AI Emails That Sound Human with Ruth Poundwhite

Monica Froese [00:00:00]:
Welcome back to the Empowered Business Podcast. Today’s conversation was recorded live at AI Exposed, my AI training event with my friend and mastermind partner, Ruth Poundwhite. You might remember her from episode 99, where we talked about AI and self-belief. This time we go deep on email, how she trains Claude and ChatGPT on her voice, the skill she built to catch AI-isms before they ever go out, and exactly how she tests her subject lines. Ruth has been writing professionally since 2008, and today she helps business owners, many dealing with chronic illness, neurodivergence, or who are introverts, sell in a way that fits their energy and their values. Let’s dive in with Ruth. Ruth, welcome to AI Exposed. I’m super excited to have you here.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:49]:
I’m so excited to be here and chat with you.

Monica Froese [00:00:52]:
You know, I always love talking to you. So for everyone’s reference, you might know this, that Ruth and I are in a peer mastermind that we call Weird Hermits. So Ruth and I talk often, we’re always sharing our different AI experiences back and forth, always to get her perspective on things. And today we’re talking about email, correct?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:01:07]:
Yes.

Monica Froese [00:01:08]:
AI email, of course. We use AI for emails while also being authentic because that’s, I know, hugely important to you and your business. But before we kick off talking about AI and emails, about yourself.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:01:21]:
Actually, I was thinking this part of my background might actually be helpful to share. I actually started my online business career in 2008 as a copywriter. So the writing part is very important to me, even though I massively reduce the time it takes using AI workflows and all of that. Very important to me. But now what I do is help other business owners, specifically often those with chronic illness, low capacity, neurodivergent, introverts, to sell in a way that honors their energy and their values and their personality, and increasingly to use AI in an aligned ways. So ways that fit however feels right for you to save you time and energy as well.

Monica Froese [00:02:05]:
I love that. Isn’t your membership, your new membership called Aligned AI? Did I make that up?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:02:10]:
Aligned AI Lab. Yeah, I ran a summit last year called the Aligned AI Summit, which spoiler alert is coming back this year. And I’ve just started a new membership, the Aligned AI Lab. Yeah. All right.

Monica Froese [00:02:21]:
So let’s go back to the beginning of your AI journey. How did you get into AI, especially because of The fact that you do talk a lot in your business about authentically showing up, did you have resistance to AI at first?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:02:34]:
Yeah, my main resistance was— I know there’s a lot of noise about various reasons that people are resisting it, which I totally get. But my main resistance at first was actually the overwhelm. And this is something I’ve noticed with different technologies throughout because, like I said, I started my online business in 2008. A lot of stuff has changed since 2008. But I’ve noticed this throughout, that there’s a, there’s people who are selling stuff on how to do it or what we should be doing or prompt engineering and stuff. It’s specifically in the case of AI that makes it feel very overwhelming and like another thing to learn and how on earth can I keep up with this? So therefore I just don’t even want to get into this. Now, clearly I have shifted and I don’t feel that anymore, but that is definitely how I felt when it first came out. Like it was so overwhelming.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:03:19]:
And then when I did start using ChatGPT more. I did not do all the training and I was just so excited by how quick it made everything. And I felt like, oh, this really does not sound like me. I started to notice those patterns. When you see AI emails being written and content being written, you start noticing these patterns. It’s not this, it’s that. And I was just like, ew, I can’t do this. It’s not me.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:03:42]:
And I’ve gone too far on the, what’s the word, optimization of my time and doing it quicker and I can’t do it anymore. So yeah, I’ve definitely had a lot of back and forth, but I’ve landed in a place where I feel very positive and excited.

Monica Froese [00:03:56]:
When did that kind of light bulb go off for you?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:04:01]:
There’s been a few light bulbs. As we talk about often in our mastermind, it’s blowing our minds all the time. But definitely when I got deeper into, I don’t know when, I don’t know when it was, but it’s definitely been a while now, a year or more, deeper into properly training it and knowing where my boundaries were on how I use this to save myself time and energy and generate ideas and also How I trust myself as the strategist in my business, the person who knows my audience well, the visionary, as I like to say, and not giving too much of that to AI. That was definitely a shift that I had. And now the kind of most recent shift as I’ve been moving everything to Claude and doing more actual tasks and taking over of proper things that I need to get done, not just content. is, is just that, oh my goodness, I can be so creative now that I’m handing over a lot of this marketing work to AI.

Monica Froese [00:04:55]:
I think that’s so important for people to understand. I view AI in my business as a workhorse, not as the strategic thinker. It can support me in my strategic thoughts. But what it really has enabled me to do is, why do I have to be in Airtable updating databases? Why do I have to be creating tags manually in Kit? Of what do you want it to do for you versus what do you want your hands still in? And so I think our topic today of email is a really good example of this because people just don’t want to be reading AI emails. They want your infused personality. If you’re going to keep an active email list, it can’t just be— and granted, I think we can agree that you can get AI to sound a lot like you and you can, but you’re still the orchestrator of it, correct?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:43]:
Yeah. Yes, exactly.

Monica Froese [00:05:45]:
So in terms of your email workflow, how do you make sure that you’re still the orchestrator, but it’s still doing the heavy lifting for you?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:52]:
Yeah, you’re really right to distinguish it as like, this is the part that I’m very involved in as the human thinker behind my business and the person that connects with other people in my business. Right. The key thing, and I will do a little demo and stuff, but the key thing I want to talk about before that is The training of your AI tool of choice. And it may not even be necessarily one tool. It could just be having documents that you’ve created that you can then upload to various tools. But the training of it is the key thing. And there are levels to this training. So I think most people who are using AI, or maybe I’m generalizing here, I don’t know, but I think most people, you need to probably do a little bit of training, how you sound or your brand.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:06:35]:
Your offers and stuff. And actually very naturally that will happen the more you talk with AI. I definitely found ChatGPT to be better at this than I have found Claude. It knows a lot just from your regular chats if you have been using it over time. However, you do need to do some like real proper training of it. And increasingly this is not just content that you’re feeding it that you’ve written, but that’s a really good thing to do. But it’s also your different types of content. So I know we’ve spoken about this before, like.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:07:02]:
It’s not just your written content, but how do you speak, or how do you write differently on social media versus your emails versus blog posts? Because I know that I do write differently in those different settings. Your visual design, your pages, all of that kind of thing as well. And then specifically for me, sales content as well. Like, it’s really important to train it on that. So I’ve been through levels in how I’ve trained my AI, and a few months ago I went very deep because I was making that shift from ChatGPT to Claude, it seemed like a good time to do it really right, like kind of a fresh start in a new AI tool. So that is really important. Also giving it, I don’t know about you, but like there are certain things that I do in my content and stuff. I like to use an ampersand instead of the word and and stuff like that.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:07:49]:
It’s just very small, but it’s actually very important. So I got my Claude to analyse a bunch of emails. like a lot of emails. I think I exported a bunch from Kit. Claude analysed them and came up with a list of Ruthisms that is then uploaded to the skill.

Monica Froese [00:08:04]:
Cool.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:08:05]:
And also the kinds of things I never say, a lot of hypey language or bro marketing stuff. And then it’s not just about the initial training, but it’s also about the dialogue you have every time you are creating content. It does not get it right every time. Even now it doesn’t, but especially earlier on when you first trained it, You need to ask it, okay, that did not sound like me. Why do you think that didn’t sound like me? Can you analyze it, figure that out for me, please, and then update the skill?

Monica Froese [00:08:31]:
So one of my bad habits is, so everything I write now is in HTML, and editing HTML is a pain because you have to find where it is in the HTML to edit it. And I have a very bad habit of getting it, well, I’ll get the email, put it into Kit, and I’m now I’m going through and I want to edit it. And I’m so annoyed that it does things I— it shouldn’t be doing that I go into the HTML and I just edit it and get it done. And I don’t go back and tell Claude, you use this word that I can’t stand, this phrase I can’t stand. Like, I— when I wrote emails for AI, I was really big on the dot dot dot. I don’t know if that’s like what the formal word is of it, but like, I would end a lot of things like that. I definitely never used em dashes. So that, that’s not natural to me.

Monica Froese [00:09:23]:
And I really, to your point, you’re doing yourself a disservice, which I do to myself daily, and I have to get better at it when you do not. So there’s, you went the next step, there’s going back to it and being like, you did XYZ that I don’t like, stop doing that, and adding that to whatever skill your voice skill, your email skill. But you took it a step further, which I really like, when you asked it to analyze why not to do it, right? That’s basically what you said.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:09:54]:
This is what I now do, and I feel like it gives me better results. It often— because if I say don’t do— so I, one, I will just caveat this by saying there are some things you will tell it and it will just never learn. This is what AI is like. So you can have a a rule to never use em dashes, it will still use em dashes, but it will sometimes catch itself doing it, which I find quite funny. But what I will say is if you say, don’t use the word quietly as a descriptor, because this is something that I notice all the time in the AI content. I don’t want to use the word quietly as a descriptor because my brand and my book, my community and my book are both called Quietly Ambitious. AI is going to use this word all over the place and it’s such a common AI word. So it’s one of those annoying things where I had those brand name before AI, but now anyway.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:10:38]:
So you could say, don’t use the word quietly, and it would just then pinpoint that one thing. Oh yeah, I can see where I use that. Here’s how we could change it. Great, helpful in the short term. But if I said, go through that email, analyze what you did wrong and why that doesn’t sound like me or why that sounds like obviously AI, it will look more carefully for what it did wrong. And it will pick up stuff that I am even not consciously aware of because there’s a vibe sometimes, isn’t there? But you don’t necessarily know what’s off.

Monica Froese [00:11:04]:
You just gave me, in some ways, and sometimes it’s fine just doing that. I wonder, like, we could go back and prompt it to read my voice skill again. What did you do wrong? Like something like that specific. Because you’re—

Ruth Poundwhite [00:11:17]:
Yeah.

Monica Froese [00:11:17]:
No matter with Claude, I, sorry, I find I do not use the word actually, do not use the word genuinely. And so like maybe if we prompt it upfront after the first iteration, it will actually do what you’ve told it to do.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:11:32]:
Yes. I think that’s a really good idea because in my experience, it won’t catch that it’s used the em dashes. It won’t catch that it’s done the like, it’s not X, it’s Y kind of thing, but it will sometimes catch it after it gives it to me and say, oh, hang on a minute. I need to be honest with you here. It’s so funny when it says it like this. I need to be honest with you, Ruth. I did use a lot of em dashes in that email. It doesn’t always catch it that way, but it is funny.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:11:53]:
So I do think if you built in a next round, that would actually catch that off the bat. I will say though, it’s going to use up a ton of ton more usage if you’re on a lower plan. But I do think that it would be helpful.

Monica Froese [00:12:04]:
So that’s a good point. So now I’m almost thinking I could build a skill. This is real time. And I really am going to do this. Build a skill to ask for the first iteration, not in HTML, because building it in HTML is going to use more tokens. Just get the text version, then have it. And really, you could just build this as a skill workflow. I don’t even have to sit there and prompt it.

Monica Froese [00:12:24]:
Give me a text version. then read this skill, tell it what skill to read again, take out everything I told you not to do, or, and maybe even ask it to score itself on what it did right versus wrong. And then give me an HTML draft. And that’s the one that I will read. I’m not even going to read the text one.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:12:42]:
I wouldn’t bother reading it.

Monica Froese [00:12:43]:
And this is a great example of even I in the first iteration, I’m like, oh, I can prompt it to go read the skill again. But really, I don’t have to prompt it. You can have Because skills can work together. So the initial email can be written with my voice skill, but another overlay skill can say, OK, after you write the initial email in text, now you’re going to score yourself and fix it based on the voice skill because you didn’t listen to everything it said the first time. But that can be an overlay skill. You can have 2 skills working at the same time.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:13:16]:
Yes, I love this. And actually, you’ve made me think that I need to update my newsletter writing skills. So I have a specific— I have various skills for different types of, not most types of emails, but I have a general email writing skill and I have a newsletter specific skill because my newsletter has specific kind of elements in it that are repeat, repeating, pick and mix. And you’ve made me think I need to bake this into that skill. And one really helpful thing to reduce the usage would be to say what you do, what you said, to make sure it only presents a draft for you to read in the chat and then we hone it and then only once, then it creates the final HTML version because creating that HTML always is going to use up way more of the usage.

Monica Froese [00:13:55]:
Yeah, and I, I’m really guilty at going through sometimes 5 iterations of my HTML emails. I think I’ve spent— even just through this conversation, what I’ve realized I’ve done is I’ve actually spent more time educating it on how I want the email to look in HTML, like the callout blocks and stuff. And I get so annoyed when— this is so bad, but I get so annoyed when it doesn’t hit my voice that I still find myself just manually editing it for my voice, when really I should be spending the time as much time as I spent getting it to look the way I wanted it to look, getting it to sound how I want it to sound, and thinking through, okay, if it doesn’t get it on the first iteration, what can we do so that before I even have to look at it, it has self-corrected itself?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:14:36]:
Yeah, I will say, well, this is something I’ve been trying to bake into my workflow recently, but I won’t always do it, especially if I’m on a time deadline with getting an email out there quickly. Practice-wise, you want to be constantly feeding that This is what I, if you do change it yourself, feedback what you changed and get it to compare the 2 versions. Constantly get it to update those skills, the brand voice emails skills as you go.

Monica Froese [00:15:01]:
A really big takeaway in general with using Claude is to get in the habit. Is there a skill I need to update based on this chat? Like get in the habit of doing that and you’re, and it will be much more educated in helping you HTML as well now, right? Like I do.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:15:18]:
I’m not writing them all in HTML. And actually this is part of, I think, what keeps me— I don’t know. I’m debating, I will say. So the reason we want HTML versions is because it makes it easier to firstly have designed elements in the email.

Monica Froese [00:15:32]:
So why do you want an HTML version of my email? So all of my emails that you get from me now are all written in HTML. So I’m not in the Kit editor typing anything anymore. It is all HTML. And to Ruth’s point. Design. Now my email, I can uplevel the design. I, it’s just a lot less before I was doing, it’s just a lot less work for me. I can get an email up and done.

Monica Froese [00:15:56]:
I just think back to, I’ve run a lot of events like this. This will be a good example. I’ve run a lot of events, whether it was me bringing in other speakers or me doing a free challenge of my own content. I’ve probably done in the last 10 years, 100 of these types of events. Every morning you’re getting an email from me with what’s coming. It used to take me hours for an event to write. I have a skill now. I have a skill that knows all the emails that have to be written for AI Exposed.

Monica Froese [00:16:25]:
And so all I have to do is say, write day 3’s email. And I did it right before— like tomorrow’s email is scheduled. I did it right before this, the last interview. 5 minutes because it knew everything. It had a, it knew the design and knew everything that used to take hours and hours when you were running events. And so that’s HTML, writing them in HTML just cuts down on the amount of work on my plate to get an email out. But yes, show us an example of yours.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:16:56]:
Yeah, honestly, it saves so much time for events, seriously. So, but yeah, basically this is my Sunday newsletter. I just published this one. Publicly on, on the kit platform, but it’s just a very simple design, but it just makes it super easy. Claude designed that HTML. It designed this section with the 3 quick things that I’ve noticed that certain people are doing differently with the way that they’re selling things. I’ve embedded a poll that’s actually with a tool called Block Builder. So shout out to our fellow Weird Hermit Mastermind sister, Steph, who has Block Builder.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:17:30]:
It’s got an HTML block for the special offer for that week. It’s really simple, but it just makes it— I would not— I’d be faffing around in Kit for ages to make a little box like this. I know you feel the same, Monica. You and I are not the design people. We’re not. That’s never been my key strength. I will write content and create offers and come up with ideas, but designing things, not my strength.

Monica Froese [00:17:54]:
For me to make my emails look pretty prior to being able to write in HTML, I paid someone to create what they call in Kit snippets that were like pretty like HTML can do, and I would have to pay for someone to design it for me.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:18:10]:
Yeah.

Monica Froese [00:18:10]:
Now it’s incredible. So do HTML-formatted emails affect deliverability? I read somewhere they do. I have an opinion on this, which is they don’t affect deliverability. My, my open rates and click-through rates are actually up since going full HTML, and I also believe it cuts back on spam. Now, I am not an email deliverability expert. I know just enough to have an email list and get by. That being said, I used to get a ton of spam clicks. I don’t get them on my HTML emails.

Monica Froese [00:18:37]:
Don’t ask me why, but I don’t. So there’s that. Then we have, um, does having Claude create an HTML version take more tokens? I think we’d all agree yes, which is why now that we’re talking— so I think, are you on the Max plan like I am?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:18:52]:
I’m on the Max plan.

Monica Froese [00:18:54]:
Yeah. Me, Ruth, and everyone in our Peer Mastermind, we’re basically running our businesses on Claude now. Paying Claude $100 a month is like, considering it saved me thousands and thousands of dollars in contractor fees. It’s like, please, Claude, take my money. I have no problem doing that. But if you’re not to that point where you want to spend $100, then you will want to take our tip of focusing on the text version of it before asking it to write in HTML. And then that’s totally fine. That’s why we’re here.

Monica Froese [00:19:22]:
How does one write an email in HTML? Do you want to explain how that works?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:19:26]:
You don’t have to write it. That’s the answer. Claude. So you would go into Claude and you would say something like emails in my brand colors. I’ve Remember, I’ve already trained it on my brand colors with a new on the podcast, a link to listen, and a quote from the episode and a short description. And it will give me options. I will often say to it, give me 3 different styles in the chat, 3 different mockups before we commit. Again, that is going to use more usage.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:19:53]:
Then it will give you the HTML. You can either copy and paste. You don’t need to understand HTML. You just copy and paste it into an HTML block in your email editor, or you can use the connector. So Kit has a connector and it can just write this entire email in HTML for you. It will just do it for you. So you don’t need to know how to do it. Have I answered the question fully?

Monica Froese [00:20:16]:
Yeah, that’s like, I know nothing about HTML. I could not write an email in HTML to say, I know a little basics now that I’ve been editing in the editor a little bit, but I couldn’t start one from scratch when I got started. Same thing. I basically— I’m trying to remember how I even stumbled across it because it’s been like a fire hose since going to Claude about— it’s like, did you know it can do this? Do you know it can basically control, take over everything? I don’t know. So basically, once I discovered it could write my emails in HTML, at that point I didn’t even know if Kit supported it because I’ve always just gone to the editor and typed. And so once I realized Kit could support it, then I just Fed it my brand kit and honestly, like, think you ask it in a very basic level what you want. I’m like, well, here’s my brand kit, here are my colors, here’s— so I gave it some examples of previous emails that I’d written so that it understood the structure that I use, that I take when I write. And I just went back and forth until it got me a design that I liked.

Monica Froese [00:21:19]:
And then I said, okay, save this as a skill. It’s, it seems almost too easy. We all, we want to overcomplicate it because that just seemed too easy that I just went back and forth a couple of times and got it to create a whole HTML email for me.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:21:32]:
Yeah, exactly. And like, it’s basic, but how does it get all the context to write that out? Is it inside a project? And it’s not a basic question because I do understand out there and we’re saying all this stuff we’re doing, it blows your mind and it can feel overwhelming, but it is literally the most, at the most basic level, what Monica said, having a conversation. Asking it, you can even ask it, what do I need to give you to train you to write and design my emails for me? And it will prompt you and then you save it as a skill. And the skill just means it’s a training file that Claude can access about your brand when it needs it.

Monica Froese [00:22:04]:
So the way I have mine structured, understanding what should be in a project, it took me a bit to get my head around when I came over to Claude. These event emails I’m writing, AI Exposed. I have a project for this event, right? So that project’s going to have the files that understands everything that’s in the all-access pass— everyone’s contributions, everyone who’s speaking, when they’re speaking. All of that’s in the project files. And the memory, as I’ve been chatting with it about this event for the last 2 months, auto-updates. So it has all this context based on all the chats I’ve had with it about this event. So when it comes to writing the email It now, the project itself knows everything about the event, but my email skills know my voice, what I don’t like, the words not to use, the em dash stuff. It has my pictures that it can use of me.

Monica Froese [00:22:56]:
So when you write in HTML, you have to have, it has to link to a picture. So I host, if I want my picture in the email, I host all my images in my WordPress site. So I have to go pull I don’t want to pull those images every single time, so those live in the skill. When I got to the point that I had to write the email for this event, I basically said, hey, I want to design an email template for AI-exposed emails. It then read all my email skills to understand how I write emails, how I structure my emails, and then it gave me a proposed design. Then that design became a skill called the AI-exposed email. And so it’s like in a project and the skill layers on it to get to the end result. But it’s the project knows all the context about this event and the skill knows all the context about, because I write several different emails.

Monica Froese [00:23:49]:
We don’t, no email is the same. The email for this event is going to be different than my Empowered Edge newsletter. So the skills are like that overlay of how I run emails in my business. And then the project has all that context about that specific event. And I question on that, Monica. So does that mean it is not required to know about your entire business to write emails for this event? Correct.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:24:11]:
This—

Monica Froese [00:24:12]:
when I write emails, I’m inside a project that knows enough of what it needs to know about my business and this event based on all the information I have fed it. And then those skills that understand how I write emails, how I format emails, and my voice can come in and overlay it. Because those, when you think about it, My voice and how I write emails has got to go across all projects because that foundational stuff doesn’t change. What changes is the content in the email. So that content that resides in the project, not in the skill.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:24:46]:
Yes, that makes total sense. And then the other, the other part that you want in a skill somewhere is just some, this is baked into my kind of core brand skill. So it’s got how I write and the words I use and my general kind of tone and also who I’m writing for, because I wouldn’t want emails about an event to be all like hustle hard and get this done, or you get— or buy the upgrade, otherwise you’re choosing the absolute wrong decision, and that kind of marketing. No, I doubt that it would come out that way based on how I use AI. You’ve got this core brand skill, so it knows the basics of who you’re talking to and what your vibe is.

Monica Froese [00:25:20]:
Yes. Yeah. And all that is the work that you put in to educate Claude on everything to do with your business and yourself and your unique preferences. And the more— honestly, if you get anything from this, the more you use it, the more educated it becomes about you. So the easier all of this becomes. Okay, let’s transition a little bit now to the whole point of this, which you’re— you want to talk about basically how to get an email out fast and efficiently but still authentically. Correct.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:25:53]:
Okay. I’m going to add some, a major caveat to this. Like, I know 10-minute email sounds amazing and it is the truth, but it is not the whole truth, obviously, because you need to do the training. I will also say the more I practice the workflow, the better I get at it, which helps. It also depends the type of email. Not every email is going to be 10 minutes. Okay. But that is what is possible.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:26:17]:
And so this is a core part of my workflow. This is called Whisper Flow. It’s a software, but basically this has changed the game for me in terms of everything, not just creating emails, but sales pages, editing. It’s really changed the game. So you basically just speak and it writes out the text for you. Now Claude actually does have a speaking mode, or you can do text to voice to text mode, but I have found it glitchy. And WhisperFlow just works across the board on all my apps. So I have just been loving it for that reason.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:26:52]:
I’ll just, I’ll start with what I’m gonna do. So yeah, most of the time now I won’t be typing into Claude, and I actually think this is very helpful for the human element of things as well, because you can just kind of brain dump information about, oh, here’s what’s going on for me right now, or here’s like an anecdote that I want to include in my email. That’s a really important part of how I personalise them. I often include something going on in my life. That may not be the way you run your brand, but for me that’s really helpful. helpful to kind of speak it out loud in WhisperFlow. Okay. So a fake offer that I am sending a launch email for.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:27:26]:
It’s a one-to-one offer where I set up people’s email newsletters for them and help them to create a skill in Claude to write their emails. So I wanna include a story in this email about how I used to spend hours on writing my newsletters. Then I created a workflow so I can write emails in 10 minutes, sometimes, not always. Keep it real. Paint a picture of what this will mean for people if they get this workflow set up, or if I set up this workflow for them, what will it mean for them in their life and business? You can make up the offer details. What matters is demonstrating my email skill. And don’t give me the subject lines until after we have worked on the draft. You can also change the settings on, on the mode.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:28:07]:
Do you want it on casual mode or formal mode? So if you’re writing emails to people, it can formalize what you’re writing. Yeah.

Monica Froese [00:28:12]:
And it cleans, it cleans up for you if you’ve said a lot of ums. Like you’re trying to get the thought out and, you know, sometimes you stumble on your, your thought process. It cleans that up for you. Quick email or something like that. But I know when someone definitely used AI when that comes out.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:28:28]:
Yeah, exactly. And it really depends on the email I’m sending. It’s definitely got some AI-isms. So what I would do is I would go back with my Whisper Flow and say, can you analyze this email against the AI tells, my AI tells that I want to avoid? And, and edit it. So I would do that. And then I would probably also, there might be something where, for example, so I think it’s got some personal information about me. So it says about before the school pickup, I stopped feeling like a fraud for having 6,000 people on my list. I was barely talking to you.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:29:01]:
That’s definitely really me. It also picks up the PSs. I always use PSs in my emails. I will often have 2. And the second one will often be something about opting out of a launch. So it knows that from its training. It also, this is something I do. I don’t know if this is a British thing, but like putting kisses on the end of my name, I often do that.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:29:19]:
It’s a very British thing. So yeah, it’s given me the first draft. I would do my edits like this. Or so I would either do that, analyse the email against the AI tells, or just analyse the email. Why doesn’t this sound like me? Come back to me, do an analysis of the email and come back to me. Or the other way I would do it would be I’m hitting the record on WhisperFlow. I would say, okay, I’m going to give you some feedback about this email. So I’m just going to go paragraph by paragraph.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:29:43]:
So in the first Paragraph, you’ve got some obvious AI tells. Can you reword that? Can we combine the first 4 paragraphs because this email is too long? And obviously I’m doing— I’m not really properly reading it as I’m giving you this example. And can we make sure that the call to action is higher up the email or more obvious? Or can you give me 5 ideas for call to action to make it clear? This is the kind of stuff that using Whisper Flow, you can just read through a draft and just speak through it as you’re going. What you don’t like.

Monica Froese [00:30:16]:
About it.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:30:17]:
Yes. And I do this with sales pages and everything. So this is how I would edit.

Monica Froese [00:30:22]:
Get WhisperFlow. I don’t have it yet, but the fact that it just even bullet pointed things out in the chat, it, so.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:30:28]:
Actually, like when I first got WhisperFlow, I thought, okay, that’s nice. But then when I started using it more, I was like, no, this is amazing. I can’t believe that I was doing it without before.

Monica Froese [00:30:40]:
So sometimes in email, it writes sounds. AI-ish, and I can pick out some stuff to change, but other things I can’t find. Is there an AI tells list you have? I believe that’s something that Ruth is going to be offering.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:30:53]:
Yes, I have created it. It is ready in terms of what it is, but I just need to create the page for you to sign up for it. So it’s called De-Robot Your Writing.

Monica Froese [00:31:02]:
Yeah. And also, when it is— when it’s done, Ruth, your speaker information.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:31:06]:
Oh, thank you.

Monica Froese [00:31:07]:
Yeah. Another thing I wanted to A little tip for everyone. So I told my Claude very early on that I like to lead with stories. I often, for the, I don’t know, I’ve been writing emails consistently since 2016. And when it was just me writing, when AI was not a thing, I always told stories about my kids or what in real time what was going on. So when I started working with Claude, I told it upfront that, listen, I lead with storytelling. I sell with stories. And so what I have now is a storytelling skill.

Monica Froese [00:31:42]:
And as something happens in my everyday life, I will just open a chat, not in a project or anything, and I’ll be like, this thing happened today. And I’ll tell it. This is— it’s basically a story, and it updates my storytelling skill. So when I sit down to write my next sales email or whatever it is, it can pull from all of this real-world experience that I have because I just keep an ongoing storytelling. I actually— a cool way to do that is I had it analyze 10 years of emails and pull stories that I’ve told repeatedly out and come up with new angles on it. Like, there’s— it’s really cool all the things you can do with this. But that could be something that could really be helpful for a lot of people with writing emails and cut out a lot of time if it has stories it already knows about you that it can pull from.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:32:27]:
That’s such a good example of stacking these skills, right? I’m—

Monica Froese [00:32:31]:
It’s called De-Robot Your Writing Guide, and it should be live.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:32:34]:
I’m not going to read through everything, but The first example, I gave it very specific things to change. It only chose those specific things. It didn’t notice that it still had these AI-isms, as I call them, in there. I said, analyse this email for Ruth’s language and AI-isms and list how you can improve. It’s not foolproof and the training is constantly being updated. The skill, my brand voice skill training is constantly being updated. So I’m not going to do it all now, but this is how I would edit. But honestly, When I say you can write an email in 10 minutes, I obviously don’t mean every email.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:33:08]:
If it’s an email that I do regularly, so for example, I’m participating in a summit or a bundle, that kind of email, that is a 10-minute email for me. I have a very specific format for that one. It’s, here’s a story about the thing. This is why I’m speaking at this event about this thing. Here are some other top topics I’m interested in that you might be too. And this is my affiliate link. That email, absolutely a 10-minute email. But if it’s a more involved email, like my newsletter, So for example, here I set up a— I’d started for the purposes of a demo, walk me through setting up a Sales Sunday email.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:33:43]:
I have a project just, just for the purposes of organization with my weekly newsletter, which is called Sales Sunday and a skill. That is how I set up my newsletter. This is the process Claude will walk me through based on the skill. So it’ll help me come up with a main topic. It’ll ask me what offer I’m selling that week. Do I wanna include any tips? Do I wanna link to a podcast episode or a freebie? And then after we’ve locked it all in, it will generate the HTML.

Monica Froese [00:34:10]:
So you were doing exactly what I said, like where mine just kicks off and writes the HTML and wastes my tokens. You already had it going step by step.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:34:18]:
It does actually jump in and give me the HTML very quickly sometimes. So I am gonna edit it to make sure it, to make sure it lets me edit in the chat first and does its analysis before giving me that draft. So I do think that was a really good tip, but yeah, this kind of email. Absolutely not 10 minutes, but like Monica said, way reduced from what it would have been. Like I couldn’t commit to doing a weekly newsletter like this before, basically because it was too much. Now I actually find it quite fun. Each step of this gives me a nice little dopamine hit. So just like getting one piece done piece by piece of the newsletter, I really love it.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:34:53]:
So yeah, I think that’s enough for my demo unless there’s something else. But yeah, the AI tells can be baked in. To your skill. So once I put that page link live, I’ve got a file you can download. It’s not actually a skill file, but you can upload it to Claude and ask it to add it to your brand voice skill if that’s what you want. So yeah, I think I’ve shared what I needed to share. I mean, it’s so easy, we could go off on this tangent and that tangent. But what I will say is I do still do some of my editing for emails in the Kit.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:35:24]:
So Kit is my email marketing service provider. I still sometimes type it in and edit there because that just makes it feel more me. So I don’t necessarily get the Kit Connector to just write the entire email, but I am debating it. But I will always edit them. I just, I need to make that clear. Like, I, even after editing that email example I gave you, which was about a fake offer, so it didn’t have all the details, I probably would not copy and paste it all. I would probably copy and paste it and then edit it because that’s just the way that I prefer to do it. But the more I practice it, and I do actually feel like, and this is, this may be a controversial statement, but I feel like using AI has made me better at writing emails because it’s helped me hone in on what’s working.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:36:08]:
It helps me, I often will write long stuff and it helps me make it more concise. That’s always, even though I have this writing background, that’s always been one of my things being like too wordy. And yeah, the more you practice it, the easier it gets, but it really is, a lot of it is in that training as well.

Monica Froese [00:36:27]:
And I know you have, your free gift is a subject line.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:36:31]:
Yes.

Monica Froese [00:36:32]:
Custom GPTN skills. So you want to talk about this?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:36:34]:
This is what I forgot to share. So I may as well just share this. This is, I think, the last thing I need to share. So run the subject line skill and give me options for subject line. So this is a skill you can. Get for free as I use it all the time. So even if I draft my emails elsewhere, even if you don’t want to, because I know some people draw the line at, they’ll use AI for loads of stuff, but they don’t actually want to write their content with it, which is fine if that’s where you draw the line. But I would still recommend using it for the subject lines because it makes the A/B testing super easy.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:37:07]:
You can also, the thing is, if you download my subject line skill, you can edit it based on what works for you. So you may find that the subject lines it’s suggesting And not what your audience, like you, you can change it to match your voice basically in the way that we talked about earlier with the way that we give Claude feedback and then ask it to update the skills. But yeah, this is what it will do. It will give you 10 subject lines in 3 different styles along with preview text for each one. So it just, often I don’t even use one of them as is. I’ll be like, I’ll mix and match too. But so it’s got clean and direct subject lines. So I used to lose entire mornings to this.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:37:46]:
So it’s not saying what it is, but often they are good for open rates depending on your audience. It’s deliberately programmed to give a few shorter options as well. And then more warm and human ones. It’s a bit clunky, but so easy. It just makes it so easy to A/B test. It even gives you preview text options. I use this with every single email I ever send, literally. And then it will give you a suggestion for A/B testing, so you’ll probably want to 2 different styles to test which ones work for you.

Monica Froese [00:38:20]:
These skills, you can— skills that we’re giving you and customize it for your own business.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:38:27]:
Yes, I love it. Exactly. That would be the best way to use it. So yeah, I do this all the time. I’m A/B testing my subject lines all the time. Often the curiosity ones do really well for me. Sometimes it’s hard to call, but I just think A/B testing subject lines is one of the easiest things you can do, even if you don’t get clear results from everyone. It’s so easy.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:38:49]:
And just that is—

Monica Froese [00:38:50]:
And I never do it. See, it’s like I never do. I know Destiny does it all the time.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:38:55]:
And I, this is a use case for AI that I think it’s just, this is just let AI do it. Like, why not? It’s just so easy. Like, yes, I want to be, have much, a lot of control over the email body, but the subject lines, let AI figure it out for you. So easy. So yeah. I think that was the last thing that I needed to share.

Monica Froese [00:39:12]:
Awesome. So we have one that we’ll end on and then we’ll talk about your free gift and to round it out, and you can let us know your school community. So I have a very conceptual question here. Since a project is very specific and narrow, how can a project have a general understanding of your entire business so that the outputs from a single project are still cohesive and aligned? So I have thoughts on this and there’s I have 2 things to say about this. First of all, you still have Claude overlay memory that resides in your settings. So in my overlay memory, it knows my 2 different businesses. It knows the branding for my 2 different businesses. It knows my kids.

Monica Froese [00:39:53]:
It knows my preferences. So there’s this overlaying memory that Claude knows about you. And so Claude’s smart enough to know how to layer all of this on. But then you can also have layered skills, right? So I talk a lot about having a bio reference skill, and basically that’s just me saying that, that reiterates this is about Monica. It has my business timeline in it because I talk about it a lot, like what my history is. It has 4 different variations of my bio. It has quick stats about me. It has links to my headshots or like different types of pictures that can pull from.

Monica Froese [00:40:27]:
It knows about my kids and all that stuff. So that’s another way these skills can be overlaid to all of these projects. So it always knows the bigger conceptual stuff about you. Do you have anything?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:40:39]:
The only thing I would add, because that is what I would say as well, the only thing I would add is that occasionally you’ll find wherever you’ve got something, it’s not quite drawing on, it’s not quite pulling from correctly. You can always just start a new chat or move it between projects and just test it that way. Occasionally that, that does happen with Claude. I don’t find the memory as as good as it was in ChatGPT. But generally, I think it’s still well worth using projects. And actually, in my research on getting Claude usage down, having projects where each chat in the project calls on the documents you’ve uploaded to project is one very important tip in reducing your research, your usage, rather than uploading the info again and again or having it all in the chat. So It’s really worth using. But yeah, if you find if it’s hit and miss and it’s not quite working, just start a new chat or move where it is.

Monica Froese [00:41:30]:
I’m going to share real quick my bio skill because this is one of these things that I felt anytime I’ve said this multiple times, I’m going to say it again. Anytime you find yourself re-explaining yourself, make it a skill that can be accessed everywhere. So I recently just did this at the end of May, and it was probably because I was coming. I was doing a lot of marketing for this event. Actually, I was putting a lot of stuff together for bundles and summits I’m part of, and I found myself reiterating the same exact So I call it my bio and reference skill, and in the description it knows to call this skill in when it’s creating any sort of content for me, whether it is a new website page, whether it’s an email, it knows to reference this. So it has verified facts that I use a lot in my bios. I’ve taught 60,000 people, blah, blah, blah, blah, 10 years of business, what my actual business name is, and then my different brands, my personal contacts. ones I would never use for my bio, for example.

Monica Froese [00:42:23]:
Like on almost every page I create, I have an About Monica section and it would pull images I just wouldn’t put there. And so I got sick of explaining myself. And so now it knows to reference that skill. I consider that when I say it like an overlay skill, it will kick off along with the specialized skills for whatever task I’m doing.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:42:42]:
That is such a great example. I need to create that. I love it.

Monica Froese [00:42:46]:
Yeah. Yeah. I probably should make it into an interview skills and give it to people so that they can create one of their own. And these are just things that you learn the more you, you’re operating in this tool. I always— anytime you’re frustrated and you’re like, why am I repeating myself? Why am I saying this again? Why does this keep getting it wrong? Say, can we create a skill so you stop doing this? Or can we create a skill so you do this? And that’s the more I, I do that, the honestly my time, it just shaves more time off of whatever task I’m doing. All right, Ruth, tell us about your free gift again real quick and how we can find you.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:43:22]:
Yeah, Subject Line Lab. So you can get that skill that I demoed for your subject lines. I use it every day. So yeah, I guess the link will be— do I need to read out?

Monica Froese [00:43:32]:
It’ll be in the show notes.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:43:33]:
Brilliant. I have the free Quietly Ambitious Community. So this is for— we’re ambitious, but we don’t necessarily shout about it and we need to do it in alignment with our energy and capacity. I will talk about Aligned AI there and self- for sales and everything. That’s ruthpoundwhite.com/community. That Robot Your Writing Guide will be up very soon.

Monica Froese [00:43:54]:
Oh, I love this. Ruth is quiet, but she is very knowledgeable and has a brilliant mind.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:43:58]:
Oh, thank you.

Monica Froese [00:44:00]:
Ruth does have a brilliant mind. And I think this is different than how I work with my AI. And the more I get— that’s going to save me so much time. It’s incremental time. The more you build— in the beginning, I was shaving maybe 5, 10 minutes off the process. But then as you keep building and educating these skills, I’m shaving a whole hour off the process. It’s all incremental. And then what does that do? It frees me up.

Monica Froese [00:44:21]:
People are also like, you’re— I think you probably hear this a lot too, cuz you just launched a whole ton of skills out of nowhere and then you launched a whole new membership. People are like, how are you able to do so much?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:44:32]:
What?

Monica Froese [00:44:32]:
Because I have a tool that does a lot of the heavy lifting for me, the actual mechanics for me, so I have time to think up new things.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:44:42]:
Exactly. And if I want to, if I was going to end on one thing that I just really want to say about it, it would be that because I feel so excited and creative right now. And it’s thanks to, because it can be overwhelming learning all this stuff about AI, but you don’t have to do it all. Pick the things that are actually helping you with the work you actually need to do. When it takes that off your plate, it leaves you with the mental capacity. And I know you and I both, Monica, that is something that we need more of. mental space, and that is what AI is helping with for us to be creative on the stuff that we do best in our businesses and the human connection as well.

Monica Froese [00:45:18]:
Absolutely. And I, that’s one of the reasons I’m so glad you came on to talk because I know you have always been very passionate about keeping everything we’re doing authentic still to our brains. And I still think no matter how much I use AI, the brilliance of it is because I know how to direct it for what I want. I just don’t sit there and be like, write me an email with no context. I know the strategy and the direction I want to take, and I’m just doing my best to have these building blocks in place so I can get to my end result faster.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:45:52]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And honestly, there’s a lot of talk about AI making us more productive and all of this, but it’s worth sending fewer emails if it means you’re going to make them more you and more human. So it’s not Quantity over quality. Definitely not, which the AI era can sometimes make you think it should be, but it’s not.

Monica Froese [00:46:11]:
I agree. I agree with that. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Ruth. I really appreciated this, and I’m so glad that you got another light bulb to come on for me, and I’m going to create that skill now tonight.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:46:22]:
Thank you so much.