Your customers know when you’re faking it

Author: Cristelle Snyman, marketing manager at Everlytic

Here’s something most email marketing guides won’t tell you: your customers have finely tuned radar for inauthenticity. They can’t always name what feels off, but they feel it instantly. The slightly-too-smooth opener. The compliment that could apply to literally anyone. The 'as a valued customer' that signals no one actually valued them enough to write a real sentence.

In South Africa, where consumers are arguably more sceptical of brand communication than most (and where inboxes are already cluttered with generic global content that doesn’t speak to local realities), the cost of sounding automated is higher than anywhere. Yet many businesses, from startups to large corporates, are making the same mistake: they’ve invested in automation and AI to scale their communication and accidentally scaled the blandness along with it.

The goal isn’t to abandon those tools. It’s to use them in a way that still sounds like a real person is behind the message. That’s harder than it sounds, but it’s entirely achievable.

The tone problem nobody talks about

The first place most brands go wrong is tone. Not content, not design, but tone.

Read your last email out loud. Does it sound like something a human being would say, or does it sound like a press release written by committee? If it’s the latter, you’ve got a tone problem.

Emails don’t need to be clever or overly formal. They need to be clear, easy to read, and recognisably yours. A simple rewrite by cutting the stiff corporate phrasing, shortening sentences, choosing the word you’d really use in a conversation, often makes the difference between something that lands and something that gets deleted.

South African brands have a particular advantage here, if they’re willing to use it. We communicate with warmth, directness, and a sense of humour. That personality doesn’t disappear when you hit send at scale, unless you let the automation strip it out.

Stop thinking in audiences. Start thinking in moments

Email automation works best when it responds to behaviour. Someone signs up, browses, buys, or drops off. Each of those moments is an opportunity to continue a conversation, not to fire off another blast.

When you shift from thinking about 'our audience' to thinking about 'this person, at this moment, off the back of this action', the messaging changes fundamentally. Suddenly you’re not writing for a segment, you’re responding to a signal. And a message that responds to what someone just did already feels more personal, before you’ve even worried about tone.

Platforms like Everlytic are built for exactly this kind of behaviour-triggered communication, and yet most businesses use them as sophisticated broadcast tools. The infrastructure for personalisation is already there. The missing piece is usually the intent to use it.

AI is a first draft, not a final voice

AI writing tools have definitely become useful for email marketers. They’re good for getting a draft down quickly, testing different angles, and clearing that blank-page paralysis that slows down teams with too much to do.

But AI has a well-documented tendency to smooth everything out. Left unchecked, it produces content that is technically correct and emotionally neutral. This is fine for an instruction manual but can be fatal for a brand email. The writing is often vague, and it tries to say everything at once. It gravitates toward phrases that could apply to any brand in any industry. You read it, and nothing really sticks.

The fix is editorial control, not avoidance. Use AI to generate, then rewrite with intent. Be specific about what your customer has done. Be clear about what happens next. Cut anything that feels like filler. And allow for a bit of imperfection, real communication isn’t perfectly structured, and it doesn’t need to be.

When automation feels personal, customers notice The brands that get email right don’t sound automated, even when everything behind the scenes is. They sound considered, specific, and easy to engage with.

Automation and AI should make communication easier, not less human. The infrastructure to do this well already exists. The question is whether you’re willing to do the editorial work that sits between the tool and the inbox.

Your tools can send the message, but your voice must still earn the attention.