Singulate Best Prompts and Practices

Singulate gives you a lot of levers. These are the prompts, habits, and guardrails we have seen produce the best emails.

A companion video guide is coming soon.

Tip #1: Start with the Agent

Create the first draft of your email, plain text or rich HTML, using the Agent. Open the Agent tab on the right and write your initial prompt: tell it the type of email you want, how you want it to segment parts of the messaging, and what personalization strategies to apply to the hook, CTA, PS, and so on.

The Agent takes a first pass and makes changes directly in the editor. From there you can edit directly to fine-tune and polish (recommended), or keep chatting with the Agent to have it build more content and features into the email.

Example: an outreach email

Create an outreach email for [paste your website URL] and make it plain text. Greet the user by their first name. Personalize the hook of the email to solve a pain point they are likely facing in their industry and job title. Segment the value proposition of [your company] based on their industry. Segment the call to action based on seniority. Add a PS that is personalized to their city if it is relevant. Make sure the email is short and contains no branding.

Example: an event invite

Build an event invite for Canvas using this link: https://miro.com/canvas/. Segment the takeaways by seniority and segment the CTA by the top 5 cities. Greet the contact by first name. Write the copy for the city-based segments and add a button CTA in the segments too.

Limit the word count

In email, every word counts and brevity matters. But AI likes to be verbose and thorough. The fix is simple: in your prompts, especially for Wow Tags and Snippets, specify the range of words you want the output to have, such as 2-3 words or 10-15 words. That guardrail stops walls of text before they get generated.

Try to use each Singulate feature at least once

Aim for at least one branch, one snippet, and one Wow Tag (not just first name) in every email. The more Singulate features you use, the more unique and relevant each email becomes.

The point is not to use every feature for its own sake. It is to use Singulate to produce the best possible email. Some emails need only a snippet or a branch. But there is simply too much data available to be okay with sending a blast email. The benefit of Singulate is activating as much of that data as possible to make the message relevant, and each feature helps do that. More relevance is better for the contact, and the email performs better.

Treat "use each feature at least once" as a heuristic that pushes you to be more creative, in service of a better message for your recipients. And use the Agent.

The first five words matter most

Use a branch or a snippet in the first sentence of your email. Those are the first words that appear in the inbox preview, and they often decide whether the contact opens or ignores you. Make that precious real estate hook and capture attention.

Recommendation: use a Singulated Snippet with Research turned on to find something timely and relevant, such as recent news, their events or webinars, a detail about their city, the software they use, or a specific pain point they cited in a previous conversation.

When to use each core feature

Wow Tag - referencing, cleaning up, or rewriting one data attribute (first names capitalized, dates written as months, and so on).
Singulated Snippet - referencing multiple data points and finessing them into one natural, personalized sentence.
Snippet with Research on - crawling the web for publicly available data, then combining it with your list data or using it as the reference, and finessing it into one natural, personalized sentence.
Branched Content - showing messaging specific to a segment of contacts: industry, growth stage, location, and so on. Similar to dynamic content.
Agent - building the first draft of your Singulate email. It can create all of the above, design your email, add images and logos, and craft segmented messaging.

Common use cases for Wow Tags

Clean up and standardize the First Name token.
Make tokens possessive or plural.
Fix capitalization and formatting of any token.
Extract useful information from a large field. For example, from a long Technologies attribute, write simply "HubSpot" or "Marketo" if it is mentioned.
Summarize a Company Description into 2-4 words.
Naturalize Company Name. Paste this into the transformation box: Condense the company name down to the version someone working at the company would say it in casual conversation to another employee at the company.
Generalize and pluralize Job Title. Raw titles are risky because they are esoteric, long-winded, and wide-ranging. Try: Condense and pluralize job title into the more general category of work in 2-3 words. For example, "Senior Vice President of Product & Engineering, EMEA" should be "product and engineering SVPs."
Transform timestamps into natural language, turning a Create Date of "06-04-26 12:21:01" into "June 4th" or "last month."

Common use cases for Branched Content

Hint: tell the Singulate Agent to build these.

Segment your email modules - the takeaways of an event, the reasons to attend, the value proposition and benefits of your product, the call to action, or the whole hero block of image, paragraph, and CTA. Useful splits include:

The top 5 most common industries
The top 5 regions (time zones or countries)
The top 5 most common groups of roles
Seniority - VPs and C-level, directors, managers
Employee count - startups, scale-ups, large companies, enterprises

Use Skip Logic liberally. For any branch you do not have targeted messaging for, there is no need to write a generic fallback. Toggle the Skip switch to skip that block for that segment, making the email shorter for contacts missing data. Skip logic saves you time building the email and increases engagement.

Common use cases for Singulated Snippets

Use a framing statement to guide the AI. Start with "Write exactly this:" and write an example of a good output for just one contact. Then use brackets to mark the parts that should be variables. This gives the AI a structure to follow and limits hallucination and AI tone.
Weave in multiple data points. A snippet's superpower is smoothly combining several attributes into one hook.
Instruct every bracket. For example: "Here are the most relevant takeaways for [pluralized naturalized role] at a [one word to describe size of company] [one word to describe type of company] like [condensed name of company]."
Singulate Research. Toggle Research on in a snippet (if you do not see it, it is not enabled on your account) and cue it simply in the writing instructions: "Research the contact's website and find the latest mention of AI in the blog and summarize the headline into 4 words, starting with about."
Content to Summarize. Provide extra context or data, like a PDF deck or whitepaper, and pull personalized messaging from it. Use the writing instructions to refer to the "source material" and highlight takeaways, recommendations, or insights relevant to the contact's industry, job title, or location.
Research vs. Content to Summarize. Content to Summarize shares personalized messaging from internal assets or data. Singulate Research is a web scraping tool that pulls from publicly available information. If it is Google-searchable, Research can find it.
Fine-tune until it is consistent. Keep modifying the writing instructions until you see high-quality outputs for several contacts in a row. If an output sounds like AI, add a rule. And copy a great unique output straight into the writing instructions with "This is a good example:" - it sets the pattern so personalization scales consistently.

Snippet examples

Research customers on their website and mention them: "I noticed [researched customer 1] and [researched customer 2] were customers."
Research recent news: "I saw the news about [researched recent professional and positive news article summarized in 3-10 words] - congrats!"
Personalized case study recommendation, with your case studies in Content to Summarize: "Highlight the most relevant case study from the source material and summarize it in one sentence that includes a data point. For example: A similar B2B marketing team at Amtrak doubled ticket sales by adding location-based personalization for recommended trips in their nurture emails."

Two patterns of poor personalization

1. "As a [job title] at [company name],"

Any sentence that opens this way is telling the contact something they already know. It frames the same core information rather than adapting it.

How to fix it: cut it. Use a snippet or branched content to tailor the core information that follows the comma so it is more relevant to the contact's job title and company, without naming those data points overtly. The best personalization is invisible. It should read as a thoughtful, helpful, relevant message.

2. Anything that sounds AI-generated

This is the central purpose of Singulate: high-quality, relevant messaging at scale. Every tool available to you exists to remove, fine-tune, and control AI-generated content so it does not sound like AI at all.

How to fix it: break your email into modules that mix core messaging with Wow Tags, branched content (especially for bullets and images), and fine-tuned snippets. Find the right mix of these tools in a Singulate template and you will send a strong, well-written email to every contact, every time.