Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:00]:
I know how to write emails. Emails are literally my thing. And yet sitting down every single week, starting from nothing and trying to stick to a consistent newsletter-style email felt so big for me that I just didn’t do it for so long. What finally changed wasn’t just handing off all my writing to AI or being more disciplined. It was making a decision and setting up a system with AI that now makes writing these emails fun and importantly consistent without the pain. Welcome to the Soulful Sales Show, where we talk about believing in the value of your offers, getting them in front of your right people, and selling more of what you do in your unique way. Hi, and welcome back to another episode of the Soulful Sales Show. Today, I’m going to talk to you about how I have been using AI systems to help me more consistently send out emails, but not just any emails, also to come up with a more involved weekly newsletter that I actually stuck to, because this is something I have been wanting to do for ages.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:01:07]:
I’ve done it on and off in the past, but it always felt like such a big deal to put together a newsletter with lots of different sections with really meaty content, and to do it week after week after week, and I could just never get myself to commit to it for that reason. And the thing is, I am not someone who finds it hard to write emails in general. I know how to write emails. Emails are my thing, but starting every week from nothing just felt so, so huge for me. So what I have now done is created a system and support with AI, and I’m not using AI to do all of the writing, by the way. This is the whole system that makes it possible for me to do it, which is what I’m going to talk about today. And by the end of this episode, you’re going to know exactly how to set up this kind of system for yourself as well. So the first part of this system is deciding on what your weekly rhythm is going to be in the first place.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:02:05]:
And I have realised so much of my business, so much of the stuff I struggle with, so much of the stuff I procrastinate on or that takes me a long time or that feels hard, comes down to just making decisions over and over again, which is really, really hard, especially for neurodivergent brains. So what I did was I stopped deciding what goes into this weekly newsletter, and I focused on deciding the shape of the newsletter. So it starts with a really short kind of intro hook, it has a table of contents, it has a main teaching section, it has a key takeaway, it has maybe a prompt or something to try that kind of varies every week, it shares an offer of mine, it shares my latest podcast episode, sometimes I share a freebie, and that is it. Now it seems kind of simple, but deciding this shape and then training AI on the shape has made such a big difference. So in my Aligned AI Lab membership last month, I did a workshop on this entire email system. So I wasn’t just telling them about it like I am in this episode, I was showing them how I set it all up. And as part of the workshop, I did a demo of writing my Sunday Sales weekly newsletter, which by the way, I don’t send it consistently every week in case you’re wondering, because sometimes I just have other stuff going on that I need to talk about instead. But I have been more consistent with it than I have been in the past, thanks to this system.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:03:29]:
I showed them a demo live, and it’s always a bit risky doing this stuff live, right? Because you never know how it’s going to turn out. But basically, I just asked Claude to go into my Kit account to look at the patterns of my past Sales Sunday emails and share the structure with me. Now, obviously, I actually have already trained Claude on the structure, but what I— the point I was getting at is that If you don’t know what the structure should be, you can actually use AI to analyze your past emails for you. And then the second part of what I demoed in that session was I uploaded a past podcast episode transcript and I asked Claude to turn that into a Sales Sunday newsletter. And it magically put it into all of these different sections, used my voice because it’s a transcript of literally me speaking, and turned it into my weekly newsletter. So, so helpful, and that’s because I have trained AI, have created a skill based on the shape of my weekly newsletter. It’s actually kind of fun for me to put together this weekly newsletter now, whereas before it would have been a very last-minute chore and a scramble and just like trying to get it out there on a weekend when I should be relaxing. So that’s the first part of my email system: deciding on the weekly newsletter that I want to send and the shape of that, and then training AI on it.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:04:49]:
The second part of it is more the bigger picture of what I’m sending in between. So we all send different, uh, different frequency of emails. I would say that in my niche where I’m B2B, it is more common to send more emails and there’s a lot going on, especially when I’m taking part in different people’s summits and bundles and I have my own promos going on and my own deadlines going on. I have probably taken part in more collaborative events over the last few months than I had like last year combined. Seriously, I’ve been taking part in so many events lately. I’ve had to be very, very careful about keeping track of them all. They all have different promo requirements, um, different things I need to say about them, all of this stuff. And it was getting to be a lot.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:35]:
So what I actually figured out, which was a very happy accident, was when I brain dumped it to Claude— and obviously you can use your own AI system of choice. I shared all of the emails I had to send, all of the things I wanted to promote, all of the live things I was doing, all of the offers I wanted to promote, um, all of the kind of admin emails I needed to send to members. I just kind of blurted it all out. I personally use voice mode. I actually use WhisperFlow because it’s much more accurate, and you can use it in other apps, but you can just use the built-in voice mode in an AI app as well. And it The great thing about brain dumping is that you don’t actually have to be organized and get it all right when you say it out loud. You don’t have to say it all in the right order. What will happen is that the AI will repeat it back to you and actually make sense of it and put it all into the right order.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:06:26]:
What’s even better for someone like me who tends to be, you know, I don’t like having things locked in well ahead of time. I find that overwhelming. Sometimes I will change things based on my energy. So I can literally come into the chat and say, hang on a minute, I’ve moved my launch back 2 weeks. Can you rejig everything to fit in? Or, oh, maybe I could do this for these 2 weeks in August. Can you rejig everything around it to see how we can fit in all the other collab promos and stuff around that? So it’s a moving thing. It’s not just a project list that’s living in an app somewhere. It’s a living thing.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:07:00]:
And what Claude created for me was a whole visual system of showing me what emails I need to write and when. I actually even got it to show me in a calendar and I go in and ask this chat what’s next. And it just gives me the one thing that’s next. What’s next? What’s next? And I know that sounds kind of simple, but when I shared this with my members, so many of them were blown away and could just see how much of a difference this will make to their brains in terms of the overwhelm of keeping track of everything and seeing it laid out visually and actually turning something overwhelming into a bit of a dopamine hit that’s fun. And I actually find that with my newsletter as well. It feels like a dopamine hit. Like I’m filling in this bit. I’m filling in that bit.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:07:40]:
It’s so much more enjoyable for me to create now. Even if I’m still doing the writing, sometimes I get AI to draft it, sometimes I do more of the writing myself. It’s the way it’s holding the plan that’s really, really helpful. It’s made it so much less overwhelming because I’m not holding it in my head now. It’s all being held in this beautiful, beautifully designed document from Claude that gets updated and is living and changes all the time. And a lot of the people I work with are neurodivergent like me. Sticking to systems is really, really hard. So having something that can actually change when you change your mind or when you add something in last minute is really, really important.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:08:21]:
And what I want to say is like, it’s not a perfect system. There’s still some stuff that I do manually. So for example, I use the Kit MCP. It’s a connector that can draft the emails but it can’t send the emails. Which actually I think is a good thing because it’s important that we check them before they go out, right? I’ve also found that because I’m now using HTML emails, I have to— I’ve had to make a skill for Claude to insert link triggers. So basically when someone clicks a link, it adds a tag or something like that. It’s a little bit fiddly, but I’ve created a skill. I share that with my members in the AI Lab, and I do still use link triggers.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:08:57]:
There’s also some limitations on the connector with subject line A/B testing, segments and tags, and that kind of thing. So there’s still a manual element to it. Um, but generally drafting in Claude using this system and sending it over to Kit has just been such a game changer for me. Saved so much time and allowed me to keep on track of a very, very busy summer in terms of all these collaborations and even promoting my own summit and my own Skill Sale and all of this stuff as well. So the thing I want to say is that what I have walked you through is something I literally talked and demoed inside my membership the Aligned AI Lab just a few weeks ago. And that is what the lab actually is, a very specific practical application of AI from a business owner who does stuff like you do. You don’t actually have to be in my niche to benefit from it, but if you’re doing the online marketing activities like I am, like emails and posts and pages and selling and all of that stuff, I will demo practical applications of the AI systems I’m using, give you prompts, skills, whatever it is that you might need to get it set up so that you can actually set this stuff up in your business and save yourself this time and effort as well. So if any of this sounded good to you, then it’s already all there inside the lab, including the prompts and the skills and everything for you to take it and run with it.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:10:19]:
And people were really loving, um, the newsletter training. Actually, in September, I’m doing a new Get It Done Week. At the time of release. It’s happening literally in a few days where we are going to set up a bespoke AI team member. So basically we’re going to create a new skill for our AI systems. I’ll help you decide what the skill should be, and I will walk you through what it means to create a skill and how to use it and tweak it and benefit from it ongoing. One of the skills I have made is to send out my weekly newsletter to my members, which is something that there was just so much room for human error. It was something I used to dread all the time.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:11:01]:
I handed it off to my assistant and even she found it really hard to get it right every time. And I don’t think it was either our fault. It was the fact that it was just— there were so many moving parts, like all the replays, all the dates, all of this stuff. It was so easy just to get a little part of it wrong. So what we did together is I built a skill in Claude and now she uses that skill in her Claude and we send the weekly emails with so much less fuss. And we both don’t hate it anymore, which is really, really great. So that’s an example of a skill that can take over something to do with your emails, but a skill could also do any kind of marketing. I have a skill to create lessons in my school community, for example, as well.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:11:38]:
So I’ll help you figure out what would be the first or the next best skill to create in your business, and we will do that together. And if you’re the kind of person who needs that kind of live accountability and deadline, we have a deadline and there are prizes on offer as well. So yeah, if you want to get in on that, if you want to get in on the previous trainings— I don’t just have emails, I also talk about doing pages with AI, interactive tools, training AI in your business and brand, and all of this stuff, plus the upcoming Get It Done Week on creating your AI team member skill— then make sure you join that Aligned AI Lab by the 15th of September because the price is about to go up. There is a 7-day trial, so you can join on a trial to test it out if you want to. As long as you start your trial by the 15th of September, you will lock in the current price. So if you decide to stay, your price won’t go up when the public price does. And it’s a really, really low-cost membership at the moment, which is exactly why I’m raising the price, because I actually— I don’t just have workshops and trainings in there, but I also have interactive tools to help you create your own AI stuff without knowing the ins and outs of how to do it from scratch yourself with AI. Um, so that’s why I’m raising the price.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:12:51]:
Yeah, so go to ruthpoundwhite.com/lab to read more about the Aligned AI Lab and to start your free trial by the 15th of September. That is ruthpoundwhite.com/lab. And honestly, so much of what is helping me to be more consistent is having these defined skills set up with AI. I make a decision once and then I repeat the way I do things every time. It has helped me so much, and this is coming from someone who, yes, I show up a lot and send a lot of emails and stuff, but I do find it very hard to be consistent. And these systems I have set up for my marketing using AI have helped more than anything. Um, so yeah, if you take away anything from this, if you want to improve your own email systems, then write down the shape of your weekly newsletter or get AI to go and analyze your old newsletters and see what that shape is and just write down the different sections. And even deciding that is the basis of a repeating skill that you could train AI on.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:13:52]:
But yeah, go to ruthpoundwhite.com/lab if you want to create that skill together, or a skill on something else that you need to hand off— hand off that marketing grunt work— and join by the 15th to lock in the current pricing. And I will catch you again next week. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Soulful Sales. If you have a moment to rate and review, know that it really does make a difference. And if you would like to carry on the conversation, then you can connect with me in the free community at ruthpoundwhite.com/community, or my personal favorite, join me inside the Soulful Sales Society membership at ruthpoundwhite.com/membership. And keep doing what you’re doing because your work really does matter.