ChatGPT Doesn’t Wear Shoes

Great photo by Grok.

Intrigued? 
 
“ChatGPT doesn’t wear shoes?” Has Copel Communications completely lost its few remaining brain cells? 
 
Not yet. Stay with us on this. And learn how—no kidding—this observation can help your business make more money. 
 
Here’s a dirty little secret. While we specialize in marketing here at Copel Comms, we’re really “closet salespeople.” Think of the playwright who shudders at the prospect of getting on stage… but is completely comfortable writing a powerful speech for the play’s leading man to deliver. That’s us. 
 
Okay. Shoes? ChatGPT? Is there a thread anywhere in this story forthcoming? 
 
Sure there is. As we’d said, stay with us. 
 
ChatGPT, and all of the generative large-language-model AI platforms of its ilk, have really changed the way that people sell. The way that you can sell. And, upstream of that, the way you market. 
 
Shortly after it appeared on the scene, ChatGPT basically torpedoed email-based marketing and outreach—and thus the sales that those were supposed to generate. The reason is simple: It used to be that only reasonably intelligent English speakers could create grammatically correct outreach notes. ChatGPT eliminated that requirement. 
 
Since its advent, every mouth-breather who can click a “Generate” button has been able to churn out grammatically flawless… spam. 
 
Yep. Spam. 
 
The ISPs quickly clamped down on this. The spam filters got tighter. Even now, Google (in a related story) is tweaking its algorithms to filter out AI-generated content. 
 
But ChatGPT is old news. The platform debuted during the pandemic, for goodness’ sakes. 
 
The “old news” aspect of this story is good news for our clients and businesses like yours. We’re seeing an uptick in the effectiveness of email outreach again. Isn’t that nice? 
 
And, just like in the old days, quality matters. Remember the ol’ “three-legged stool” of email marketing? It consisted of the quality of: 

• Your list 
• Your offer 
• Your email which presents the offer

 
Guess what? That’s true again. 
 
Which gets to shoes. Specifically, “shoe leather.” We’re talking about the old days, when salespeople would “pound the pavement,” going from business to business, to the point where they would wear holes in the leather soles of their shoes. Hence “shoe leather.” 
 
ChatGPT does not wear shoes. It doesn’t understand how you can (and perhaps should) “pound the pavement” to actually generate sales. 
 
Example: We recently penned an email (is that a mixed metaphor? We actually used a keyboard) for a client of ours, directed toward their current clients, introducing a referral program for their services. 
 
Per best practice, the offer was “two-sided”: “Refer a client to us, and they’ll get a massive discount on our services. And you’ll get an Amazon gift card. Everyone wins!” 
 
So. It was a matter of taking this good offer (Leg 2), turning it into a compelling message (Leg 3), and sending it out to our client’s list of existing customers (Leg 1). 
 
Another dirty little secret: The client’s list of clients was small enough that no automation was needed. So “Dear [First Name]” was typed in as “Dear Linda,” and so on. 
 
Sure, it was old-fashioned manual labor. But it was effective. Proving that pounding the pavement, in its modern iteration, can still yield sales. 
 
And proving that ChatGPT doesn’t wear shoes. 
 
Need help with a marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! 

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