neutral and functional, like a returns policy, a shipping FAQ, or terms and conditions. Don't waste the effort there. Save the voice work for the content that's building a relationship.
Social captions sit in between. If you're studying how bigger brands hold a consistent voice across formats, the way Airbnb's brand marketing strategy stays warm and specific rather than corporate is a good model to steal from, even at a fraction of their budget. Same with how tight, opinionated captions built the Instagram strategy for brands that punch above their follower count. The lesson transfers down to a one-person business fine, it's the same principle: specific beats smooth.
The other place people quietly cheat themselves
There's a second issue I see constantly with clients, and it's rarely discussed because it's a bit embarrassing to admit. Business owners ask AI to write their brand's About page, their founder story, their "why I started this" content, and then they never read it out loud before publishing. If you wouldn't say a sentence to a customer's face, don't put it on the page. I make every client read their homepage copy aloud before it goes live. About one in three sentences gets cut or rewritten purely because it sounded fine on screen and ridiculous out loud. That single habit, reading it aloud, catches most of the remaining AI-flatness that a voice document alone won't fix.
If your brand identity itself feels generic, not just the copy, it's worth looking at how design-led companies fix that visually too. The way Figma's early marketing strategy leaned into a distinct visual and verbal identity from day one is a useful reference for small businesses trying to look and sound like something specific rather than "a professional company."
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
A simple test you can run this week
Take your last five sent emails, from a tool like Mailchimp or whatever you use, and read only the first two lines of each out loud. If you can't tell which one is which without checking the subject line, your voice has flattened. I've run this exact test with clients using their Mailchimp campaigns and it's a fast, slightly humbling way to see the problem in under five minutes.
If the test confirms it, don't panic and swear off AI entirely, that's throwing away a useful tool over a fixable habit. Build the voice document, ban the flat phrases, keep three true and specific details in every piece, and read everything aloud before it goes out. That's the whole fix, and it costs nothing but 90 minutes.
One more number worth knowing: in a small informal test I ran across eleven client accounts last year, adding a structured voice brief to AI prompts increased email reply rates by an average of 40 percent within a month, not because the offers changed, but because the emails sounded like they came from a person who'd notice a reply.
When it's worth getting outside help
If you've tried this and your content still reads flat, or you simply don't have the time to build the voice document and test it across email, social and your website, that's exactly the kind of hands-on work I help small business owners with directly through AI consulting for small businesses. It's usually a two or three session fix, not a six month project, once someone sits with you and pulls the real material out.
And for what it's worth, positioning yourself as specific rather than generic is a theme that runs through most of the smartest operators I follow, including the business lessons from Alex Hormozi, who built an entire audience on saying the plain, slightly uncomfortable version of things everyone else was softening. AI didn't create that opportunity, it just made it more obvious who's taking it and who isn't.
Frequently asked questions
Does using AI to write marketing content hurt my results?
Not automatically, but unedited AI copy tends to sound like every other unedited AI copy in your niche, which quietly lowers opens, replies and trust over time. The fix is feeding the AI a written record of your real voice before it drafts anything, not avoiding AI altogether.
How do I know if my marketing sounds too generic?
Read the first two lines of your last five emails or posts out loud without looking at the headline. If you can't tell them apart, your voice has flattened. This takes under five minutes and is more revealing than any AI detector.
What's the fastest way to fix AI-flattened copy?
Build a one page voice document: a transcribed voice note about your business, five phrases you say, ten words you ban, and three true specific details about how you work. Paste it into every AI prompt before drafting. Most businesses see the difference within one send.
Should small businesses stop using AI for marketing content?
No. The tool isn't the problem, the blank prompt is. AI without a voice brief defaults to generic. AI with a proper brief, banned phrases and real specific details attached can sound more like you than copy you rush out yourself on a bad day.
Related reading: The AI Notetaker Sitting In On Your Client Calls Might Be Breaking Your NDA and Why "Write Like Me" AI Prompts Fail for Small Business Content (And What Works Instead).
Worth a read if this is your situation: write for us about email marketing.
