I Never Liked Building Campaign Outlines… So I'm Happy to Turn That Over to Claude
I tried letting AI plan full campaigns. The output was plausible but too long. So I built something in between — a Claude Project that produces a single-page outline I can actually hand to a client.
I’ll admit I’ve tried to have AI plan full campaigns for me.
The output is usually plausible. But it gets unnecessarily long. I sent a couple of them over to clients, even after doing some back and forth, and I quickly realized they would never read it.
So I built something in between full campaign development and manual generation.
What It Is
I use a Claude Project. It has a set of instructions and a template. When I set it up for each client, I also add branding guidelines, tone of voice, and so forth. When I’m ready to plan, I open it and talk through the campaign out loud: what we’re trying to accomplish, who we’re targeting, what’s happening in the account, what kind of sequence makes sense and why.
The project takes that conversation and produces a single-page campaign outline in Markdown. No email drafts. No subject line suggestions. Just the architecture: a hypothesis, the entry logic, a sequence summary, and the metrics we’ll use to know if it worked.
Why I Built It
My goal is to plan. To communicate. To develop something concise enough that within 60 seconds my clients can see what my goal is, the logic behind why I planned it, and that there was some intentionality behind what I was doing.
I want them to have full confidence that what I’m doing makes sense. And then I also want to give them the opportunity to give me feedback and change things based on the strategy they feel they need to implement.
What It’s Actually Doing
The time savings are modest. The bigger gain is something else: it’s forcing collaborative work — and hopefully not stuff that’s just left aside.
Before this, campaign planning happened in my head. Or in Slack threads, or in half-finished Notion pages. Clients generally trusted that I had a plan. But they couldn’t reference it, didn’t know where to push back on it, couldn’t point to something and say “that’s not quite right.”
That’s what this really becomes. The template is there for planning, not the outcome. It’s supposed to facilitate the planning process. I want to spend more time interacting with my clients to figure out what’s best — not just documenting it or flying by the seat of my pants.
How I Use It in Practice
I pull up the project when I’m formalizing a new campaign. I don’t use it for every small send, but for anything with a defined sequence, a defined audience, and a defined goal. I talk through the context, the model produces the outline, and I edit it before it goes to anyone.
That last part matters. The output is a starting point, not a final answer. I’m still the one signing off on the strategy.
Once it’s in good shape, it goes to the client. From there, we mold.
It’s a simple tool. That’s probably why it works. Try it and let me know how you made it better.
Michael Roberts is the founder of Boost My Email, a fractional email marketing consultancy for B2B SaaS companies. He helps teams build email programs that actually move metrics.