One by one, the old email firms and
mailing list outfits are adopting artificial intelligence (AI).
Take AWeber, an email marketing company founded 28 years ago. It has launched what it calls its AI Landing Page Builder.
But it is not competing against its peers in the email business — it is setting itself up against the likes of ChatGPT and others in that space.
To hear AWeber tell it, this is
unusual positioning.
"We didn't see other marketing platforms as our competitors," says Chris Vasquez, chief product officer at AWeber. "We saw Claude, ChatGPT, and
Lovable. Our direct competitors were afraid to generate real code because they didn't understand the technology.”
Other firms are free to make counter-arguments. But AWeber contends that
most marketing platforms with AI page builders have simply bolted a conversational layer onto their rigid template frameworks.
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The end result may look like AI, but it is
still a limited grid with a stock library, AWeber states.
In contrast, AWeber’s builder generates HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images from scratch for every page, it adds.
The
discovery was arrived at almost by accident. An informal internal development hackathon led to team members building and sharing playable games, using the tool. The team had not planned for that
extension beyond landing pages.
The main goal for output is taste, meaning that it avoids the pattern usually associated with AI-generated pages.
"Two companies can use the
same underlying AI and produce completely different work," says Sean Cohen, chief operating officer at AWeber. "The difference is whether someone put in the effort to shape real taste, or just shipped
the average. That gap is human, and it always will be."
According to AWeber, the AI toolkit includes a growing set of components:
- AWeber MCP —
For managing email marketing from within ChatGPT or Claude
- AI Newsletter Assistant — This automatically drafts a firm’s weekly newsletter, using its own
voice
- AI Signup Form Builder — This allows the user to create a wide range of forms and visually place them on a
live site
- AI image enhancement — This allows users to generate and improve images from a single text prompt
- Subject
Line Generator — This provides suggestions based on performance data and email context
The AI Landing Page Builder is now available to AWeber customers. An AI email
builder arrives this fall.