Personalize Content Campaigns with ChatGPT

Content campaigns help utilities engage customers with informative articles and blogs right to their inboxes and increase traffic to utility websites and marketplaces.  But, to date, utilities tend to depend on 1:All content, general content intended for every customer inbox instead of more personalized engagement.

We know that personalizing content to key customer segments and interests dramatically improves performance of content campaigns.  Just customizing content for customer segments like residential, small business, and commercial & industrial accounts results in peak open and click through rates in utility email performance.  Imagine what results your campaigns could produce by customizing for key customer segments or industry groups.

Until now, it’s been expensive and time consuming to develop personalized content at scale. Innovations in generative AI like ChatGPT now make it relatively easy for a single MarComm writer to produce customized content for different customer segments.  LIke everything with ChatGPT, success depends on the quality and framework in the prompt.  We wanted to share some benefits of ChatGPT for content personalization and provide tips your MarComm teams can put to use today to help scale the performance and velocity of your content campaigns.

Benefits of ChatGPT for Content Personalization:

1. Efficiency in Content Creation: ChatGPT streamlines the content development process, allowing writers to generate initial drafts quickly. With the right prompt, MarComm teams can produce outlines and drafts of multiple articles ready to be customized with segmentation and utility program details.

2. Personalization at Scale: ChatGPT's advanced algorithms tailor content to various customer segments – from residential users to large industrial clients. Small adjustments to the prompt refresh a foundational topic with custom attributes for each customer segment and interest.

3. Consistent Quality and Tone: Maintaining a consistent voice across communications is key in building brand trust. ChatGPT helps in keeping the tone and quality uniform, yet adaptable to different contexts.  Using ChatGPT trains it for the style, tone, and content themes unique to your utility and customer base.

4. Up-to-Date Information Integration: ChatGPT can incorporate the latest trends and data in energy efficiency, ensuring that the content feels current to customers.

With the right starting prompt and a few tweaks, your MarComm team can build a foundational piece of content on a key theme like energy efficiency, and ask ChatGPT to revise the content for new customer segments and interests.  All it takes is a prompt framework and a bit of practice.

A Great Prompt Framework:

1. Target Audience: Specify the customer segment (e.g., residential, commercial, industrial) to tailor the content appropriately.

2. Purpose of Content: Whether it's to inform, persuade, or educate, the purpose should be clear.

3. Key Information to Include: This could be details about energy-saving programs, rebates, or efficiency tips.

4. Tone and Style: Indicate if the content should be formal, conversational, technical, etc.

5. Length and Format: Specify if the content is for a social media post, blog article, newsletter, etc.

Writers simply adjust the “target audience” elements of the prompt to customize the core content for with examples aligned with different customer segments.  Try the following prompts in your own chatbot to see the results.

Core prompt:

“Please write a 250 word summary of the energy efficiency benefits of a smart thermostat for homeowners.  The summary should inform customers of the features and benefits of smart thermostats for managing energy use and reducing energy bills during peak heating and cooling seasons.  The tone of the summary should be informative using authoritative language and key examples suitable for utility customers to employ.  This summary will appear in a blog post on a utility website prior to winter in the mid-Atlantic.”

When I posted this prompt to ChatGPT 4, it produced a reasonable 6 paragraph post that illustrated the key features of a smart thermostat including learning capabilities, mobile app controls, and integrating with demand response programs.  The introduction and conclusion needed some editorial flair, but the content was suitable for a blog with just a little polish.  I’m sure you found similar results from your chatbot of choice.

To personalize this same content, we can adjust the prompt to help ChatGPT learn the triggers and interests of different customer segments like these:

“Rewrite this same content for an audience of “tech savvy” customers who like to adopt new technology early in the cycle, appreciate the mobile and tech features of new technology, and like the tech forward design of new consumer electronics.”

“Rewrite this same content for an audience of “budget conscious” customers who may have smaller budgets or live on fixed income and cannot afford big swings in their energy bills.  These customers have interests in the money saving features of smart thermostats that they can employ.”

“Rewrite this same content for an audience of “Green Energy” customers who appreciate the ecological and environmental aspects of reducing their energy use and carbon footprint.”

With simple adjustments to the prompt, ChatGPT personalized the same topic with benefit statements for the new audience.  The “tech savvy” prompt reframed smart thermostats as part key component of home automation and illustrated the benefits of optimizing energy use from a smartphone.  For the “budget conscious” audience, ChatGPT summarized the benefit of the smart thermostat learning the household routine to adjust the thermostat for energy and cost savings, and the mobile features that help homeowners make adjustments remotely to avoid heating or cooling when they aren’t at home.  

In less time than it took to write the article you're reading, we used ChatGPT to create 4 versions of content that virtually any MarComm writer could polish for personalized engagement with different customer segments via email or a blog post.  We even asked ChatGPT to “provide 5 different titles for this article that encourage customers to read the full blog post.”  With about 90 minutes and a topic, an experienced MarComm specialist could produce a foundational article, customize it for 4-5 customer segments, and polish each version for an email or content campaign to encourage customer engagement and traffic to the website. It's really that easy.

ChatGPT won’t take a MarComm job away, but a talented MarComm specialist who learns how to use ChatGPT effectively can significantly improve the quantity, quality and personalization of a utility’s customer engagement programs and informative content on the website.  Customers appreciate when utilities send them content that’s timely, relevant and personalized for their individual interests.  In the past, that level of content customization proved out of reach for many utilities.  GenAI powered chatbots and tools like ChatGPT reduce the cost and resource requirements of customized content creation, so what’s stopping you?  We encourage utility Customer Service, Marketing Communications and Customer Engagement teams to at least try the new technology.  Try the prompts we’ve listed and generate a few of your own, and let us know the results.  As always, if you want additional insights or help with AI solutions for your utility outreach programs, give us a call.

image created using DALL-E, a product of OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, on January 6, 2024