Regie AI Lands $10M to Write Your Marketing Copy
Hyper-automation is spreading
How much time is spent writing sales emails? How about marketing copy for a campaign email, a white paper, or that new landing page? What is the quality behind those activities?
Every knowledge worker has to write something every day, even if it’s just an email. The writing task load and stakes are higher when you are in a sales or marketing role. Let’s face it, not everyone is a fast writer, and fewer still are good at it. However, we ask people that are essentially untrained in persuasive writing or copywriting to perform those tasks daily. How’s that working out for everyone?
A Writing Assistant for Revenue Generators
Regie AI announced today it closed a $10 million funding round led by Scale Venture Partners. The company uses GPT-3 to generate email and marketing copy based on simple natural language inputs and promises to help improve conversion rates for growth teams.
There is a lot less focus on this segment of synthetic media than on text-to-image, text-to-video, voice clones, or deepfakes. However, text-to-text generators may wind up being the most widely used synthetic media segment. Writing is a daily task for a lot of people. Video and image generation are daily tasks for a much smaller population.
Quality and Capacity
There are two key benefits companies such as Regie are going after. The first is to help sales and marketing professionals improve the quality of their copywriting. The solution will take the existing copy and suggest alternatives. It can also review the text in a draft email and suggest a subject line.
By the way, the subject line is the most important element of any sales or marketing email. If the prospect doesn’t open the email, all is lost. Once they open the email, you then need copy than can hook their interest and hopefully convert a call to action. That reflects three points of failure that can sink a direct outreach or campaign.
Marketers traffic in words and images and are often called upon to write everything from blog posts and press releases to landing page copy. Are they all good at it? No. All of these are areas where text-generation AI models can help.
Another element of quality relates to consistency. Most companies have a salesperson that is a great copywriter. Everyone else pales in comparison. That means there is inconsistent quality in the outbound emails. This can be normalized somewhat with templates and scripts, but at some point, a salesperson will have to write a personalized email that doesn’t follow the generic pattern.
It is an interesting idea that a text-generation AI model could create more consistency in terms of communication quality with prospects. Will it succeed in leveling up the entire sales team or, at least, the lagging performers? I am intrigued to see some data on this across a large population that doesn’t rely on the anecdote.
The second benefit of this type of solution is capacity. Writing takes time. If a tool cuts down the time while maintaining or improving quality, that frees up salespeople to reach more prospects or offer more personalized attention to the best prospects. For marketing, it may enable a higher volume of targeted campaigns or website content that can drive SEO and inbound leads.
Hyper-automation and Hyper-Creation
At Synthedia, the synthetic media conference in September, I spoke about the rise of hyper-automation and hyper-creation. The former creates an order of magnitude improvements in output per man hour. The latter enables more options for professionals to choose from, which often introduces new ideas that would not have arisen otherwise.
For sales and marketing, the promise of these twin forces is to deliver what every business lead wants: more revenue per hour of input.
Word processing software revolutionized business productivity for knowledge workers 25 years ago. Synthetic media for text-generation is the evolution of that innovation and will likely drive another step-change in productivity for knowledge workers where persuasive writing matters.
Regie AI has a good story to tell and may have an advantage from getting resources of its series A round faster than competitors. Others that have raised funding but at lower levels and with somewhat different value propositions but in the same category include Copy.ai and Writer. I expect to see a lot more of these emerge over the next 6-12 months.
Let me know if you have used one of these solutions and what you thought about it.
