The Autonomous Marketer: How Solopreneur Pam Covarrubias’ Uses ActiveCampaign + AI to Power Email Campaigns

Just because you work as a solopreneur doesn’t mean you actually have to work alone — thanks to AI.

Looking to AI as a thought and accountability partner has been key for life and business coach, podcaster, and Spread Ideas Move People founder Pam Covarrubias.

“I realized as a solopreneur, as someone who didn't have a huge team or resources or even capital, I needed to figure out ways to use technology to help me get things done better, faster, and more efficiently,” she explains.

Covarrubias first discovered the benefits of AI as a solo business owner long before ChatGPT’s launch into the world a few years ago. As a DIY podcaster back in 2017, she used a tool called Auphonic—“it wasn’t called AI back then, it was just this magical audio leveling tool [for podcasters]”—to help her produce a professional-quality show each week.

Today, Covarrubias has earned AI certifications and leverages the technology for her business, including creating a 100+ page super prompt and custom GPTs to help organize her thoughts, plan, write, and run seamless email autonomous marketing campaigns with ActiveCampaign.

The result? Covarrubias’ chosen AI tool, Claude, knows her and her business intimately, and can offer up personalized suggestions, workflows, and motivation to keep her email campaigns running smoothly.

What this all looks like in practice for Covarrubias is a “super prompt” she built with her business coach, Amber,  to help her create content for marketing campaigns for her business.

“I have a super prompt—a Google doc—that’s about 142 pages long at this point,” she says. “It took me about three months to build and continues to grow and evolve.”

Here’s what the document entails, designed to help AI tools like Claude and other custom GPTs deeply know and understand Covarrubias’ brand background, capabilities, voice, and style. In some cases, the doc is knowledge for a Custom GPT. In others, it informs Claude skills. It includes:

✅ Methodologies and frameworks used in her coaching practice.

✅ A detailed breakdown of Covarrubias’ ideal customer: first-generation women and femmes (i.e., first to go to college, first to start a business, daughters of immigrants).

✅ Her constraints, including marketing tactics she’d never use.

✅ History of Covarrubias’ podcast and business background—plus transcripts from her show.

✅ Writing samples, including emails that resonated with her audience.

And more—this is a living document that Covarrubias updates and adds to on a regular basis.

“It’s a lot of context,” Covarrubias explains. “It’s still not perfect, but [the output] gets me about 75-80% there when I’m writing.”

Covarrubias said as someone with a neurodiverse brain—she has ADHD—not starting with a completely blank page has been incredibly helpful to actually move projects along, including marketing campaigns.

“Once I built this document, it helped with my ever-changing ADHD mind. The biggest thing the doc does is it gives me guardrails to my wild mind so I don't make things up as I go,” she says.

“I go to my cowriting tool GPT and I say, ‘OK, I have this campaign I’m working on. Let’s write the first email together,’” she shares. “And it gives me a starting point and I change things, remove words, add storytelling—I get it to 100%.”

Keep reading for a detailed look into one of Covarrubias’ latest campaigns.

As Covarrubias’ super prompt demonstrates, AI is only as powerful as the information you give it to work with.

While AI can definitely serve as a time-saver, Covarrubias believes that most people aren’t laying enough groundwork before expecting business-changing results.

“I don't see AI as a shortcut to my work,” she shares. “I see AI as a thought partner. I don't ever expect AI to do my work for me. It would never be able to coach it like me, for example.”

Instead, because of the impressive amount of groundwork Covarrubias has laid, she creates a solid foundation. She says she sometimes spends 20 minutes or more to create a super detailed prompt, but the output is so much better than if she had shared less information, saving time and energy in the long run.

“The one thing I often say is ‘the result of your delegation is as good as the quality of your instructions,’” she shares. “I keep that in mind when I'm working and planning campaigns and doing all the things to make sure that I'm investing enough in the front to make sure that I don't have to spend a lot of time in the back.”

In the fall of 2025, Covarrubias decided to run her first-ever Black Friday, Cyber Monday marketing campaign, tied in with her birthday and the anniversary of her podcast.

She was skeptical because there’s so much noise in people’s inboxes during the sales-heavy week, but she still wanted to experiment and turned to AI, specifically, Claude, which she believes serves more as a philosopher and is better for thinking and evaluating than other tools, with her idea.

“I re-shared my super prompt (the 100+ page brand background document) and explained I wanted to do a campaign for a specific version of my client,” Covarrubias says. She wanted to do a Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale for her course “Unmute Yourself” positioned as a self-improvement challenge.

Here’s the full language of the prompt she shared to help get her campaign planning started:

Covarrubias and AI teamed up to figure out the timeline and technical aspects of the campaign.

“Because my prompt includes all my tech, AI knows that I work with ActiveCampaign, that my checkout cart is ThriveCart, that my course tool is MemberVault,” she says. “It already knows. I don't have to explain it.”

Claude even offered up a list of tags to add to ActiveCampaign in the process, which Covarrubias says saved a ton of time brainstorming and figuring out workflows.

Here’s what Claude recommended, which Pam says was a great start, but she still made some tweaks. Another reminder that AI is a tool and can’t replace your human brain.

“The tool isn't perfect, but it’s a good starting point,” she says. “This is why I think discernment is very important when you work with AI. Your humanness is super key. We refined the campaign together, and then once we had the timeline and the foundation of the tech, it was writing time.”

Covarrubias and Claude spent about a week writing a total of 18 emails, designed to be sent over the course of three weeks, and sent at exactly the best time because she relies on Predictive Send, a powerful feature that maps the optimal send time for each recipient.

By week two, Covarrubias felt burnt out and told Claude, “Hey, I don’t think I want to continue the campaign. Let’s end it here.”

Claude jumped into partner mode, and encouraged Covarrubias to keep going.

The tool motivated her by saying: “You have one week left. You're more than halfway through. Let's just push through it and remember that one of the things that is important in your super prompt is to have data to make decisions later. If you don't complete this project, we're not going to have enough data. And you would never tell your clients to leave something undone, would you, Pam?”

This little bit of light bullying was what Covarrubias needed to hear, and she pushed through to complete the campaign.

The campaign presented some wins and also some learning opportunities.

When the campaign was complete, Covarrubias went into ActiveCampaign to grab the stats from her efforts and fed them into Claude to help evaluate what went well and what could be improved upon for future campaigns. =

You can see in the screenshot below that ActiveCampaign’s Active Intelligence offered up some thoughts and ideas based on campaign data.

Covarrubias asked Claude: “Analyze which specific campaigns had higher click rates to replicate successful elements.”

Claude provided Covarrubias with a helpful analysis that allowed her to look at the data in a fresh, new way she hadn't considered before. She had been super focused on the number of unsubscribes, but Claude provided information that helped her to better understand the data from her emails.

In addition to crunching the numbers, Covarrubias’ cothinking with Claude (above) helped her realize this particular campaign wasn’t targeted to the right audience — an important lesson for next time.

In the case of Covarrubias’ holiday campaign, the AI tool served as a:

👏 Logistics helper

👏 Thought partner

👏 Cheerleader

👏 Analyst

Working with AI as a thought partner truly began to click when Covarrubias focused her efforts on two tactics:

1. Smart prompt engineering.
2. Providing AI the information/context it truly needed to be impactful from the start.

For those looking to run their own campaign with the help of AI, Covarrubias advises knowing the goal and desired outcome of your campaign and continuing to come back to that time and time again. AI isn’t perfect, and it can sometimes take you off track if you aren’t clear about your goals.

“Working with AI is pretty amazing, and the work upfront is a worthy investment to ensure future results reflect brand alignment and congruency,” she shares.

Covarrubias says she can now make data-driven decisions and build a solid warm-up campaign before she even starts selling next time.

Since the campaign ended a few months ago, Covarrubias has taken her AI use to even greater heights to help her effectively run her businesses.

“I've built projects inside Claude with specific skills based originally on my super prompt, but they now do specific things for each part of my business, like write newsletters, intro/outro for podcast episodes, write sales pages, write email promos, and more,” she shares.