How to write a discount offer email using AI (How-to and templates)

For marketers in both B2B and B2C businesses, it’s important to know how to position the perfect discount offer to your customers. After all, temporarily lowering prices can help you bring in new clients, turn one-time customers into repeat buyers, and reach revenue targets more quickly.

To get the most out of your discount promotion, however, you’ll need to nail your client communication. Below, we’ll walk you through how you can use artificial intelligence (AI) to write the perfect discount offer email and drive the best results for your campaign.

What is a discount offer email?

In both B2C and B2B industries, discounts are an essential tactic used to win over new business, re-engage existing customers, and drive revenue. And whether you work in marketing or sales, chances are that you’ve had to write an email or two letting clients know about a discount — i.e., you’ve written a discount offer email.

Discount offer emails are emails used to tell customers about special discounts available on all or specific products or services. They can be high-volume and generic (such as a Cyber Monday or Black Friday sale) or unique and completely personalized (like giving an enterprise client a discount for switching over from a competitor).

10 steps to write the perfect discount offer email with AI

Below, we’ll walk you through the 10 steps to writing a discount offer email that converts — with plenty of help from AI along the way.

Do the math

First up: you need to understand how deeply you can discount your product. This means taking a look at key metrics, like your potential profit margin and customer acquisition costs (CAC). Before you decide on a discount amount, calculate how much you can lower your prices while still maintaining a healthy profit and realistic CAC.

Understand how discounts might impact your brand

When you think of some brands — like Target, Walmart, or Sephora — regular discounts are pretty much a guarantee. In fact, they may discount products so often that some people decide to shop there only when they run a specific sale.

For certain upscale brands, however, discounts are basically unheard of. Tiffany & Co., for instance, reportedly won’t even run a sale on Black Friday; others will only run one sale a year.

When you decide on a sale price, think about how the discount might affect how consumers perceive your brand. Discounts that run too deep or too often can:

• Devalue your product
• Decrease consumers’ confidence in your brand
• Train your customers to wait for discounts before buying
• Attract deal shoppers, rather than your target audience

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t run a sale, mind you. It just means timing it right, setting the discount at a reasonable amount, and marketing it the right way.

Decide who to offer the discount to

Most marketing teams will segment their audience into several different groups. Decide if you want to target this offer to one specific customer, one audience segment, or all of your customers.

If you decide to target specific segments or customers, you can generally run more personalized campaigns at a lower overall cost — such as offering students 15% off during finals or sending a customer a coupon for leaving a great testimonial.

On the flip side, a more general sale that targets your entire audience can help you hit monthly or yearly targets in one fell swoop — but since the discount is available to everyone, it can cost your company more.

Personalize your promotional email

Everyone likes to feel special — and this holds true even when you’re sending out discount offer emails. According to research by McKinsey, brands that personalize their marketing materials generate 40% more revenue from those efforts than brands who don’t.

Over three-quarters of consumers also say that they’re more likely to consider purchasing, re-purchasing, and referring friends and family members to brands that personalize their communication.

Fortunately, even if you’re sending out hundreds of promotional emails, many marketing platforms will allow you to plug in customers’ names to the message and subject line automatically. If you’re using an AI tool like CopyAI to generate your email message, just make sure to replace the “[customer name]” prompt with either a name plug-in or the customer’s name.

Make your discount offer limited or time-sensitive

Your sale shouldn't last forever, and you should be wary of giving customers the impression that it will. Use scarcity to create urgency and encourage customers to act now.

Let them know that your offer is only available for a limited time and that this is a special event that doesn’t happen often.

Include the end date and time of the offer. You can even add a counter to the email.

Focus on the value you’re providing your customer

While a sale is enticing, it shouldn’t be the main reason your customer is buying from you. Use this discount offer email as a chance to remind your customer the value that you bring to their lives.

After all, even though you’re sharing a sale, your email is still an opportunity to market your products.

Keep your email short and sweet

Your discount offer email has one purpose: to inform your customers about an ongoing sale. Longer emails aren’t necessarily better, and brevity is essential when capturing customers’ attention.

Once you complete the most important task of getting your customers to open the email, you should:

• Get to the point
• Introduce your offer
• Provide the discount code (where necessary) and expiration date

Using AI to craft your copy? Just instruct your AI generator to keep the message short, and it’ll do just that.

Set the tone

Make sure that your message matches your brand voice and tone. For some brands, this might mean using a punny subject line and plenty of exclamation marks. For others, it might mean focusing more on the craftsmanship behind the products and highlighting that this is a once-a-year sale.

Regardless of the vibe you’re going for, let your AI generator know by using specific inputs. For instance, to craft one discount offer email in CopyAI, we selected a “luxury” tone and specified that we wanted the email to sound “classy and respectful.” Here’s the result:

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For a second email, we kept the same discount, product, and audience, but opted for a “witty” tone and instructed the generator to craft a “funny and friendly” email. Here’s what we got:

Give your AI platform as much detail as possible

AI is smart, but it can’t read your mind (yet).

To get the best results from your AI platform, feed it as many details as possible, including:

• The tone you’d like to use
• The audience you’re targeting
• The problem your product or service solves
• Your discount amount and code (if applicable)
• Which products or services are included (if applicable)
• What makes you unique
• The end date of your sale
• Your unique value proposition

The more details you can provide, the more accurate your end result will be.

Have a follow-up plan

Once you have your email ready to go, start planning how you’ll keep your new (or returning) customers engaged after the sale. What will your follow-up emails look like? How will you educate them about your product? How will you drive the next sale?

Make sure that your discount offer email fits into a larger plan to retain and grow your audience.

7 discount offer email templates

It only takes a minute to generate a discount offer email that’s unique to your brand using an AI copy generator — but if you’re looking for something pre-built, check out our CopyAI-generated templates below.

Discount for signing up to a newsletter

Convert new subscribers more quickly by giving them a discount on their first order.

Subject line: Thanks for joining us — here’s [discount]% off your first order!

Copy:

Hi [name],

Thanks for signing up for our newsletter! We're so glad you're here, and we'd like to offer you [discount]% off your first purchase. Just use the code [code] at checkout.

If you have any questions about our products, please feel free to email us at [email]! We always love hearing from you.

Abandoned cart discount

Did a customer leave your site with a cart full of goodies and no checkout? Win them back by sweetening the deal.

Subject line: Remember you wanted to buy this? (Take [discount]% off!)

Copy:

Hi there!

We're so sorry to hear that you didn't get around to finishing your order. We know it's no fun to leave a cart full of stuff behind, but we hope that you'll give us another shot sometime soon.

If you do decide to complete your order in the next [time limit] hours, we'd like to offer you [discount]% off your purchase.

Just enter "[code]" at checkout and let us know if there's anything else we can help with.

Customer reengagement discount

Turn one-time customers into repeat customers by giving them a deal on their next purchase.

Subject line: We miss you, so here’s [discount]% off your next purchase!

Copy:

Hey there!

We just wanted to check in and see how you're doing. It's been a while since your last purchase, and we miss you!

So we have a special deal for you: [discount]% off your next purchase! Just use the code [code] when checking out to get the discount.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out! We're always here for you.

Loyal customer discount

Let your customers know you appreciate them with a “just because” discount.

Subject line: Thanks for being a loyal customer! Here's [discount]% off your next purchase.

Copy:

Hey there, [customer name]!

We wanted to reach out and thank you for being a loyal customer. We love having you around, and we're always working hard to make sure your experience with us is the best it can be.

To show our appreciation, we'd like to offer you [discount]% off your next order with [company name]. Just enter the coupon code "[code]" at checkout, and we'll take care of the rest.

Thanks again for being awesome!

Product launch discount

Drive adoption for your latest product by giving your existing customers a cut on its cost.

Subject line: Try [product name] at [discount]% off — this week only.

Copy:

Hey there, [name]!

We know you're always looking to try new things and we've got a great one for you. We just released our newest product, [product name], and we want you to be the first to try it out. Not only will this be a great opportunity to try something new, but it will also save you [discount]% off the normal price.

The offer expires next week, so don't miss out on this amazing deal!

Seasonal sale discount

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day… if you need to increase revenue, every month brings new opportunities to discount your products.

Subject line: [discount]% off all products on [sale event]!

Copy:

Hey there!

We know you've been waiting for this one.

For [sale event], we're giving all of our customers [discount]% off on all products. This deal is available on everything, so don't miss out!

This sale only lasts for [time limit], so make sure to take advantage of it before it's too late.

Discount reminder

Don’t let customers forget about your promotion if they haven’t taken advantage of it yet.

Subject line: Don’t miss out on this deal!

Copy:

Hi there!

We just wanted to remind you that our discount is running this week only, so if you've been thinking of taking advantage of it, now's the time.

Just type in the coupon code "[code]" at checkout for [discount]% off your order. We hope you enjoy it!

Write a discount offer email in under 5 minutes

Now that you know what makes a good discount offer email and have seen some inspiring examples, you’re ready to create your own.

Not a writer? That’s perfectly fine!

All of the templates you saw above were created using copy.ai, which uses AI to generate unique and effective discount offer emails in minutes.

This means you don’t have to struggle to write your copy without sacrificing quality. You’ll save time so you can focus on other aspects of your business.

Start for free and get 2,000 words on us.

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More reading:

4 Ways To Use Generative AI for Email Marketing

9 Generative AI Prompts for Email Marketers