We started sending a weekly agency newsletter because we got tired of explaining what we actually do. Prospects would land on our site, read the services pages, and still not quite understand how Choco Media operates day-to-day. The newsletter fixed that faster than any homepage rewrite we’d tried. The agency newsletter is now one of the few channels we touch every single week without fail — and AI helps us ship it consistently without it taking a full day.
This post is a behind-the-scenes look at our format, what goes into each issue, and where AI does the heavy lifting versus where we keep a human hand on the wheel. If you’re running a small agency and wondering whether a newsletter is worth the effort, we hope this gives you a concrete answer — and a workflow you can borrow.
Why a weekly agency newsletter at all?
The honest answer is that a newsletter earns attention in a way that social posts don’t. Someone who opens your email every week is telling you something. They’re signalling interest before they’re ready to buy, which means when they do need an agency, you’re already in the room.
For a small team in Rovaniemi, the newsletter competes differently than it would for a London agency with a massive organic presence. We don’t outspend anyone on paid reach. But we can show up in an inbox reliably, write something useful, and let that consistency do the positioning work over months.
There’s also a compounding content benefit. Every newsletter issue becomes a pool of ideas for longer posts, social content, and client talking points. The newsletter doesn’t exist in isolation — it feeds the rest of the content production workflow.
What’s actually in each issue
We’ve tried several formats and landed on one that’s short enough to write, specific enough to be useful, and personal enough to feel like it’s from a real team rather than a content machine.
The structure we use
- One observation — something we noticed this week in client work, in a tool we tested, or in a shift we’re seeing in how AI is changing marketing. This is 2-3 paragraphs, written in plain language, not “thought leadership”.
- One practical thing — a prompt, a process step, a tool setting, a metric to check. Something a reader could use before the week is out.
- One pointer — a link to a piece of our content, a recent post, or an external resource that’s genuinely useful for the kind of reader who follows us.
- A one-line close — we sign off with something brief and human, not a call-to-action grid.
This structure takes about 45 minutes to write from scratch. With AI in the workflow, it takes closer to 20.
The AI/human split: where each belongs
This is the part most people ask about, so we’ll be direct.
What AI handles
We use AI for the drafting layer. Specifically:
- Expanding a rough bullet-point observation into readable paragraphs
- Generating three or four versions of a subject line from a rough description
- Turning a half-finished practical tip into a clear numbered sequence
- Checking that the reading level is accessible without being condescending
The input to the AI is always a human note. We don’t ask it to come up with the idea — we ask it to render the idea clearly. That distinction keeps the newsletter sounding like us rather than like a generic content service.
What stays human
The observation itself always comes from someone on the team. It has to be grounded in something real — a client campaign result, a tool test, a conversation we had, something that happened this week. We don’t allow fabricated case studies or invented insights.
The subject line decision is also human. AI gives us options; someone picks the one that fits the week’s tone. If the observation is more serious, we don’t use a clever subject line. If it’s light, we might. That judgment doesn’t belong to a model.
The sign-off is always written by hand. One sentence. No template.
The fastest way to make your agency newsletter sound like a press release is to let AI write the opening line without any input. Give it a single honest sentence from your week, and the output changes completely.
The tooling we actually use
We keep this simple on purpose. The more tools in a workflow, the more friction there is to showing up every week.
Drafting and editing
We draft in a plain text editor first — no formatting distractions. The rough notes go into our AI drafting prompt, which is a short template we built once and have refined about five times since. The output comes back in our voice roughly 70% of the time. The other 30% needs a light edit to fix overly formal phrasing or generic transitions.
- Claude for drafting and editing passes
- Notion for storing the editorial brief template and past issues
- Mailchimp for sending (we use the free tier; our list doesn’t require more yet)
We looked at Beehiiv and Substack. Both are good products. We stayed with Mailchimp because the list was already there and migrating wasn’t worth the time.
The editorial brief template
This is the document we fill in before writing anything. It has four fields:
- This week’s observation — one or two sentences in rough language. What happened? What did we notice?
- The practical thing — what’s the one actionable point? Who is it for?
- Tone this week — short instruction: “direct, slightly dry” or “warmer, client-facing” or “brief, we’re in a sprint”
- The pointer — link or source we want to include
Filling in this brief takes five minutes. Handing it to AI with a prompt that says “write our weekly agency newsletter using this brief and the voice below” gets us a working draft in under a minute. This is the AI workflow in practice — not magic, just a structured handoff.
Subject lines: the part that actually determines open rate
We’ve tested a lot of approaches. Here’s what’s worked for our list, which skews toward founders and marketing leads at small-to-mid businesses:
- Questions that identify a specific situation: “Is your brief too vague for AI to execute?” outperforms “How to brief AI content” every time
- Numbers when they’re real: “3 things we changed after the Q1 campaign audit” opens better than vague curiosity gaps
- Honest admissions: “We got this one wrong” consistently outperforms anything that sounds like a newsletter subject line
What’s never worked: subject lines that sound like blog post titles. The inbox is a different environment than a search results page. The subject line is a promise from a person, not a keyword.
AI helps us generate six options quickly. We pick one, sometimes edit it, and move on. The whole process takes two minutes.
Scheduling and consistency: the only metric that matters early on
In the first six months, the only metric we tracked was whether we sent it every week. Open rate, click rate, list growth — all of those come later and all of them depend on showing up first.
We use a simple Friday deadline. The brief is drafted on Wednesday or Thursday. AI draft comes back same day. Light edit Thursday or Friday morning. Send Friday afternoon Helsinki time, which lands at a reasonable hour for our Finnish and European readers.
The AI workflow has meant we’ve missed the deadline exactly twice in eight months. Both times were during unusual weeks (one client crisis, one team illness). Without AI in the loop, we estimate we’d have skipped four or five issues by now, and each missed week is harder to recover from than people expect.
Consistency is a moat. It’s unglamorous and it takes longer to pay off than anyone wants. But for a small agency building an owned audience, it’s the most reliable thing we’ve found.
What we’d change if we were starting now
A few things we’d do differently with the benefit of hindsight:
- Start the brief template earlier. The first eight issues were written without a template. Looking back at them, they’re inconsistent in tone and variable in length. A template from day one would have made the archive more useful as a content source.
- Build the AI prompt from issue one. We developed our voice prompt around issue twelve. The earlier issues needed more editing because we were figuring out how to give the model useful direction. Now we have a prompt that reliably gets us 80% of the way there.
- Repurpose more aggressively. Each newsletter issue can become a LinkedIn post, a short-form video script, or a seed for a longer blog post. We do this now as part of our AI automation workflow but we should have started it sooner.
Should your agency have a newsletter?
If you have something specific to say — something grounded in your actual work, your actual clients, your actual opinions about the industry — yes. A newsletter is one of the few owned channels where that kind of specificity actually gets rewarded.
If you don’t have that yet, starting a newsletter won’t create it. The tool doesn’t generate the perspective. Spend time figuring out what your agency actually believes and what it’s actually seeing before you commit to a weekly send.
For us, the newsletter works because we have a point of view: AI should reduce production friction without replacing the human judgment that makes marketing work. That’s something we can write about every week because it shows up in the work every week.
If you’re thinking about a newsletter and want a second opinion on your format or workflow, we’re happy to take a look.