After recent convos about democratising AI and improving productivity, I decided it was high time I started adopting AI more myself.

Here are 5 ways I’ve made life and work easier. And no the doll is not one of them - getting that image to generate was a PITA.

You know how you just tick along in life and then suddenly a door opens unexpectedly, and you just have to walk on through and see what happens.

Well it opened. So I walked through… into 10 Downing Street!

I’ve had lots of panicked emails in my inbox asking what you need to do following this email from Mailchimp yesterday.

Some are from businesses that do need to take action, others that it just doesn’t affect.

Here’s how to find out if it affects you, and if so, what you need to do.

In principle you can use a merge tag to add each recipient’s first name into your Mailchimp emails, in ways like this:

• In the greeting e.g. Hi Claire,

• Within a sentence e.g. “I’d love you to be there Claire”

• On a button e.g. “Get yours Claire”

They can be super-effective and catch the eye. BUT should you actually use them?

Here are some questions to ask yourself before you take the plunge and some tips to make names work for you.

Are you paying the right amount for your Mailchimp account?

About 30% of accounts I audit aren’t - and usually because they’re paying too much.

Want to find out how to check? It only takes a few minutes…

When was the last time you checked who has access to your Mailchimp account. In fact have you EVER checked? Do it now. Trust me, I see some shockers. Here’s how…

Your contacts subscribed because they want to hear from you. And email marketing simply can’t work for you if you don’t send emails…

But there are never enough hours in the day so here are my tips to make it all quicker and easier, gleaned over the course of 14+ years of doing this. A 5 minute read that will save you HOURS and mean that Mailchimp can work harder for you and your business.

The subject of images comes up a LOT in my day to day as I work with clients on their Mailchimp accounts. I have rarely come across a client that has been using more than 2 o 3 of these tips, despite them being incredibly useful at a) make your life easier and b) making your emails work harder for you.

So here are 10 tips to make images work more effectively and efficiently for you in Mailchimp:

Email marketing takes time, energy, resources and, very often, money. Testing means you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t to avoid wasting them all.

We can all make educated guesses, but they’re just that. If we don’t test, we don’t actually know! So here are 5 things to test regularly...

I get asked this question a lot. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, have a look at the All contacts part of Mailchimp and scroll right a bit in your “spreadsheet” - chances are some of your contacts have a grey label that says “Cleaned”.

Find out what it actually means, how it happened and what to do with your cleaned contacts now...

I’ve talked about buying email lists before (and why you almost certainly shouldn’t). But how DO you grow your mailing list?

Key to this is that you should be aiming to grow it with the right sort of people - who are...

A few experiences lately means I need to ask you this VIQ (very important question)…

Do you actually know what your email subscribers experience when they try to sign up for your emails / newsletter? Have you actually looked at it with a fresh pair of eyes lately?

Initially, this question was prompted by

Recently I sent an email out about using AI for Mailchimp etc. You can read it (and subscribe so you don’t miss future ones) here.

Below are some tips and demos of how to do some of those things. Lots of them use Chat GPT, but others are using some different tools I’ve find and like. Enjoy!