Newsletter automation with Claude, Perplexity and Make.com

Could your business benefit from having a regular newsletter? In this post we're showing you how to automate 90% of the work of writing a newsletter with AI! Check out the Youtube video for more details.

Newsletters? Are those still a thing?

Newsletters are among the most efficient, simple and cost-effective ways to drive business growth and engage your customers. According to some sources, the Return On Investment (ROI) of email marketing investments is a whopping USD 42 for each dollar spent on your newsletter! (source: Databox via Perplexity AI).

It seems like a no-brainer, but a lot of Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) don't do email marketing. It's quite common to see only companies with the budget and headcount to hire dedicated copywriters or email marketers run email marketing campaigns. That excludes most 1-50 FTE companies, unfortunately.

The great thing is, as a small company you don't really have a brand - so you can experiment with the right newsletter format, and (as long as you're not terribly obnoxious or pushy about it) you only stand to gain!

What is more, writing a good newsletter doesn't need to take up a lot of time. Here at Lodestone Digital we've developed a newsletter automation template that does most of the heavy lifting for us. As a result, we can generate our weekly newsletter in as little as 15m!

Keep in mind that this template and time commitment only works if you know a lot about the topic (e.g. a dentist with >5 years of experience, or a plumber with a thriving practice). If you're new to a given field, newsletter editing and research could potentially take a lot longer!

In what follows, I'll walk you through the email automation template we've built in make.com to generate each of the following sections of our "The Lodestone" newsletter:

• The main story of the week
• A set of 10 headlines optimised for open rate
• Image search queries to find the right Unsplash image
• A run-down of top AI news stories in bulletin format

We're using a mix of different LLMs (Large Language Models) in make.com, including Claude and Perplexity AI as well as integrations with Unsplash and Google Sheets, so buckle up as we dive right in!

Make.com automation pipeline

Our newsletter automation runs in make.com. Make.com is a no-code automation builder where we string together the different actions and LLM prompts to generate our newsletter. This way, we won't need to copy and paste prompts and generated content between different websites each time we want to send out our newsletter.

From the make.com website:

Make is the leading visual platform for anyone to design, build, and automate anything—from tasks and workflows to apps and systems—without the need for coding skills.

We'll go over the main steps in the automation one by one, starting with the idea for the newsletter topic.

Inception: finding newsletter ideas

We typically look at either exciting new developments or larger trends in AI for our newsletter. But if you're a dentist, you might want to cover different topics - things you hear from trade conferences, dental hygiene tips, etc. We write down interesting topics for the newsletter in a Google Sheet:

The Google Sheet make.com component is one of the most popular connectors in make.com. Adding a new row to the "ideas" sheet will automatically trigger the entire automation, which will end up writing the contents of the newsletter back to a different sheet in the Google Sheet workbook.

So the newsletter curator only needs to have access to Google to use this automation for the newsletter.

The first step in the automation is a call to Perplexity AI. We're using Perplexity AI's LLMs to do desk research. Their LLMs have access to the internet, and are configured by Perplexity to prefer high-quality sources.

As you can see in the image, we're using a custom prompt for the Perplexity LLM. The prompt is partly fixed and partly filled in with templated variables from the Google Sheet. Those templated variables are unique for each run of the automation - they are populated from the row in the Google Sheet.

The full prompt for Perplexity:

Act as a desk researcher for the "AI from Scratch" newsletter and write a summary of the very latest trends in the following topic:

{{1.`0`}}

Make sure your summary is relevant and interesting for the following target audience: 

{{1.`3`}}

Run an exhaustive search for each topic you cover, and make sure to identify and highlight recent trends and AI news in your summary.

If there are sources mentioned, follow up by reading those websites and incorporating the contents on there in your summary:

{{1.`4`}}

The last component we're using is the make.com Anthropic component. We're using this component in a number of ways:

• To generate the main story in the newsletter
• To generate headline suggestions
• To generate Unsplash image search queries

It's configured to run the latest version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

The full prompt for Claude 3.5 Sonnet is:

Write a newsletter item on the following topic:{{1.`0`}}

Your tone should be friendly, engaging and professional. Write it from the perspective of the AI from Scratch team, dedicated to providing business leaders with the most actionable information for applying AI in their businesses and careers.

Treat the newsletter as an ongoing conversation, keeping readers up to speed with the latest trends and insights in artificial intelligence and business AI.

Don't repeat yourself, and make sure the newsletter content is actionable and relevant for the target audience:

{{1.`3`}}

Be very specific.

Add hyperlinks from the Perplexity desk research if relevant - for example, when discussing an AI tool add a link to the AI tool website. This is the Perplexity desk research:

{{12.choices[].message.content}}

Make sure all the elements from the outline are covered in your final draft {{1.`1`}}

Use the desk research done by Perplexity as a starting point, and mention at least one real-world example from the desk research.

And that's all!

We can now configure the make.com automation to trigger automatically when a new row is added to our Google sheet, or run it manually whenever we want to send out a newsletter.

Copying the generated content and selected images to the newsletter, and proofreading and editing the generated content are still manual tasks. We also highly recommend you check each piece of content manually to ensure the quality and messaging is consistent with your brand.

Nevertheless, having AI do the desk research, comb through AI news and generate summaries, and write a 90% complete version of the main story saves us a lot of time. So much so that we can send out a newsletter once a week in ~30 minutes. The only thing we need to worry about is what topic to pick!

For completeness, here are the other prompts in the newsletter automation:

The Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet "Unsplash query writer" prompt

Write a search query for the Unsplash photo library based on the newsletter content. The search query should look for images that illustrate or highlight key points from the newsletter main story:

{{2.content[].text}}```

The Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet "Headline writer" prompt

Write 10 newsletter email headlines that maximise the open rates of a newsletter email with the following topic:

{{1.`0`}}

The email contents is the following:

{{2.content}}{{2.content[].text}}

Make sure you cover the email contents as good as possible while still maximising emai open rates. 

Keep the tone friendly, engaging and professional.```

The Perplexity AI "AI news bulletin" LLM prompt

Write bullet-point summaries of this weeks' key AI news in a friendly and engaging tone of voice. Make sure to cover business AI news items, and write the summaries in a way that they are interesting to the following target audience:

{{1.`3`}}

Write a maximum of ten bullet points, but write less if there is no relevant AI news.

Make sure to incoporate the internet sources as hyperlinks in the bullet points.