Email marketing with AI: 4 free skills, step by step

You know you should email your list. Then you open a blank draft and send nothing for another month. Or you ask a chatbot for "a welcome email" and get one that sounds like every other welcome email.

AI helps with email marketing, but not with one button. It helps with the slow parts: deciding what to send, writing a sequence that hangs together, and cleaning the copy before a real person reads it.

This guide does not promise opens, clicks or sales. Nothing here was measured on a real list. It shows four free, open-source skills, what each one does according to its own files, and one catch for each.

New to skills? Start with how to install a skill.

Step 1: Decide what you will send

Most email programs stall on the plan, not the writing. Content Calendar (MIT, by mohitagw15856) builds a calendar from a few facts about your brand. It asks for your audience, your main goal, your channels, how often you post and for how long.

If you do not give it themes, it derives three or four content pillars from your product description. Then it builds a weekly table: date, pillar, topic, format, channel and an opening hook. It flags one or two posts a week as high priority and adds a repurposing idea for each one. One of its own examples is turning a LinkedIn article into a newsletter section.

Good for: a newsletter that keeps skipping weeks because nobody decided what goes in it.

Catch: it plans across channels, so tell it plainly that email is the main channel. Otherwise you get a social calendar with a newsletter bolted on.

Step 2: Write the whole sequence, not one email

Email Campaign Skill (MIT, by mohitagw15856) writes complete email sequences: welcome flows, launches, lead nurture and win-back emails for people who went quiet. Before it writes, it asks for the goal, the audience, the offer, the number of emails, the tone and the sender name.

If you do not pick a length, it uses defaults from its file. Onboarding is four emails over seven days, sent on day 0, 1, 3 and 7. A launch is three: teaser, launch day, last chance. Re-engagement is three: a gentle nudge, a value reminder, a final offer.

For every email you get a subject line plus an A/B variant, preview text, the body, one call to action and a short note on why that email exists. Its rules are simple. One call to action per email. Preview text must add something, not repeat the subject. Each email must make sense on its own, because some people miss the earlier ones.

Good for: anyone setting up a welcome or launch sequence for the first time.

Catch: the file says subject lines under 50 characters "perform best on mobile" but gives no source. Treat it as a house rule, not a measured fact. The skill writes the copy. It does not send anything, so you still paste it into your own email tool.

Step 3: Make it sound like you

AI drafts tend to share the same phrases, and readers notice. Voice preserving rewriter (MIT, by conorbronsdon) rewrites text to remove those patterns while keeping your voice, facts and structure.

Its file is strict about what it must not touch. It keeps quantities, URLs and conditions as they were, and leaves quotes, code blocks and tables alone unless you ask. It also keeps passages that already sound human.

Good for: emails you drafted with AI and now have to sign with your own name.

Catch: this skill is one part of a set. Its first instruction points to the rules in a sibling skill, avoid-ai-writing, in the same repo. Install the set, not just this one file, or it has no rules to follow.

Step 4: Check the list before a big send

Bad addresses bounce, and bounces hurt your sender reputation. Email Verification (MIT, by gooseworks-ai) checks whether an address is valid and can receive mail before you send.

It runs the check through the Hunter or Tomba APIs and returns one of four statuses: valid, invalid, accept_all or unknown. Its own table says what to do with each. Send to valid. Do not send to invalid. Send with caution to accept_all. Check unknown by hand.

Good for: an old list you have not mailed in a long time, before you send to all of it.

Catch: it needs a GooseWorks account. The setup reads a key from ~/.gooseworks/credentials.json, and every address you check goes to an outside service. Make sure your privacy policy allows that before you upload subscriber emails. The file is also honest that "valid" does not guarantee delivery, and "unknown" does not mean invalid.

What stays with you

A sensible order: plan a month with Content Calendar, write the sequence with Email Campaign Skill, clean the drafts with Voice preserving rewriter, and run Email Verification before any large send to an old list.

None of these skills know your readers, why they signed up, or which offer you can actually deliver. That part stays with you. What they remove is the blank draft.