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. So let's talk about how we are leveraging the power of AI right now in our business.

The ways we use AI might surprise you, and it's probably not what you think. 

Want to get stuck into it? 

Let's go! 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:13)  Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!
(4:08) Why and how we use AI in our business.
(11:38) Using the integration between Zoom & Vimeo to upload live training calls.
(16:41) Getting user-friendly summaries of our live Q&A calls (ditched!).
(25:00) Relating to stories to lessons to use inside your emails.
(27:20) Summarising customer interviews.
(29:00) Helping us overcome people's objections.
(30:54) Writing engaging social media posts.
(35:09) Creating a lead magnet.
(38:08) Making your writing more 'punchy'.
(40:10) Helping with formulas and code.
(41:38) Other AI tools we recommend.
(46:65) Subject lines of the week.

Why and how we use AI in our business 

AI is developing at super rapid speed, and we're testing and implementing (or ditching) different ways of using it to the advantage of our business and our customers. We're going to share a bunch of things we've tried – some of which have been successful and others not so much.

We don’t sell any offers that are led with AI because we don’t find anything created with AI is good enough. And we don't even use AI to write our emails or our subject lines, so we're not going to tell you to do that.

Why? Because we tried to teach AI tools such as ChatGPT or Claude.ai our methodology. But so far, we've not been able to make that work successfully. We don't believe that AI can do a better job than a human at writing your emails. Sure, there's something to be said for learning to write great prompts. And believe it or not, professional prompt writers are now a thing! But we're not that. 

Whatever you use AI for, it has to be good! 

Instead, we're going to give you ideas of how AI can save you time or make things easier for you. We're going to share how it can help by giving you new and diverse opinions and insights. The key though, we believe, is that whatever you use AI for, it has to be good!

Can AI write subject lines for your emails? Can it write your emails? Absolutely. Are they going to be good enough? Probably not.

If a subject line or an email (no matter who writes it) doesn't get the person at the receiving end to take action (whatever the action might be), then it's not good enough. If you're currently not doing email marketing and think you're going to use AI to do it for you because sending anything out is better than nothing, we don't think that's the case at all! 

Using the integration between Zoom & Vimeo to upload live training calls

One of the ways we use AI in our business is to upload the recording of our live training calls into our Members' Area to make them available to our students. Inside our programme, the Email Hero Academy, we run at least 3 live Q&A sessions where we answer people's questions and give them help with tech. 

Before we started tapping into the power of AI, we used an assistant based in the Philippines who would download the recording of each Zoom call and then upload it onto Vimeo and into our Member's Area for our students to watch back. It used to take hours for our assistant to do all this!

That's until we found out there’s free integration between Zoom and Vimeo, which allows us to deliver our call through Zoom but also record it straight into Vimeo as well. So our assistant now simply needs to log into Vimeo, grab the embed code, and upload it in the Members’ Area. What used to be a several-hour job a few times a month is now a 10-minute task. Win!

RPA is a form of AI!

And if you’re thinking that integration is not AI, it is – it's a form of RPA (Robotic Process Automation). Even if Zoom and Vimeo hadn’t ‘connected' in this way, we could have asked our developer to create a piece of code to do this for us.

We’ve done something similar to integrate Thrive (our shopping cart) and Xero (our accountancy software). This saves money on a bookkeeper because we don’t need to reconcile every single transaction to make sure it’s filed correctly. It’s all done automatically. Having done this at the start of our business, we’re saving thousands on bookkeeping fees a year – and it only cost a few hundred dollars for our developer to do this. 

Getting user-friendly summaries of our live Q&A calls (ditched!)

For the sake of total transparency, this is something we tried for a while but then ditched. The idea was to get AI to take the transcript from our live training calls and summarise it. That way, we could share it as a PDF with our members. We wanted the tool to highlight the individual questions, summarise the answers, and add time stamps. This was so that our members could consume our content in other ways, i.e. by skimming through a document rather than sitting at their laptop watching an entire 60-90 minute video call. We wanted to help people speed up their consumption of our content.

We’ve been doing something similar for our internal meetings, for example. We record them, get a transcript, and then get them summarised with AI and sent back to us with action points. And that seems to be working fine. But when it came to using AI to create effective summaries for our members, it wasn’t good enough! Kennedy tried it a few times, put all the relevant prompts into the tool, and found the process easy enough.

But when he handed this over to a member of staff, they noticed that entire questions were being missed! The AI tool wasn’t able to pick up some of the questions – and that was the exact job we wanted it to do! As the output was unreliable, and we couldn't get the AI tool to deliver on its core function, we decided there was no point in using it. 

Beware of inconsistent outputs and unreliable results! 

Having said that, Kennedy isn’t a prompt engineer. And neither of us has the patience to become better at this. We recognise having this resource would be valuable to our members, but considering the output we received was unreliable, we also admit that right now we don't have the time, energy, effort, creativity, or patience to experiment.

And that’s something we’ve experienced with different AI tools and heard from others too – that AI isn't reliably producing results when it comes to certain deliverables. There still needs to be a level of human understanding and cognizance to check the output and ensure it’s accurate. And if we need a human to check things, then we’re better off hiring someone to go through our calls, manually find the questions, and summarise the answers. So for now, we ditched this AI-supported initiative because the results weren’t reliable or good enough.

Relating stories to lessons to include in your emails

As you know, we’re big fans of using stories and lessons in our emails. And we’ve had some success in using AI to find the lessons inside a particular story and relate them to email marketing. It’s not perfect as the tools don’t know our unique framework. Even if we tried to teach it to AI, it wouldn’t be possible to do it in just one chat thread.

So what we found so far is that the best an AI tool can do is to use generic knowledge about a particular niche. An AI tool can’t know what’s unique about you, so it can’t reference the frameworks you know and use, for example. You’d never be able to teach it everything you’ve ever said anywhere, or every little anecdote or metaphor you’ve ever used.

So while some of the stuff AI comes up with is useful, it can also be quite bland and vague. Still, it's a good springboard to help you link a story to a lesson that relates to your niche. You might want to experiment with asking the tool about a few different options, and then it’s up to you to find something a bit more unique and refine the output. But if you're having a bit of a creative dry spell, AI might help in this way.

Summarising customer interviews

Another aspect of our business where we use AI is during customer interviews. We do these with both prospective and existing customers. We’ll reach out and find out more about them – these are purely research calls (not sales calls). We try to get ‘under the skin' of people and understand what problem they’re trying to solve.

In the past, we’d take lots of detailed notes about what people told us during these interviews. But now we simply take the transcripts, put them into an AI tool, and have them summarised. And because it’s one single piece of text, the summaries are quite good.

We can then further analyse the output by looking at people's fears or hopes, and it helps us to write new pieces of marketing or update existing ones (such as email campaigns, sales pages, etc.). You might even develop an entirely new programme based on the needs that the people have, so try this out! 

Helping us overcome people’s objections

Another thing we’ve been using AI for is brainstorming ideas and supporting us with the science behind the copy. In our email campaigns and sales pages we always focus on overcoming people's objections. So, for example, we’ve asked ChatGPT to come up with some objections that someone might have in buying a $2,000 email marketing course. And then we asked for suggestions on how to overcome those objections.

If someone says they can’t afford the cost of the programme right now, the AI tool might suggest we lower the price, for example. And that’s not something we’re prepared to do. But when it suggests that we introduce a payment plan, that’s an option we can consider. Or we may ask the tool to act as a direct response copywriter or a salesperson and help the person realise how valuable our product is and see things through a different perspective.

In a nutshell, we found AI is quite useful in pushing your brain outside of what you’d ordinarily think. It can help you brainstorm things in a better way than you would by sitting down on your own with a piece of paper.

Writing engaging social media posts 

Something Kennedy does regularly is to start a discussion thread inside our Facebook group every Tuesday about the topic of the podcast episode that’s going to be released the day after. He likes to ask simple questions that are engaging and easy to answer. So every week on a Tuesday he takes the transcript of the podcast, feeds it into an AI tool, and requests 10 engaging social media posts that ask a question about the content of the podcast episode.

While Kennedy has never simply copied and pasted the wording of the posts, he takes the sentiment and the idea around it. And if the tool gives him more than one good idea (which it often does), he’ll create several Facebook posts for various days. So doing this has been working great for our business.

Creating a lead magnet

We also used AI to create a lead magnet for us, outlining what we call ‘the five different types of buyers' that we have on our email list. These definitions are based on our unique framework, and we've aligned each type of buyer (the Urgent Buyer, the Researcher, etc.) with the elements of our Score Engine. The idea is that different types of buyers buy at the back of different campaigns, depending on what the sequences are based on (objection handling, risk reversal, engagement, etc.).

We already had all that information, but we wanted to create a simple report that describes the psychology of the various types of buyers. So we put the information into an AI tool, described how these customers typically behave and then asked AI to give us a full psychological profile for each type of buyer. In his prompt to the tool, Kennedy asked AI to act as if it was giving a psychic reading. Interesting, right? This was based on the principle that psychics can extrapolate information to work out what a person is like. And this became part of our lead magnet. Just remember that with anything you do with AI, you always have to refine the output as you go. 

Making your writing more ‘punchy' 

Another thing we found AI super useful for is to make our writing punchier, more emotive, and more ‘attention-grabbing'. So if you've written anything, you can put it into the tool and ask it to re-write it in a way that a sixth grader would understand. That keeps the language nice and simple.

Or, even better, ask AI to rewrite something in the style of a tabloid. Those are designed for easy consumption and have no fancy words or technical language, so you can experiment with headlines and subject lines. It’s a great tip for writing copy too, so try it out! 

Helping with formulas in Google Sheets

Something else that Rob uses AI for is to correct formulas in Google Sheets. Rather than asking our developer to write little pieces of code or spending hours on YouTube or reading blog posts and consuming tutorials to try and understand how to do something, you can get AI to help with that. It can fix a formula and correct errors for you – saving you time and making you more efficient.

Similarly, you can also use it for help in embedding some code into your website if you find that what you’re doing isn’t quite working.

Other useful AI tools we recommend

Last but not least, there are a few other AI tools we've experimented with. Did you know you can use GPT for split testing? It can predict with 80% accuracy what will win in a split test. So feed it a couple of pieces of Facebook ad copy, and it’ll tell you which one is more likely to be more successful.

ZuBot is another tool we recommend for writing Facebook ads. We tested it out by asking it to create a Facebook ad for our product Countdown Hero. We told the tool it’s a piece of software that drives urgency without using cookies and IP tracking. Plus, we shared who our target market was and that we wanted the style to be fun, high-impact, playful, and inspiring. The tool asked us some further questions about the investment and the visuals and came up with pretty good headlines and copy about our tool. It included emojis, which made the whole thing look cool. And it even told us what the call to action button would need to be and gave us some good guidelines for the visuals. All in all, we were quite impressed with the results!

And the third tool we recommend is the Google Analytics Guru. If you’re not that familiar with Google Analytics, you can link this up with your account, ask it questions, and it’ll tell you what you need to know based on the data in your account.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint

If you like what we shared today, know that bringing you the cutting-edge stuff that we do in our business and what works in the world of email marketing is what we teach! So if you want more of that, the best place to get it is inside our programme – The Email Hero Blueprint. It's everything you need to get your email marketing to the point where it makes you sales every day. And that's both through automated emails and through live broadcasts. 

Subject line of the week

This week's subject line is “Legal quicksand”. In this email, Rob was talking about some funny legal thing with the Ts&Cs we see out there on pretty much everything. The subject line has a lot of curiosity baked into it and gives the idea that someone may be in trouble. You'll open the email because you want to know what’s going on. It's quite an interesting phrase that creates a bit of a visual and tells the reader something’s out of control. It’s evocative, and it works. So check it out!

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