Email Campaign Brief

A Claude Agent Skill that walks a marketer through producing a tight, opinionated email campaign brief in a guided interview — then hands back a clean Markdown, Word, or HTML document.

🌐 getdyspatch.github.io/email-campaign-brief — what it does, and a one-click download.

The brief is deliberately short (1.5 pages or less). A long brief is usually a tell that the strategy isn't clear yet, so the skill pushes back on vague goals, fuzzy audiences, and multi-idea messaging until each section actually lands.

📄 Preview the output — assets/brief_template.md shows the full structure of a generated brief, section by section.

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What it does

Ask Claude to brief an email campaign and the skill runs a short interview, section by section, producing a brief that aligns copy, design, dev, QA, legal, and stakeholders on what the work must do and must include. It covers the strategy a generic creative brief would (Background, Goal, Audience, Challenge, Opportunity, Single Minded Idea, Proof Points, Mandatories, Timing, Measurement) plus the email-specific details that cause most last-minute rework:

• Sender name & reply-to, message type, and KPIs (Primary / Secondary / Diagnostic)
• Production path, assets (existing vs. net-new), and testing/QA flags
• UTM tracking — always included, with sensible defaults proposed if you shrug
• Suppression / exclusion lists — the "wait, we sent it to who?" safeguard
• Legal & compliance by recipient region (CAN-SPAM, CASL, GDPR, CCPA, …)
• Localization — locales, translation rounds, per-locale legal and goal rollup
• Per-email mini-sections for multi-email sequences, including exit conditions

It works for a single send or a multi-email sequence (welcome series, nurture, launch + reminders, abandonment, re-engagement, and more).

What you get

• A finished brief in Markdown (default), Word (.docx), or HTML — your choice, remembered for next time.
• Optional extras you can accept or skip:
  • Recommendations pass — 1–3 research-backed, brief-specific suggestions for how the campaign could land harder.
  • Sample email — a content-block table (header, hero, body, CTAs, footer) with directional draft copy tuned to your audience.

Installation

This is a standard Agent Skill — a directory containing SKILL.md. Install it wherever your agent looks for skills.

Claude Code (skills live in ~/.claude/skills/):

git clone https://github.com/<your-org>/campaign-brief-skill.git
cp -r campaign-brief-skill ~/.claude/skills/email-campaign-brief

Or use a packaged release: download the email-campaign-brief-<version>.skill file (a zip), then unzip it into your skills directory:

unzip email-campaign-brief-<version>.skill -d ~/.claude/skills/

The unpacked folder must be named email-campaign-brief (matching the skill name). Restart your agent if it caches the skill list.

Usage

Once installed, you don't invoke anything special — just describe what you're doing and the skill triggers itself. For example:

• "Write a brief for my Black Friday email."
• "Help me scope a 3-email welcome series."
• "I need a creative brief for a product launch email."
• "Brief my team on this campaign."

Want to see the format before committing? Ask for a sample and the skill returns an annotated blank template instead of running the interview:

• "Show me what a brief looks like."
• "Give me the brief template."
• "What info do I need to gather for an email brief?"

How the interview flows

1. Picks up where you left off. If you've briefed campaigns before, it reuses what it knows about your brand, ESP, compliance scope, owners, and output format instead of re-asking.
2. Sets the mode. Conversational or batched, single email or sequence, single-locale or multi-locale, and whether light web research is allowed.
3. Gathers the brief, pushing for specifics — a quantitative Goal with a timeframe, one persona, a Single Minded Idea of ≤8 words.
4. Offers recommendations and a sample email (both optional).
5. Shows you the full draft inline and iterates until you're happy — then produces the file.

Repository layout

The skill is plain Markdown; only SKILL.md is always in context, with the rest pulled in on demand.

Path	Purpose
SKILL.md	Entry point and the step-by-step interview flow.
references/section_guide.md	What a "good" answer looks like for each section, with examples.
references/email_specifics.md	Detail on the email-only elements (production, localization, UTMs, compliance, …).
assets/brief_template.md	The structural template the final brief is assembled from.
assets/sample_brief_template.md	Annotated blank template returned when you ask for a sample.

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Development

Tooling is plain Node (ESM) with zero npm dependencies, driven by package.json:

Command	What it does
npm test	Run the validation suite (node --test). Enforces the Agent Skills spec: description ≤ 1024 characters, name format/length, optional compatibility ≤ 500 characters, and that every referenced references//assets/ file exists.
npm run validate	The same checks as a readable ✓/✗ report.
npm run bump -- patch|minor|major|<x.y.z>	Bump the version in package.json (the source of truth) and sync it into SKILL.md frontmatter metadata.version.
npm run package	Build dist/email-campaign-brief-<version>.skill (a zip). Validates first and refuses to package a failing skill.
npm run build	npm test then npm run package.

Packaging requires the zip binary (apt install zip / brew install zip). The packaged .skill ships only SKILL.md, references/, and assets/ — the tooling (package.json, scripts/, tests/, dist/) is excluded.