This is a review of Lavender.ai. As a heads up, I run a website called SalePier, where we list and review the newest and coolest sales tools coming out.
Lavender claims to be an AI email coach and improve the writing style of your emails, whether that’s crafting a brand new email from scratch, or revising an existing email.
I’ve been hearing more and more buzz around Lavender online, which piqued my interest in reviewing this tool, but that could just be their LinkedIn influencers constantly in my feed.
Setup
Two notes here:
- This is the section where you input your own information for the purposes of personalization
2. A lot of metrics for reporting — an aggregate overview of your open/response rates, common themes of improvement, and even a gamified leaderboard to see how your average email scores compare to that of your peers.
I almost feel like they over indexed on the amount of analytics and reporting available on the emails, with many of sections being repetitive. Personally, I think communication — through any medium — is always more of an art than a science, and while analytics can capture areas of improvement to a degree, I’d wager that there’s a lot that the numbers don’t capture.
That said, I want to analyze Lavender.ai’s performance against a few use cases
Writing an email from scratch
I inputted a fictional personal background, claiming that I’m the founder of a payroll software company. Lavender then prompted me for three bullet points that I wanted to write the email on. Here’s what I provided:
Before I share the variations of what it spit out, important to note that you can select whether you want a “general email” or a “cold email”. There’s also a slider for how creative you want the output to be.
Now for the examples:
70% Creativity, Cold Email
100% Creativity, Cold Email
0% Creativity, Cold Email
Of course, this is just one example, but in my eyes the creativity slider did nothing, and the output was merely stringing the provided bullet points and user context together — almost in a robotic fashion. Changing the email generation type from “cold email” to “general email” didn’t help either. In fact, it almost made it worse.
70% Creativity, General Email
Keep in mind that you can continue to generate new outputs until you get the type of email you want.
In terms of evaluating the output emails it generated, I was a little underwhelmed.
The first email produced literally took the three bullet points I provided it almost verbatim, stitched them together, and maybe sprinkled in a little bit of the company context we provided in the settings section.
Adjusting the creativity slider seemed to have little to no impact or correlation on the output of the email.
Improving an existing email
In this case, I wanted to evaluate how well it took a demo email script that Lavender.ai provided, and identified opportunities for improvement.
Personalization Assistant
The personalization assistant it provided basically scraped information from the corresponding LinkedIn profile of the associated email address. The quality of this panel depends on the quality of the information on their LinkedIn.
Apart from the “About” panel, there are a few other sections that also pull public information, such as “Work History” and “Social Media”. The picture above illustrates the “Personality” tab which runs a basic sentiment analysis of their public info.
I tested this against myself and some friends, and found it to be pretty useless — in no way would I say that the personality assessment it provided was accurate.
The main value add of the “personalization assistant” is to easily toggle between LinkedIn and your Inbox.
Email Coach
The meat of Lavender is the “email coach”, as depicted above. The email coach provides a rating between 1–100 that’s intended to represent the strength of your email.
It also identifies three sections:
- Areas for improvement (missing sentences)
- Needs work (how to improve current sentences)
- Ready (what you’re doing well)
Additionally, it notes the approximate time to read the email and the interpreted tone of the email.
Upon clicking on a “needs work” section, Lavender will underline the corresponding sentence within the email, and generate multiple ways to rewrite the email.
To me, this is the most valuable part of Lavender. Knowing what you want to say, but not knowing how you want to say it is probably the most common challenge when it comes to email writing. Lavender provides multiple inline suggestions to make it easy to formulate your email in the exact voice you want to write it in.
I also tested these features for a non-demo email, which I’ll relay in the final thoughts section
Mobile Preview
Another handy tool Lavender provides is the ability to see a mobile preview of your emails, which is likely the format in which your recipients will be reading the emails.
Final verdict
Lavender. ai offers several features, though their usefulness can vary depending on your writing and grammar proficiency.
What I think it can do, is take a poor or average writer to at least an average or above average writer, primarily through the email coach.
Lavender’s email coach serves as a handy guide to ensure you don’t overlook essential elements in your emails, such as including the recipient’s name, a clear subject, a distinct call to action, and relevant date and time information. This checklist can be especially useful for those who are new to email communication.
Apart from this core feature, a lot of the AI tools and the personalization/tonality features seem like extraneous bells and whistles that are kind of crammed in to provide the illusion of an email writer of the future, when in reality their effectiveness and accuracy is still questionable.
The email score it provides is an arbitrary standard. I wrote a brand new email from scratch that contained one sentence, and the entire email was scored at a 90. The take away here is to take recommendations/scores/benchmarks/standards with a grain of salt, as writing and communication are more of an art rather than science.
As much as we’d like to treat email writing as a formula and checklist, where email writing tools like Lavender or Grammarly fall short is that the don’t take nuance, voice, intention, history, recipient etc. into account.
Granted, Lavender definitely tries (has tonality, personalization features etc), but the features don’t work well enough to fully trust and rely on them yet
If you are more experienced in email authoring/outbound, you may not need to rely on its pre-designed sections as heavily. However, for individuals who are just starting out and lack extensive email writing experience, Lavender can be a valuable resource.
To explore other email authoring tools and alternatives to Lavender, visit SalePier
