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<aside> ✉️ If you want to use AI to help with your email workflows, writing a good prompt is the most important skill to learn. The better your prompts are, the more the AI will be able to help you.

The core concept of AI prompting is constrained creativity. You need to give the AI enough guardrails to get the kind of result you want.

For basic prompting, providing the AI with a set of instructions is sufficient. For advanced prompting, you’ll want to give the AI instructions as well as a series of input and output pairs as examples to learn from. In this section, we’ll cover basic prompting!

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📏 General rules

💬 Examples of basic prompting

📏 General rule: Be as specific as possible

Your prompts should be simply phrased and highly specific. Imagine you’re explaining what you want to a fifth grader. Here’s a general line by line plan you can use:

1. Summarize what you want and what input(s) to draw upon.
   • E.g. Tell me what this company does, based on the “company description” input.
2. Specify the input(s) in Clay.
   • E.g. Here is the “company description” input: [insert input].
3. Describe your desired output format (including word count, phrasing, etc).
   • E.g. Write a one sentence summary in under 10 words.
4. Provide a prefix, if applicable.
   • E.g. Start each summary with the prefix, “I noticed that your company”

<aside> 💡 Tip: AI prompting is a process of trial and error. AI can do an infinite amount of tasks and you need to constrain it to only accomplish your task successfully.

If you see the output is being too sales-y, tell it to write casually. If the output is coming out with too many sentences, specify the sentences. The framework above will help you start your prompt—but watch the outputs carefully and keep refining your prompt to get the output that you desire.

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💬 Examples of basic prompting