How we cut our email brief writing time by 75% with Claude
Generated by Klaviyo AI
ECD Digital Strategy built The Email Brief Writer, a Claude-powered web app that plans, drafts, and dispatches email and SMS campaign briefs, cutting brief writing time from 1 hour to 15 minutes for a 10-brief batch. The system reads client promo calendars, writes voice-matched briefs, and triggers downstream tasks in Asana, Klaviyo, and Google Drive automatically.
- One approval triggers four systems at once: When a plan is approved, Claude simultaneously updates the client's send-schedule sheet, spawns an 8-subtask Asana project, creates a draft Klaviyo campaign with audience and send time populated, and generates a Google Doc copy file, so no one has to manually set up the campaign.
- Client-specific rules live in structured prompts, not memory: Each client's voice, segment logic, and discount rules (e.g., never discount more than 15%, or always use 3 specific segments in priority order) are encoded in version-controlled system prompts, so briefs stay consistent regardless of who's building them.
- The value compounds over time as performance data feeds back into planning: Claude pulls monthly Klaviyo performance reports (opens, clicks, conversion, top segments) and Shopify inventory data, then uses that history to shape the next round of briefs, giving the system a sharper read on each client's audience than any one person could maintain manually.
Writing a brief to create marketing emails used to mean having 6 tabs open at once. The client's promo calendar in one tab. Their need-to-know doc in another. Their Klaviyo dashboard for segment names and naming conventions, a previous brief to copy the template, Asana to track which downstream tasks needed spawning, and a blank Google Doc for assembling it all.
As founder and CEO of ECD Digital Strategy, a performance-driven ecommerce marketing agency, this was a huge part of what my team did in a given week. To create 10 briefs for clients took my team about an hour.
Today, the same 10 briefs take about 15 minutes, thanks to a tool we built on top of Claude that we’re calling The Email Brief Writer.
Let’s walk through the architecture and how we actually use it.
How Claude builds the campaign plan
The Email Brief Writer is a web app we host on Render that uses Claude as its engine.
Claude picks a client from a dropdown, takes in how many email and SMS briefs are needed for the cycle, reads a few lines about what the batch is about, and hits “Plan.”
Next, Claude reads the client's promo calendar straight from a Google Sheet and proposes a draggable, editable plan. A human team member tweaks it.
Claude then writes each brief, voice-matched to that client, with the right Klaviyo segments and naming conventions baked in.
When the plan is approved, 4 things happen at once:
- A row lands in the client's send-schedule sheet.
- A parent task spawns in Asana with 8 role-assigned subtasks covering copy, review, design, build, and QA.
- A draft campaign appears in Klaviyo with the audience and send time already populated.
- A Google Doc copy file generates from a template in the client's Google Drive folder.
In other words, nobody opens Klaviyo to set the campaign up, because Claude has already taken care of it.
The same system handles flow briefs, too
The same system handles flow briefs as well: welcome series, abandoned cart, abandoned check-out, browse abandonment, post-purchase, and win-back. Each flow type has a framework inside the Claude prompt.
It sets:
- The email count
- The delays between messages
- The subject line patterns that match the flow's intent
- The rules about whether the brand discounts heavily or avoids discount-led copy
When Claude builds a win-back flow for a particular brand, for example, it doesn’t have to be reminded what the reactivation angle is, or that they never discount more than 15%. Claude knows, because that brand’s profile lives in the system as structured data, and the prompt is wired to read it.
Standardizing brief and template structure
Claude doesn’t design the visual template. A designer still owns that. But Claude standardizes the structure every designed email uses.
Every brief follows a fixed skeleton:
- Hero hook
- Body argument
- Primary CTA
- Secondary CTA
- Audience block
- Send time
- Naming convention
The skeleton is filled from the client's profile and the campaign type. So, when the designer opens a brief, they already know:
- Where the hero copy belongs
- What the secondary product mention is
- Which segments the email targets
While the visual template is still a human craft, the brief that feeds it is now consistent across every person on the team.
Crafting the custom prompts
The whole system runs on long, specific system prompts that live in version control. When we onboard a new client, we paste their need-to-know doc into a “wizard” (a dynamic living document). Claude pulls brand voice, standing rules, and the product catalog into a JSON profile and commits it. The next brief written for that client respects every rule.
These 3 excerpts that show how the layer works:
1. Prompt 1: user instructions always win
ABSOLUTE PRIORITY ORDER:
1. USER INSTRUCTIONS are the single source of truth for what to plan. If the user says "15% off sitewide today only," plan a 15% sitewide sale anchored on today.
2. CLIENT PROFILE: voice, segments, recurring monthly briefs.
3. PROMO CALENDAR: informational only. Never substitute "what the brand usually does" for what the user EXPLICITLY ASKED FOR in this batch.
2. Prompt 2: exactly 3 segments, in order
Always include EXACTLY 3 INCLUDE segments, in priority order:
1. PRODUCT interest (180D)
2. COLLECTION interest (90D)
3. BRAND full-engagement (90D): opens + site visits + adds to cart (NOT "Email Engaged"; cast the wider net)
3. Prompt 3: one client’s discount rules, encoded
AVOID sitewide percentage-off as the main hook. 12+ months of 25% off sitewide trained the list to wait for sales. Default promo format: tiered AOV ($90 to $10 off, $120 to $20 off, $150 to free gift).
The time savings, broken down
Overall, we’ve cut our brief writing time by about 75%:
- Our 10-brief planning session went from 1 hour down to 15 minutes.
- Our 30-brief monthly calendar went from 2 hours down to 30 minutes.
Across the team, that's hours per person per month that used to go to assembly. Now, those hours go to strategy work and client conversations instead.
The improvements and time back we’re seeing aren’t from a smarter AI. They’re from encoding what we already know:
- Voice rules
- Segment logic
- Naming conventions
- What each client refuses to do
That knowledge goes into a system Claude implements against precisely.
And it doesn’t stop at brief assembly. The same backbone is becoming a single data layer for every client we run marketing for. Each ECD client database is wired into its own Shopify account, so SKUs, inventory levels, and recent order data flow into the system in real time. The brief writer knows what’s in stock today, what’s a top seller this month, and what just went live.
On a monthly and sometimes bi-weekly cadence, Claude also pulls a full report from each Klaviyo account via the MCP connection, revealing:
- Opens
- Clicks
- Conversion rate
- Which segments engaged
- Which subject lines worked
- Which campaigns underperformed
And those insights don’t sit in a PDF in a folder. They flow back into the same system that writes the next month's briefs.
That’s where the value actually compounds. The system isn’t generating the same copy every cycle. It’s reading what worked for that client 3 months ago, what worked last month, what shifted in their catalog, and what segments grew or shrank, and it’s shaping the next round of briefs around all of it. 6 months in, the system has a sharper feel for each client's audience than any single person could hold in their head across a full portfolio.
The model is becoming a commodity. The prompt layer and the data wiring are the product. The agencies that figure that out now will be the ones that keep their margins as the rest of the industry catches up.
Related content
