Your Email Platform Can Now Talk to AI (And Most People Are Missing the Real Opportunity) [Ep 253]

AI can now connect directly to email platforms like Kit and Flodesk.

And while everyone seems to be asking whether AI can write their emails, I think they're missing the much bigger opportunity.

In this episode, I'm sharing why I believe the future of AI in business isn't content creation - it's interpretation.

We're talking about what happens when AI can analyse your data, spot patterns, surface insights in seconds, and help you understand your audience better than ever before.

But we're also diving into the trust and consent conversation that comes with these new tools - and why business owners need to think carefully about how they use AI as this technology continues to evolve. Because while AI is changing how we create content, I think the businesses that thrive over the next decade will be the ones that understand their audience best.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• What it means for AI tools like Claude to connect directly to your email platform
• Why I think most business owners are focusing on the wrong part of the AI conversation
• How AI helped me uncover surprising insights from my own email marketing
• The shift from information to interpretation - and why it matters
• The trust and consent questions every business owner should be asking
• Why relationships, community, and connection are becoming more valuable in an AI-powered world

Key Takeaway

The future doesn't belong to the people creating the most content.
It belongs to the people who understand their audience the best.

Ready to grow your business without social media or burnout?

🎉 Join Email Marketing Skool here:
https://www.skool.com/email-marketing-skool/about

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Last week, I connected Claude to my email platform. what happened next genuinely stopped me in my tracks

[00:00:06] because within seconds, Claude was showing me things about my email marketing that would have taken me 20 minutes, if not longer, to find myself. . Some things I'd never even thought of to check myself, and it made me realize something. I think most business owners are looking at AI completely backwards.

[00:00:22] Everyone keeps asking, " Can AI write my emails? Can AI create my content? Can AI build my sales page?" Meanwhile, I'm sitting here thinking, " That's not even the exciting part." The exciting part is what happens when AI starts helping us understand our businesses better than ever before. Let's talk about it

[00:00:41] Are you a female business owner frustrated with battling the algorithm and looking for growth strategies that don't involve awkwardly pointing or dancing online or throwing cash at paid ads? Welcome to the Email Growth Show. I'm your host, Kylie Kelly, visibility and email [00:01:00] marketing strategist. I grew my email list from zero to almost 10,000 subscribers in less than two years, and the same is possible for you, too.

[00:01:08] Are you ready to build your email list and start making more money in your online business? Let's head into today's episode.

[00:01:17] Hey, hey. Welcome back to the Email Growth Show. I am so excited that you are here. So something about AI landed in my inbox recently that genuinely made me stop what I was doing and pay attention. And if you've been around here for a while, you'll know that that is actually pretty rare every second email these days seems to be about AI writing content, AI building your lead magnet, AI creating your sales page, AI generating a month's worth of social media posts.

[00:01:44] And honestly, we've all become a little numb to that conversation, right? But this felt different. Both Kit and Flodesk recently announced ways for AI tools like Claude to connect directly to your email platform. Now, the technical term for this is [00:02:00] MCP, Model Context Protocol. You do not need to remember that. The simplest way to think about it is this. Normally, when you're using Claude or ChatGPT, you have to feed it information. You copy and paste, you upload screenshots, gather reports, explain context. You have to tell it what's happening.

[00:02:17] Now, you're giving AI permission to access information inside another platform. So instead of manually digging through reports, you can ask which email got the most clicks last month, or Which lead magnet generated the most subscribers?

[00:02:33] Or which email had the highest engagement? Which segment hasn't heard from me in 90 days? AI can pull that information for you. That is a pretty significant shift. But here's what's fascinating. I think most people are looking at this completely the wrong way

[00:02:47] Because whenever a new AI update comes out, the conversation immediately becomes, can it write my emails? Can it write my social posts? Can it write my sales page? Can it create my content? How can it save me time? But I [00:03:00] actually don't even think that this is where the biggest opportunity is either Because most business owners don't have a writing problem, right? They have a focus problem. They have a decision-making problem perhaps. They have an I have no idea what's actually working in my business problem, and the data is already there.

[00:03:15] The answers are often already there. Most people just never have time to go looking for them. And this is where I think AI gets really interesting, not as a creator,

[00:03:24] as an interpreter. After I connected Claude to Kit, I asked a very simple question, " Which email had the highest engagement last month?" Within seconds, it pulled the answer, the email, the open rates, the performance, everything. And what's funny is the answer wasn't even what I expected. One of the emails that performed really well wasn't one of my carefully planned emails. It wasn't one of the ones where I'd spent an hour creating the perfect angle. It was one of the emails that felt almost too simple. And that made me laugh because I can't tell you how many times I've spent an hour writing what I thought was the perfect email, and then the email that I dashed off while waiting in the school pickup line is the [00:04:00] one people reply to, the one people forward, the one people buy from, which I also think says a lot about what people are actually craving right now. Now, could I have analyzed my emails and found the information myself? Absolutely. But here's the thing, I probably wouldn't have, or at least I would've kept putting it off because I'd need to log into Kit, open the reports, scroll through the emails, compare statistics, cross-reference click rates, open individual emails, analyze the patterns.

[00:04:27] Like It's a lot to do manually, and that's exactly why I think so many business owners don't do it, right? Like, we collect the data, but we rarely analyze it because we're busy. We're busy serving our clients, running launches, managing teams, being parents, trying to have lives outside of our business. So the data sits there unused.

[00:04:49] And that's where I think this gets exciting, not because AI replaces us, but it removes friction. And there's another side of this conversation that I think is worth talking about too, Because after I [00:05:00] shared some of this inside my Skool community, one of the members brought up a perspective that honestly hadn't been front of mind for me, and that's the question of consent.

[00:05:07] Because at the end of the day, our email lists aren't just data, they're people, real humans, people who trusted us enough to hand over their email addresses and invite us into one of the most personal places online, their inbox. And while I'm genuinely excited about what AI might make possible, I also think we need to approach this thoughtfully. Because when we connect AI tools to our email platforms, we're not just talking about our own business information anymore. We're talking about information connected to other people too.

[00:05:40] Now, I'm not here to tell you what you should or shouldn't do, and I'm definitely not a lawyer, but I do think this is a conversation worth having because whenever new technology arrives, It's really easy to get swept up in what it can do, like how shiny it is. sometimes we forget to ask, what else should we be thinking about? Questions [00:06:00] like, what information is this tool actually accessing? What permission am I granting? How is this data actually being handled? Have I read the privacy policy? Am I comfortable with how this works? Those feel like really important questions that not many people are asking.

[00:06:17] And I think this is where we need to stay grounded, because there are some uses of AI that feel incredibly exciting to me. Looking for trends, analyzing campaign performance, spotting patterns, I probably would miss. Amazing. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm excited about. But if we start moving into a world where AI is making strategic decisions for us or modifying systems we don't fully understand or handling customer information in ways that we're not paying attention to, that's where I personally start to slow down.

[00:06:47] Not because I'm anti-AI. As you know, I'm quite the opposite. I think this technology is incredible. But excitement doesn't remove responsibility. And the thing I keep coming back to is this: [00:07:00] technology will keep evolving, probably faster than any of us can keep up with. But trust is the foundation of good business.

[00:07:06] Trust is why people open our emails. Trust is why people buy. Trust is why people stay. And I think whatever tools we choose to use moving forward, that has to remain at the center of the conversation. For me, the goal isn't how much can I automate? The goal is, how can I use these tools to serve people better while protecting the trust they've placed in me?

[00:07:28] Because if we lose sight of that, we have missed the point entirely

[00:07:33] The more I've thought about this, the more I've realized that AI is changing the value equation in business. Because for years, information was valuable. Knowing something other people didn't know was valuable. Teaching something was valuable, explaining something. But information is becoming easier and easier to access, and I don't think that's slowing down anytime soon.

[00:07:53] Creating content is easier. Building landing pages is easier. Writing emails is easier. Research, brainstorming, all of it [00:08:00] is easier than it ever used to be. The barrier to creating things is getting lower and lower and lower, and that is making a lot of business owners nervous. I've had so many conversations recently with clients, friends, mastermind members, and even Nick on my walks about this.

[00:08:15] What happens when AI can write? What happens when AI can analyze? What happens when AI can build? What happens when AI can create, right? And I think they're all really important questions, and some of them AI can already do really well. But here's what I've realized. The value is shifting. It's shifting away from information, and it's shifting towards interpretation, towards perspective, trust, relationships, community, connection.

[00:08:41] I think that's one of the reasons I've been so excited watching what happens inside of my Skool community lately. We crossed 1,000 members quite easily. And again, it's not because it's some magical platform. It's because people are craving connection, community, rooms, conversations.

[00:08:57] They're craving just people, right? you know, [00:09:00] Claude can tell me any day of the week which email performed best, but it can't tell me why that email resonated with my audience in the way that it did. It can show me the numbers, but it doesn't know the conversations I've been having. It doesn't know what my audience is worried about right now.

[00:09:16] It can guess, but it doesn't know. It doesn't know the stories behind those emails. It doesn't know the context or the relationships. It can surface information, yes, but it can't replace connection. And this is where so many business owners are looking in the wrong direction. They're asking, "How can AI do more for me?" When maybe the better question is, "What can I do that AI never will?" Because the businesses that thrive over the next few years won't necessarily be the ones creating the most content.

[00:09:46] I really don't think that's the game anymore. I think they'll be the businesses that understand their audience the best, the businesses that build the strongest relationships, the strongest communities, the strongest trust, The strongest customer [00:10:00] experiences, personal brands, perspectives.

[00:10:02] And honestly, this makes me incredibly optimistic because those things, all of that is deeply human. Relationships are becoming more valuable, not less. Because if AI lowers the barrier to creating content, then understanding your audience becomes even more valuable. And that's why I keep coming back to this same idea.

[00:10:23] The future belongs to the people who understand their audience best. Which is exactly why I still believe in things like collaborations, podcast guesting, partnerships, referrals, community building. I think spending your time doing that is some of the smartest investments a business owner can make. So if you are watching all of these AI updates and wondering where to focus, here is my advice.

[00:10:47] Use AI to save time. Use it to analyze, to organize, to surface patterns. Use it to make better decisions. But spend the time you save becoming more human. Have more conversations. Build more [00:11:00] relationships. Get closer to your audience. Create better experiences for them. Tell more of your stories. Share more of your perspective.

[00:11:08] Build community, because those are the things people are gonna keep paying for. They are the things people will keep following, and they are the things that AI simply cannot replicate. So back to the whole point of this episode, the MCP, the Claude entering the kit conversation, am I excited about this? Absolutely. I think it's one of the most interesting developments in email marketing we've seen in quite a while.

[00:11:31] Not because AI can write another newsletter, but because it can help us make smarter decisions. And if you're willing to use it as an assistant, not as your replacement, I think that is where the real magic is. So I would love to know what you think. Have you connected Claude or ChatGPT to your email platform yet? Would you? Are you going to? Or does the idea of AI having access to your email account make you wanna run into the opposite direction? Both answers are welcome and very valid. Come and tell me. I would [00:12:00] love to hear from you. That is all from me this week, my loves.

[00:12:02] I will see you again next week. I love you so much. Thank you for being here, and I will talk to you soon. All right. Bye for now

[00:12:09] Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Email Growth Show. I hope you found valuable insights into the next steps you can take to grow your email list and boost your business without relying on social media or paid ads. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show and share it with others.

[00:12:27] Your feedback helps me reach more female entrepreneurs just like you, who are ready to say goodbye to social media and leverage email marketing to grow their business and make a bigger impact. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.