Emlet vs ChatGPT for Writing Marketing Emails

Worth being upfront about this one: Emlet uses a large language model too, so this isn't a "human-made vs AI" comparison. It's a comparison between a general-purpose chat assistant and a tool built specifically around the constraints of email HTML, with your brand remembered from one email to the next. Those are different jobs even when the underlying technology rhymes.

What ChatGPT is actually good at here

Copy. If you need a subject line, a paragraph of promotional copy, or help figuring out what to actually say in a welcome email, ChatGPT is a genuinely solid first draft tool, and plenty of people already use it exactly that way. The trouble starts when people ask it to also produce the finished HTML.

Where it falls apart: the HTML itself

Ask ChatGPT to "write an HTML email" and it can produce something that looks fine in a code preview or even in Gmail, and then falls apart in Outlook. That's not a knowledge gap in the model exactly, it's that safe email HTML requires specific, non-obvious constraints: table-based layout instead of flexbox or grid, every style inlined rather than in a stylesheet, and Outlook-specific conditional comments (MSO comments) for things like button padding that render inconsistently otherwise. Unless you already know to ask for all of that explicitly, and know enough to check the output for it, what you get back is web HTML wearing an email costume. I go through the specific rendering failures, dark mode inversion, Outlook's Word-based engine, image blocking, in this post, if you want the detail.

No memory of your brand

Every new chat starts from zero. If you want your brand colors, logo, and tone applied consistently, you're re-explaining it, or re-pasting brand guidelines, every single time, and it's easy for that consistency to drift across sessions. There's no persistent brand profile a general chat assistant applies automatically to every email you ask for afterward.

Where ChatGPT is still the right call

Brainstorming, drafting a single line of copy, or figuring out tone before you've settled on what the email should even say. It's a fine thinking partner for that stage. It's the "now build the finished, brand-matched, Outlook-safe email" stage where it needs more hand-holding than most people realize going in.

The honest recommendation

If you're drafting a single line of copy or brainstorming subject lines, ChatGPT is fine for that. If you want the finished, ready-to-send email, brand-consistent, tested against how email clients actually render HTML, without learning MSO conditional comments yourself, that's specifically the problem Emlet is built around. Same underlying category of technology, aimed at a much narrower and more specific job.