Here’s Episode 19 of The Shift: Zapier, Claude AI, AWeber: Personalized Welcome Email Workflow
What if every new subscriber got a welcome email that sounded like you actually read what they told you?
Not a template. Not “Hi [first name], thanks for reaching out.” A real message, written for them, based on exactly what they shared when they signed up.
Chris and Alycia build that in three steps and zero code:
- A Typeform intake survey captures the subscriber’s biggest problem
- AI by Zapier writes a personalized intro paragraph from their answer
- AWeber drops it into a custom field and sends the email automatically
Then Alycia, an AWeber product designer and prompt specialist, shows how to rewrite the prompt so the email sounds human instead of buzzword soup. We cover voice and tone, character limits, conditional fallbacks, and how to get rid of the AI em-dash for good.
Got questions? Sign up for the newsletter and just hit reply: https://www.aweber.com/shift
Here’s Episode 20 of The Shift: Use Claude to Build an AI website Chatbot (with emails and reviews)
Right now, customer questions are piling up in your inbox. How does this work? What’s your return policy? Is this right for my kid? And you’re answering them one at a time.
We take the stuff you already have, old emails, reviews, FAQs, website copy, and feed it to Claude to build a knowledge base. Then we use Claude Code to turn that knowledge base into a real chatbot that lives on your site and answers questions at 2 a.m. while you sleep.
We built the whole thing for a fake baseball equipment store in about the length of the show. No developer, no monthly SaaS, no coding experience required. Just your data and Claude.
Inside this build:
- Turn raw, unformatted notes into a clean markdown knowledge base
- Confirm Claude understands it before you ship
- Generate an embeddable chatbot with Claude Code
- Keep your API key secure (and why that matters)
- Embed it live on a Lovable site
Plus a Q&A on pointing Claude at your website URL, fact-checking its work, avoiding AI slop, and organizing projects in ChatGPT.
Here’s Episode 21 of The Shift: Build a Web App to Grow Your List (No Code)
Learn how to turn a lead magnet idea into a working web app that captures emails and remembers each visitor’s data.
Most lead magnets are PDFs and checklists. People download them once and never open them again. This video shows how to build a small web app instead. It’s something visitors actually come back to and share. It uses AWeber’s upcoming AI page builder. An email sign-up gate is built into the experience, so it feels like logging into a product instead of filling out a form.
Here’s Episode 22 of The Shift: 3 Canva AI 2.0 Tricks Small Business Owners Can Use Today
Canva says it’s not a design tool with AI bolted on anymore. It’s an AI platform with design tools built in. We put that claim to the test live.
In this episode, Jesse and Chris set up a brand kit from scratch, generate a full on brand launch campaign in one shot, connect Gmail to turn a customer email into a testimonial graphic, and schedule recurring AI design tasks. We also hit a few real bugs along the way, and we show you exactly where they happened.
If you run a small business and use Canva, this episode will save you hours of trial and error.
What we cover:
- How to set up your brand kit the right way (and the one setting that quietly breaks everything if you skip it)
- Building a full campaign (Instagram post, story, email header, and flyer) from a single prompt
- Turning a customer email into a testimonial graphic using Canva’s Gmail connector
- Scheduling recurring AI design tasks so new content is waiting for you every morning
- Where Canva AI 2.0 still falls short, and how it compares to using Claude or ChatGPT directly
Here’s Episode 23 of The Shift: Stop Sending Ads to Your Product Page (Do This Instead)
Your ad sends someone to your product page. They’ve never heard of you, so they bounce. You paid full price for that click and got nothing back.
In this episode, Jesse and Chris rebuild that same $50/day ad budget around a lead magnet instead. They build a free, interactive “10 Steps to a Better Swing” experience live in AWeber’s page builder, write a nurture email sequence with the Newsletter Assistant, automate it with Workflows, and generate ad creative in Canva AI 2.0. Same budget. Instead of one shot at a sale, you end the week with a list of prospects who convert for months.
What you’ll see built, live:
- An interactive lead magnet landing page (AI-built, mobile responsive, no code)
- A tagged, triggered email workflow: welcome, insight, brand story, offer
- The Newsletter Assistant drafting nurture emails in your brand voice
- A “no dead ends” product CTA added to every email footer
- Ad creative generated in Canva AI 2.0 in minutes
Here’s Episode 24 of The Shift!
Evan Carmichael has more than 4 million YouTube subscribers, four books, and a mission to help people believe in themselves.
He’s also been an AWeber customer for 21 years.
He sat down with Jesse Kennedy and Chris Vasquez to cut through the AI noise for small business owners and entrepreneurs.
No “build a billion-dollar one-person company.” No “rebuild your whole business.” Just one frustration, two hours on a Friday, and one small thing that works.
In this episode:
• Why Evan is firmly on “Team Human” (and what that means for how you use AI)
• The “floss one tooth” rule for getting unstuck
• His nearly one-million-video YouTube dubbing project
• The 10-idea trick for your next newsletter
• How he’s been building “AI Evan” since 2022
• Why your open and click rates are a quality signal AI can learn from
• The one rule his whole team follows: don’t trick people
• Why YouTube long-form is now the #1 source for AI citations
• Your homework: two hours, one Friday, one problem
ABOUT EVAN CARMICHAEL
Evan helps thought leaders get their message out to the world through content. He runs the #BelieveNation YouTube channel and the Movement Makers program.
YouTube: 
/ @evancarmichael
Website: evancarmichael.com
Here’s Episode 25 of The Shift: AI Product Mockups That Look Real: Book Covers, T-Shirts & Stickers
Your product deserves better than a warped mockup from a $40/month generator.
In this episode, Chris and Jesse generate real product mockups live: a book cover, t-shirts, a sticker pack, and pickleball paddles in the hands of players. Then they drop one design into our AI page builder and generate images right on the landing page, matched to the page’s colors and style.
You’ll learn the prompt structure that gets consistent results, the one sentence to add at the end of every image prompt, and why transparent PNGs quietly break AI mockups (plus the 10-second fix).
Grab the mega prompt doc with every prompt from this episode: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W…
Thank you for posting these here. I really enjoy these and having them here is quite convenient!
Here’s Episode 26 of The Shift: Free AI Marketing Tool Tested Live on a Real Brand
Your feed goes quiet because making one good post takes 20 minutes you don’t have.
Google built a free tool for exactly that problem. In this episode, we hand Pomelli a real website live, no dry run, and watch it study the brand colors, fonts, voice, and imagery. Then it builds a campaign we could actually post.
You’ll see what Pomelli gets right (brand consistency, the photoshoot templates, one-click posting to Instagram), where it stumbles (no editable layers, Instagram safe zones, that mysterious green box), and the one thing you should download before you rely on any Google Labs experiment.
The test brand? A page we built in our AI landing page builder from a two-sentence prompt.
Here’s Episode 27 of The Shift: Build an Interactive Survey That Grows Your Email List (No Code)
How to turn AWeber landing page survey answers into subscriber tags, then analyze them instantly with Claude or ChatGPT using the AWeber MCP.
This episode walks through a workflow for learning about your audience without paying for a separate survey tool: build a simple form or quiz in a landing page builder like the AWeber Builder, save each answer as a subscriber tag, then use the AWeber MCP inside Claude or ChatGPT to query and visualize those tags conversationally.
Chris demos a business-needs survey that gets analyzed into charts, audience segments, and specific marketing recommendations, then turned into a shareable HTML report.
Alycia follows with a “quiz” variation - a Zumba personality quiz - where the result (not each individual answer) becomes the tag, and that tag automatically triggers a personalized AWeber workflow email.
Includes a live example of AI-generated audience recommendations based on real tag data, not just the raw numbers.
Shows the difference between tagging every answer (for segmentation) versus tagging only a final result (for personalization).
Here’s Episode 28 of The Shift: One Google Doc Makes Every AI Tool Sound Like You
A single Google Doc style guide gets on-brand results from ChatGPT, Claude, Canva, and Lovable.
AI copy sounds generic because every tool starts from zero: it doesn’t know you, so it gives you the average of everyone. A centralized brand style guide, kept as one plain-text Google Doc and pasted into each tool, fixes that. When any tool gets your brand wrong, you update the doc once and every future output improves everywhere.
There are two ways to build the guide, and both are demonstrated start to finish. The brain-dump method compiles scattered notes, newsletter screenshots, and website colors into a guide with a one-liner, contrasting voice traits like “warm but honest,” and “say this, not this” rules that get rid of AI cliches. The interview method uses a one-line prompt that makes Claude interview you from scratch, producing a brand profile with hard rules like “never punch down.”
The proof: the same pasted doc produced matching colors, type, and voice in Lovable, Canva, the AWeber landing page builder, and ChatGPT, tools that have no concept of each other.
- Includes a verdict on which method to start with: the interview if you have nothing written down, the brain-dump if your brand notes are scattered.
- Also an honest look at where the guide still fails: AI-generated imagery misses the mark until you describe images by feeling, not by example.
Here’s Episode 29 of The Shift: Build a Calculator Your Customers Will Trade Their Email For
Build a no-code calculator lead magnet that trades an instant answer for a name and email.
The highest-converting lead magnet answers the one question every prospect asks right before hiring you: what can I afford, or where does my budget go. A calculator built as a landing page lets visitors adjust the inputs freely, then gates the personalized result behind a first name and email, and the answer appears the moment they sign up, so the trade feels instant and fair.
Three builds are demonstrated from short prompts in the AWeber AI page builder, and Lovable or Replit follow the same pattern. A home affordability calculator for a real estate brand estimates a buyer’s price range and pairs it with a book-a-consult button. A wedding budget calculator turns a total budget and guest count into a line-item breakdown that reshapes around the couple’s top priority, and a voice-dictated prompt produces an interior design style quiz that profiles taste, project, and budget lane.
The follow-through matters as much as the capture. Storing the calculated range as a custom field lets the automated welcome email quote the visitor’s exact number, and teasing the result on page while delivering the full breakdown by email earns opens that build sender reputation with Gmail and Outlook.
- Includes the 40/40/20 argument for why the calculator’s offer matters twice as much as its design.
- A candid critique of the AI’s first layouts, and the one-sentence fix that moves the calculator above the fold.
Here’s Episode 30 of The Shift: Does AI Even Know Your Business Exists? Find Out in Minutes (Free Prompt)
AI answers now name brands before anyone clicks a link, so ranking alone doesn’t get you recommended anymore. In this episode, we walk through a 10-minute AI search audit. You paste an AI answer for your key term into one mega prompt, and it shows you why you’re being skipped and ranks the fixes.
We ran it live on a real pickleball paddle brand, and the diagnosis was blunt: the AI answer was built on specs while the homepage was built on vibes.
You’ll also hear why third-party citations outweigh anything on your own site, and which queries are actually worth chasing.
Here’s Episode 31 of The Shift: Launch a Lead Magnet Today With Just a Google Doc and AI
Turn a plain Google Doc into a live lead magnet today: landing page, tag, and delivery email.
Don’t polish the doc; put the effort into the landing page. People trade their email for an answer, not a pretty design, and “make it pretty first” is where lead magnets die. The best test for what to offer: whatever people already ask you for all the time.
The whole build was one short prompt in AWeber’s AI landing page builder: the goal, a logo, my site for styling, the doc’s contents, and the signup tag. It wrote the benefit callouts and matched the footer on its own.
For delivery, we email the link instead of redirecting to the doc. Opens and clicks on that first email send positive signals to Gmail and Outlook, while a redirect means the courtesy copy often gets deleted unread, which hurts. The automation is two steps: trigger on the tag, send the email.
