Are you using AI in your business? Can it save you time, make you more efficient, and deliver a better experience to your customers? Depending on what you do and how you use AI, yes.

We’re Kennedy and Fifi, and today we're going to be talking about how we are leveraging the power of AI right now in our business. No fluff. No 'ideas' - just practical stuff that we're actually doing.

Ready? Let's go!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

How To Use Summits To Get Visible (Even If You’re An Introvert) And Build Your Email List, With Fifi Mason.

Useful Strategies To Stop Procrastinating RIGHT NOW To Get Your Email Marketing Done!

How To Build The Most Impactful Email Marketing Strategy Plan To Make More Sales In Your Business.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. Here's a list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.

Join the FREE Facebook group

Do you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber? There's a way! Every business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. You'll find a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This content is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint 

Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.

Want to connect with Fifi?

Fifi is a personal brand and visibility coach who works primarily with introverted coaches and impact makers. She helps quieter people - those who have ideas they want to share with the world but struggle to put them out there. Fifi empowers them to find a way to share in a way that aligns with who they are. You can find Fifi on her website.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the biggest mistakes you're making with your email automation strategy) and love the show, we'd appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast.

And please do tell us! What do you really fill your working days with if you don't spend time on email marketing? We'd love to know!

Step this way, come behind the curtain as we show you how we're using artificial intelligence in email marketing right now. Oh yeah, it's email marketing Wednesday. You ready heroes? And this is the email marketing show.

It's time for a no bullshit look at how to make more sales from that email list of yours. Let's do it. Hey, hello, and welcome to the show.

I'm Fifi Mason from FifiMason.com. And I'm Kennedy from emailmarketingheroes.com. And we want to make sure that the stuff we talk about in today's show actually makes it into practicality within your business and what you're doing. So if you've got questions about how you apply this stuff that we're going to talk about with AI and stuff like that into your business and the things that you're doing, your platforms, your courses, etc. Then come and join us for the discussions inside of our free Facebook community that we call the email marketing show community.

Just go to Facebook, search for the email marketing show community and come and join us. We'll see you there. Yeah, and we absolutely love to hear from you in the testimonials and the reviews.

So if you are new here or you want to just share something with us, then please leave a review and we will give you a name check if we find anything that we love. Love it, love it, love it, love it, love it. It's the end of summer, right? And I was just trying to think, like, are you a summer person? Do you like a summer? Like, are you one of those people who has a favorite season? I do have a favorite season and it is the summer.

And I'm pretty gutted that it's nearly an end. Why do you like the summer so much? You're a pale skinned person like me and I thought you might be a fellow like this bloody sun. No, I am a very cold person.

Right. Not emotionally. That's not what I've heard.

Just in general, I'm always cold. So I find that in the summer, I'm just like, oh, it's nice. And people are like, it's so hot.

And I'm like, well, I'm actually warm for once. So, yeah, I kind of prefer the summer for that. Interesting.

See, I love the heat of the summer. And I love, like, how the weather makes you feel like really positive and the blue skies. But I prefer the clothing of, like, the autumn winter.

Like, I love autumn winter clothing, layers and stuff. Whereas I can't really wear, like, an over shirt with a t-shirt and my shorts in the summer because I'll melt. Yeah, I get that.

I think, yeah, to be fair, when you can actually dress up and when it gets into the autumn and then the Christmas season, you get to wear all the fancy clothes too. I like that. Still, weather-wise, weather-wise, I'll take summer every time.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. I think I'm with you.

I think I'm with you. to show you what you can do to save a pile of money before your next bill goes out. Go watch it for free at emailmarketingheroes.com slash cleanup.

emailmarketingheroes.com slash cleanup. This episode is sponsored by Zero Bounce, the email cleaning and verification service. Obviously, AI is developing at a hell of a pace.

And the pace of it is the thing that's increasing as well. And so we thought it'd be really interesting to have a little chat about ways that we're using AI in our businesses right now. Specifically, we're not going to talk about what's possible with AI, but actually what we're doing with AI.

And I think that's a really important distinction. There's a lot of people talking about what you can do with AI, but when you go to an event and you say, what are you actually doing with AI? People sort of start to get a little bit shy and go, well, you know, there's lots of things you can do. And you go, yeah, but what are you doing? Which parts of it are good enough to actually use? It's not just like some cool novelty thing that just because AI did it makes it suddenly impressive.

So that's what I thought we would have a little chat about today. I think we should kick things off with everyone's favorite subject, which is subject lines. Yes.

I'm intrigued what you're going to share on this, because I know that you've been doing some fancy things with AI to do with subject lines. Yeah. So what I decided to do back in June was to start, no, it must've been before June, actually, because I was in Orlando in June.

It must've been May. It must've been May. Was I thought I would start training a GPT to write actually good subject lines.

So what I've done is I've been training a GPT. So using chat GPT, creating my own GPT, where there's two elements to it. One, it's not using formulaic subject lines, like benefit-driven.

If you've got an email, that's about three ways to do something. It's not going to be like three ways to outcome, because they stink like marketing. They don't have a lot of the psychology that I like to put into a subject line, like compound curiosity and really making them emotive.

They're just benefit-driven, which people smell a mile off. So if I was the first thing, figuring out how to make it not write benefit-driven subject lines, that was the first piece of the puzzle. The second piece of the puzzle was training to write subject lines, which beat my subject lines.

Okay. So what I've done is I've created this GPT where I've been feeding it for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks now, the split tests I've been doing on my emails. I've been doing a split test where I've written the email and written a subject line for it.

And then just before I send it, I go to my GPT, give it the email. It comes up with a subject line. I put that one in, do a split test.

And the split test I do is for clicks, not opens, because clicks are much more accurately measurable. Plus they're closer to getting somebody to buy, aren't they? So it's a much better result to look for. And I'm giving it four hours, sending it to 20% of the list.

So 10% get subject line A, 10% get subject line B. And after four hours, whichever had the highest click-through rate to go and check out the offers, we send the rest, the 80% of the list, that subject line. And so I've been taking the two subject lines and telling it and training it on this one won. And on this split test, this one won.

And over time, I'm now at a point where 85% of the time, the GPT is beating my expertly crafted, in my opinion, subject line. So I think for things like that, as long as you're training it to do the actual outcome, and I think that's a big thing when you're creating a GPT. And I might make the GPT available at some point to people.

I haven't decided what that might look like. I want to get it even better before I even share it with people. I've got a small inner circle group of people who are running tests with it and sending me their results as well, so I can train it on more data.

But for me, when you're training a GPT or training AI, it has to be not just on the style you want it to have, like the sort of art of what you want it to have, but also on the outcome that you want it to have. And I think a big piece of that is making it do the analysis. And we're going to talk about analysis later, but have it figure out.

You don't need to figure out why that subject line won over that one. You need to give it to the GPT, because it's hyper smart at analyzing stuff, have it figure it out, and then it inform itself on how to generate more like that. So we've been using this since I think May.

I'm training it on a few hundred data points around that now. It's really intriguing. It's really interesting that you can actually tell it the ones that perform better, and then every time it's going to get the same similar result because it's following that.

I love that idea. And the fact that I don't have to figure out why, because that's its job. And that's the thing I think people get wrong with this is they are trying to figure out how do I teach it.

You don't need to really teach it. You just need to tell it the outcomes that are happening, and it's going to do the analysis for you. So what have you been doing with things? So when I'm using AI, it's just giving me a starting point in my emails.

So rather than I'm just staring at a blank screen, I will use it for, well, ideation a little bit, but also just to get that kind of rough draft. So I might have a few bullet points, and then I'll ask it in my actual chat that is trained on my voice in a little bit that it will come up with something, and then I will take that and be able to tweak it to actually be relevant. But I could go further.

I could, as you say, I could start training it more in terms of giving it what I rewrite and go down that avenue. But I feel like I like this process. It's just, for me, a starting point.

So I'm not getting stuck in that, what do I even start with? How do I even get started? So that's how I'm using it. I don't feel like I need it to write my emails start to finish and do it all for me. But yeah, just to have that initial bit of- The blank page.

Yeah. When you're doing that, are you giving it the starting point of, I want to write an email about this topic? Like how early a starting point is it giving you? Are you like, I don't even know what to write about? Or is it, I want to write an email about networking for introverts? I already have the idea. Yeah.

So the way that I do things is I have this process now of, I call it A to B and I start with, well, where are they at? And where do I need to get them to within the email, especially in the campaigns that I do? And so I will just list bullet points of what I could actually include in that. What kind of points it needs to hit. Then I put it in there and it will come up with some kinds of content.

And then yeah, I take that and change it how I need. Put in my own, a bit more of my own voice because it's not perfect. I haven't spent hours on chat GPT, get in mind to really write in my voice yet.

But yeah, it's just enough that it gives me that starting point. And I look at that. One of the things I was told and I haven't done much with, but in case this helps, this is not from experience, but this is what I've been told is to get it to understand your voice better.

The best way to do that is give it just your last 30 emails, 20 to 30 samples and say, Hey, analyze my voice from these emails and then use this as my voice when writing my emails. And you can put that in the voice, the bit where you can do the customization when it does the responses. Yeah.

So that's, but I didn't realize it was, it was somebody at an event I was speaking at earlier this year at Adcon who was just telling me this in one of the side conversations, like having that many samples is really what it's down to. So I thought it was quite interesting. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I think one of my favorite things I like doing it, I sort of hinted at it before, was actually using AI to analyze stuff. You can give a bunches of data, download a CSV file from wherever of whatever you've been doing and say, find me the top trends in this information. And you can do that first party data, stuff that you've collected from your subscribers, or if you find some research that somebody's done online somewhere, download that as a PDF or whatever, give it to chat or any other AIs and say, can you give me the top five or top 10 trends you can spot in this? And you can even be pretty specific around, give me the top 10 trends that will apply to, and then the market or the type of people who you're talking to.

So I think that's quite interesting. So one of the ways you could do this, let's go back to subject lines again, just for a second, is you could grab your past 200 subject lines that won in split tests and put it in there and say, can you analyze these and say, what is it about these subject lines that really, really works? Or what about these call to actions or these offers? Here's the text from my three sales pages, or you could do it with other people in your space. One of the things I did, and we taught actually in a course recently, is when writing Facebook ads or any kind of ad, go to the ads library and find other people who serve your same audience, probably not with the same offers, but like other people who also serve the same audience, copy and paste the ad copy and ask chat to analyze it and come up with the format that they've used.

What's the common formula they've used? And then either you write a new copy based on that formula or have it have a go and not start at a standing start. So taking data, taking information, taking what's working and putting it into AI to do a lot of the analysis, I think is probably the biggest opportunity that most people are not using. They think of it as a thing that's gonna write something for them or create something.

But what if it was used to interpret things and to understand things? It's called a large language model because it's really good at dealing with large amounts of information. That's the point of it. Yeah, that's a great one.

And it's something that I feel like I'm like a half a nerd when it comes to it. I love the idea, but it's moving at such a fast pace, it's hard to keep up and then utilize it in the best ways. And even though I tend to use it most days in some capacity, it's just finding the ways is gonna work more smarter for you.

And with the way of using it for analyzing is just one of those ways, isn't it? And pulling out the frameworks that you can then utilize in your own content is just genius, really. Yeah, yeah. Do you have a favorite AI tool that you're currently using? I mostly use ChatGPT.

That's the same one, yeah. Yeah, same. I was using MidJourney for some graphic stuff, but then actually the stuff that Dali through ChatGPT is producing has actually been better than the MidJourney stuff recently.

So I've actually just fairly recently canceled my MidJourney subscription. I was putting the prompts into both, not exactly the same prompt, but trying to adapt it. And the MidJourney ones were just nowhere near as good as the Dali one.

I've only just started exploring using it for graphics and things. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, but you're a graphic designer, so you're gonna have an additional layer of skepticism around it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally, totally. Another thing that's really useful, if you use stories in your emails and then wanna link those stories to a lesson.

So you take like a story from your everyday life, oh, it's my cat's birthday or whatever. And then you wanna link that to a lesson that your audience can get value from and then ultimately link that to your offer. Chat is really good at that.

Like, hey, this is what happened. I had a dream about being in a bathtub full of blancmange. How can you link that story to a thing about how to help course creators and experts to make more sales with email? It will give you examples.

It will absolutely give you examples. The one thing I don't like to do, although I know people who do, so this is just my personal preference, is I don't like to ask it to come up with the stories because the stories won't be true. And I really think it's important for me and my style to be sharing stories about things that are actually happening in my life because that deepens rapport and builds a relationship with readers.

But in terms of, sometimes you go, how is that gonna have anything to do with the thing I teach and the thing I'm talking about in this email? Then chat's really good at finding those parallels. I mean, Claude is too. Claude's very good at that too.

Yeah, I've tried this. I actually, I do it for my emails, but very often it's my social media posts, which are very story-led. And I have a framework called SET.

So it's S stands for situation, E is explain or educate, and then T is transformation. And so I have a GPT that I can use for this and I will say enough information about the story that I wanna talk about, but then it will put it in that format and give me the transformation in terms of what I've asked it. So if I say, yeah, it's the lesson, what I want them to actually take away from it, and it just words it in a way where that transformation makes sense in relation to the story.

And it's very clever in that respect. But again, I always take that and then tweak it slightly in terms of my own voice a bit more because yeah, I need to work more on getting it to do my own voice if I can. But I'm not too concerned on that.

I think once you've got the ideas, you can go from there. I think so. And speaking of like coming up with those ideas, a thing I really like to do, if you're ever like feeling like you're always saying the same stuff and teaching the same things in your emails is I literally put in, I think I was on a train journey home from an event or something.

And I was like, I'm sick of talking about the same old thing. Surely my audience are too. And I just went and said, hey, my audience is this people, they're this.

And as much as I could about them, I did sort of gender, age range, the problem they've got, just broad strokes. And I help them with doing, helping them make more sales from their existing email list without launching new offers and without growing their email list. What are the top 50 problems or concerns that my audience has? Just 50 ideas right there.

I mean, just brilliant, brilliant, brilliant stuff there for coming up with ideas. So for researching, it can be really, really good. In particular, if you want really good research, the leading platform, I think right now for that is Gemini.

That's gonna be the best one for actual live research. But I mean, I just use chat for like these general concepts around what my audience will be concerned with. And it's really, really interesting.

And also it means you can like now address them, you can overcome these things, you can use them as emails, you can use them as ads, you can use them as social media posts. Like these are just absolute gold. Yeah.

I mean, even if you think of some of the frameworks that are inside email marketing heroes, it's like you could utilize it. So I'm just thinking of Fabtee. You could kind of use that to come up with initial ideas for it.

Absolutely. I mean, I do have, I have a prompt that I use and we give people inside of the Blueprint program and other things inside of Accelerator as well, which helps people to come up with the Fabtee framework. All of you who are members of ours and customers of ours will know the Fabtee framework for explaining and describing the features and the elements of an offer in a way that's compelling, exciting and gets people to buy rather than just being a shopping list of stuff.

But yeah, that can be tricky getting your head into that. And I have trained, and well, I haven't trained. I've got a prompt.

I actually should do a trained GPT on doing the Fabtee of that, because if you just grab one of the elements of your offer, oh, module one is about blah, blah, blah, stick that in and it produces the bare bones and, you know, personality-less, probably, version of your Fabtee instantly. Yeah, it's a great one. I love that idea.

Yeah, yeah, it's good. Yeah. I forgot that I'd actually done that, so I'm pleased you reminded me.

And I should, I should actually create a GPT for it, which I haven't. Yeah, it would be really good. But yeah, using it for frameworks is something that I am always trying.

Yeah, it's great. I love it, I love it. Yeah.

The other thing to do is sometimes when you're writing a piece of copy, like the content of an email or a sales page often or a sales video that we all need to do, finding the right metaphor for really describing stuff can be tough. There's only so much you can do by looking at the thesaurus.com or whatever it's called, find that right word. But you want a really good metaphor that's a thing that's a bit like this, but not that, that represents something that's really big and tall, but not too powerful.

And it's quite a complex metaphor. Again, it's pretty good to go in there for writing those bits of copy and finding a good metaphor for that. And I would just have it list five metaphors for that thing.

Yeah, I like it for that kind of stuff. And also idioms. I like a little idiom.

It comes up with all sorts of cool things when you just ask for interesting, creative ways to phrase things. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it totally does. You can also use this stuff to create a lead bank that's really, really quickly. For example, we talked about Gemini earlier on.

That's a really good way to research a topic and then stick it into Claude, which is the leading AI for writing good copy. So take the research from Gemini that it's done, put it into Claude to write the thing. And then you could use something like gamma, G-A-M-M-A dot AI, I think it is, to produce a slide deck or a presentation or a booklet or something like that really, really quickly.

So you've got AI doing the research, then it's doing the writing and then AI doing the layout. All of that's happened. And then if you need a logo for it, pop into Midjourney or I'm using ChatGPT to do that.

Stick that into Canva, edit the image, click on, what's that button? Text Grab, I think it is. You can edit the text if it's gone a little bit wonky. And pretty much you have got a lead magnet that you can produce really, really quickly.

Will it be a great lead magnet? No, like will the content do all the things that I really want a lead magnet to do? No, but it's a really good way of getting stuff produced quickly if that's what you need to do. Yeah, I think some of these things I've not used personally, but I think it's a really good way of just, especially if you're just starting and you want something to get out there, just getting it out there and getting it done. Or if it's just a little thing that's going to be included in, say, one of your podcast episodes and it doesn't have to be this amazing singing, dancing thing.

It's just enough info. It's got everything that they need. It's a download.

They can get it quickly and that's what you want. Especially for like, imagine if you've like written the main meat of it and then you go, oh, I've got to write the bloody intro now. Grab the thing, stick it into chat or Claude and say, I need a teasing intro to get people excited about reading this bit of content.

Give me 300 words, 400 words, 500 words and it will do a fairly good job. Last one I want to talk about is something a bit more advanced, a bit more new, which is what we're currently implementing. So it's not out there in the wild, which is why we've left it to last.

We're currently implementing, which is in some email platforms, you're able to use an automation integrated with AI to create variations, to create variants, to create variations. So for example, we have a bunch in our academy, which is our membership, Email Hero Academy. We have emails that go out every week to tell people about the live call that's happening.

It's pretty much every week, not quite every week, but it's always the same email. Like we're going to be live in less than a cup of tea's time is the one we've used for ages, right? For one of the calls. But instead of it always being the same email every single month, what we're currently building is that it's going to send that to chat GPT.

GPT is going to write a new variant, insert that into the email, and that's what's going to be sent. So every month, the reminder email resets their attention. It's not the, oh, it's just in a cup of tea's time.

It's going to be fresh each single time. And we're not going to make the whole email totally different, but maybe the subject line, maybe the opening line, maybe the closing line. And this is also useful for things like, and we haven't implemented this yet.

I'm sort of thinking about it. Literally, I'm making this up right now. But another thing we could apply this to is re-engagement sequences.

Because the question we always get when we teach the revival sequence is, what if somebody goes through it once, gets re-engaged, but then they go through it a second time? You know, are they going to be like, oh, I've seen these emails before? Not if you're having a GPT, the second time they go through it, rewrite elements of that email. So it's the ability to put people through the same automated emails over and over again, but without them being the same over and over again. And I'm really excited about that idea.

Yeah, I think it's a great idea. You're just going to be able to like, wake people up a little bit. And you can do stuff like you could, I guess you could probably personalize it further by in the post that you send over to say, chat GPT to do the customization, you could send some personalization with it.

So you could say, say I've got a custom field, which is about what you sell. So and yours says coaching. I could say in the thing, hey, can you rewrite a variation of this? Which is like, we're going to help you with making sales online, but make it specific to a coaching business.

It comes back with, hey, would you like more clients knocking down your door to work with you? Whatever it's going to be saying. So you could even include custom fields that you've got in your CRM, in your email platform, send that over, have it write a variant, come back in and paste that in the email. So now you're not just having to merge words in, you're merging in custom paragraph based on data points you've already got.

And that's where I want to get to. Yeah, we're going to have to watch this space then, aren't we? I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So there's some ideas of using AI, how we're both using it in our businesses right now, and then ended up on sort of what we're working on next. So love it. Now let's get into this week's subject line of the week.

This week's subject line is the hand mark on my face. Oh dear, oh dear. So what I like about this is, now the email, just to give you context, was actually about having a facepalm moment when I realized I've been an idiot.

I was like, ugh, duh, I'm an idiot, right? But I thought if I just say facepalm moment, the question that's in people's head by reading that is, what has he done wrong? That's it. It's not any more interesting than that. It's interesting, but it's not super interesting.

But if I change it from being a facepalm moment to the hand mark on my face, it's like, whose hand? What did you do? What's the outcome? It sort of implies a bit of pain, which people like the idea of to find out what the hell happened. So think about that simple little change from facepalm moment, which is what it was originally going to be, and I was like, that's not good enough yet, to the hand mark on my face. Now we've got something that's really interesting.

I'm intrigued. Was this one of the AI tests or did you come up with it yourself? You know, I wish I'd written that information down in my research for this episode. I can't remember.

I can't remember whether that was an AI test or it's a good bloody question though. It's a good question. I will look that up though.

If you've enjoyed the show, which I hope you have, and you're thinking about what you're going to do with AI in your business and how you're using it, I'd love to hear specific ways you're using it, not how people could use it, but what you're actually doing in your business with AI. We're starting a discussion all about this over in our free Facebook group. It's called the Email Marketing Show Community.

So head over to Facebook, search for the Email Marketing Show Community, come and join us and let us know what you're doing with AI or what you're planning on doing with AI. If you've got any questions about the stuff we talked about that we're doing with AI, come and have that discussion over in the group. Yeah, and thank you so much for listening to the whole show this week.

We are back next week. So if you are new to the show, be sure to hit subscribe to make sure you don't miss out on the next episode. Make sure you hit subscribe on your podcast player so you don't miss the next episode.

And we will speak to you next Email Marketing Wednesday.