The 6 best AI tools for newsletter growth

👋 Hi friends -

Welcome to The Newsletter Growth Memo. Twice a month, I share short reflections with my newsletter clients + other operators.

Zero formality, ads, or affiliate links - just a guy sharing learnings from working with media operators doing $25-500k+ / month with newsletters.

New reader highlights: Welcome to Liam, VP Marketing & Communications @6AM City | Patrick, Senior Director @Red Ventures | Khizer, Head of Paid Acquisition @Superhuman AI | Avi, Founder @ Creator Logic

Hey - it's Nathan.

I want to talk to you about a handful of AI tools that are completely changing how marketers will research, ideate, and create ads.

These are tools we or our clients use after testing multiple alternatives.

And I’ve personally seen drive serious results for large media / newsletter brands.

Let me break down my favorites.

1. HeyGen - clone yourself & drive organic

I’ve watched my buddy Rowan grow an Instagram account for his personal brand/newsletter to just shy of 100k followers on (almost) autopilot.

Rowan runs the largest AI newsletter + constantly gets invited to try the latest software/hardware.

So one of my rules of thumb is that it’s a no-brainer to go pay for any tool he’s using.

His workflow has three parts:

• The daily newsletter serves as the basis for the script

• He uses HeyGen to create a digital clone of himself and his team pairs it with Eleven Labs for voice alongside b-roll shots

• They use Manychat (AI chatbots for DMs) to convert readers from viral content to newsletter subscribers

Boom - daily content that feels like it’s coming directly from the founder.

I’m a huge fan of writing once, publishing twice - more operators should be using this.

2. Arcads - AI UGC that’s (almost) publish-ready

Arcads has many competitors now. But it’s still the best tool for AI UGC.

It’s not perfect - only about 30% of the actors are usable.

But net-net it gives us an incredible amount of leverage:

• Rather than invoice clients $200-250 for a UGC creator, we pay for the Arcads subscription ourselves and can get a concept launched for <$50

• Once we’ve found a winning UGC concept, we can create iterations with many personas (different ethnicities, genders, ages, etc.) in a fraction of the time of booking more creators

Here’s their newest interview ad format in action:

3. Claude - The copywriting MVP

ChatGPT is great for a lot of things, but Claude writes better ad copy. Period.

The output sounds like something a human would actually write.

Ad ideation is one of the 50+ things I find myself using Claude for as a thought partner:

1. I feed Claude our hook library, hooks of winning ads in a particular ad account, and the onboarding doc we have every client fill out about their audience

2. Claude teases out gaps where existing creative may not cover particular audience segments OR themes across winning hooks

3. Iterate those winning concepts or generate ideas for new concepts

4. Take a first stab at hooks that we can tweak

The final product always takes work from a creative strategist, but we’ve had many winning ads (including the one below) emerge from brainstorming augmented by Claude.

4. ChatGPT - The data whisperer

While Claude wins for copywriting, ChatGPT is our go-to for data analysis.

I received many replies from marketing/sales leaders at media companies from this newsletter a few months back, which analyzed declines in sponsor performance and what your team could do about it.

That analysis took 1/5th the time using ChatGPT that it would have in Excel.

For ads, ChatGPT comes in handy for analyzing signals like reader feedback.

We uploaded all the comments from Tyler Denk’s newsletter (Big Desk Energy) + received insights about why readers love the newsletter.

That feedback is gold for positioning the newsletter in our ads.

If you see me walking around NYC, there is a 50/50 shot I’ll be mid-conversation with ChatGPT (download the app, voice → text is significantly faster than typing prompts).

It’s my pocket analyst and I try to spend as much time with it as possible.

5. Eleven Labs - The narrator

We use their voiceovers constantly for ads where we need narration.

The voices are easily distinguished from real people, but it’s become its own style for both organic and paid content and we’ve had a few winning ads from its narration.

It can also ingest between 0.5-3 hours of your own audio to clone your voice if you’re looking for a more informal style.

6. Gumloop - Zapier meets AI models

I’ve been pretty disappointed with Zapier’s AI features and, while N8N is great, it’s far too difficult for non-technical folks (me) to use.

Meet Gumloop.

It was built with marketers in mind - it has a Facebook ad library scraper as an out-of-the-box node, for example.

We’re playing with it right now and pretty impressed with the results… you can set up a workflow that:

• Views the ads your competitors upload every week

• Analyzes themes in ad copy (actually watching videos all the way through using Gemini)

• Writes a report on its analysis

• Emails it to you and your team Monday morning

That’s legitimately a workflow you can duplicate immediately below:

It's early days - most of the best workflows are coming from users, so you need to be scrappy or build things yourself.

But Gumloop (+ all of these tools) will allow you to make huge progress in automating research + synthesis so that your marketing team can be focused on execution.

That’s the letter.

- Nathan

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