Paperboy
Posts
AI Won't Replace Your Designers

AI Won't Replace Your Designers

Train them, don't replace them

Fil from Bedford
March 27, 2025 • Reading time: 5 minutes

Yo! Paperboy here 🗞️

Today’s Golden Nugget: 5 powerful words

“Did you enjoy this email?"

Most people assume the brands emailing them are mega brands.

Brands that don’t care about them. Who don’t want their feedback.

They assume any survey they fill out goes into a pile of trash in the corner of the office that an intern cleans out once every 2 years.

Don’t be a mega brand.

At the bottom of your next email ask your customers “Did you enjoy this email?” You can add “Reply directly to this email - our CEO reads and replies to every message.” Or even “We’re looking for feedback on how to improve”.

The feedback will transform your brand’s approach to email 👀

I’m going down a rabbit hole.

If you’ve been reading Paperboy for a while, you know I haven’t posted in 2 weeks (sorry).

It’s because I’m going down a deliverability rabbit hole.

I've been talking to deliverability people much smarter and more experienced than me. People who've run email at companies like Disney & IBM (think billions of sends) and founders who built some of the biggest software in the email space.

Why?

I noticed a ton of my readers have a similar problem:

It’s getting harder and harder to weed out fake emails in your email account.

So to fix that I’m building out a cool new deliverability funnel. It goes beyond traditional segmentation and layers on technology to audit your emails in real-time.

Next week I’ll share:

How to clean out fake incoming emails to avoid bounces
How to do a full list clean properly
How to monitor campaigns and get notified of any issues

I’ll show you my full tech funnel and how to set it up (for free).

Most solutions in this space cost a fortune and are super complex to set up. I’m going to change that.

Stay tuned…

If this is of interest to you, please reply and ask me any questions or share your experience. I’m trying to gather as much feedback as possible to refine this solution.

In the meantime, I suggest setting up Google Postmaster if you haven’t already. Every expert I’ve spoken to tells me to do that first. It’s basically google analytics for email deliverability.

Today’s Issue: ChatGPT vs. Your Design Team

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've seen ChatGPT's new photo editing capabilities that dropped this week.

My phone's been blowing up with founders asking me this one question:

"Is it time to fire our designers?"

My response? Absolutely not.

We're actually doubling down and planning to hire MORE designers.

Here's why:

Great design requires something AI still doesn't have - taste.

AI is a powerful tool, but it has a fatal flaw: it creates "good enough design." It's technically correct, but emotionally empty. Your customers will notice the difference.

My team is taking a different approach:

Training our design team on AI image-gen tools
Building AI/agentic processes for the boring stuff (exporting, background removal)
Letting designers experiment

Note that we're not demanding 3x more output.

We're not expecting overnight quality improvements.

So what are we expecting? Simple.

With AI, our designers can ditch the tedious tasks and focus on what they do best: creating kickass emails customers actually want to open.

Don't think "how can I cut costs?"

Think "how can I supercharge my team?"

A designer with AI tools is your secret weapon. Not an expense to cut.

Meme of the Week

That’s all for now,
Paperboy 🗞

p.s. Did you like the newsletter? Hate it? Reply and tell me why! I read and reply to every message.

AfterSell - Upsells that drive AOV without hurting CVR

Alia Popups - Engaging popups that grow your list

FoxSell Bundles - Boost AOV using product bundling, mix & match, and more

I use all these sponsored tools for 7 and 8-figure brands at my agency. I would never promote a product I don’t personally use.