For way too long, I treated "make my emails better" as a writing project. Better hooks, better stories, better subject lines.

Meanwhile the emails themselves were giant walls of plain text. 😅

And here's the thing I finally had to admit: people don't read emails. They scan them.

And for a lot of readers, including neurodivergent readers like myself, a wall of text isn't a preference thing. It's genuinely hard to process.

Without color, without bold, without structure... the email closes before the message ever lands.

So I stopped polishing my words and went looking at what my own list had been telling me the whole time.

Formatting isn't decoration. It's accessibility, and accessible emails get read and clicked.

Which means your branded email template isn't a design preference. It's a conversion asset. And you shouldn't have to rebuild it from scratch every single send.

💡 So this week's shortcut is the exact one I built to fix it: AI audits your past sends to find what actually converted, locks it into a branded HTML template, and then writes every future email inside it for you.

Mine goes one step further. Because my email platform is connected through an MCP, Claude doesn't just hand me the HTML. It creates the email right in my account as a draft. I open it, review it, schedule it.

I never format an email by hand anymore, and I never copy-paste one either.

Every send, already branded, already formatted for the scan. 😉

Before ❌ Big blocks of plain text your readers scan past ❌ Formatting every email by hand, every single time ❌ Draft in one place, copy-paste into another, fix it again

After ✅ Color, bold, and hierarchy that guide the eye to the click ✅ One branded template proven by your own data ✅ Every email arrives in your platform as a finished draft

Your Shortcut 👇 Pull up one email you sent that got opened but barely clicked. That's your test case: the subject line already did its job, so whatever's leaking is inside the email. Scan it for five seconds the way a stranger would. Can you catch the point and where to click from the bold text alone? If not, your readers can't either. Then ask your AI to compare a handful of your past sends, winners against losers, and tell you what the winners share. Your sent folder already knows what your readers respond to. You just have to ask it.

You've already been inside The Shortcut so you know how it works 😉

This is just the shortcut that dropped this week so if you're ready to stop hand-formatting every email and have AI build each one in a branded template your own data proves converts, I'd love to have you come back.

Come back to The Shortcut →

Happy automating,
Steph