5 Claude Skills That Run a Shopify Marketing Team
By Brendan Gillen, Founder & AI SpecialistPublished · Updated · 4 min read
In short
A Claude skill is a stored recipe for a repeatable task. Five run my marketing: email campaigns, brand intelligence, ad copywriting, blog writing, and SEO audits. Build your own with the TEACH framework (Task, Explain, Actions, Connect, Hone), start in draft-for-approval mode, then schedule it once it is reliable.
I run my Shopify brand with two humans. The rest is AI. Over the past few months I trained Claude to be the marketing team: SEO, blog posts, website optimisation, ad creative, email campaigns. It even builds new skills to train itself. In the last 30 days sales rose 21% while I did less. The mechanism is Claude skills. Here is what they are, the five I run, and the framework for building your own.
What a Claude skill is
A skill is a recipe. You give Claude a task, the ingredients (connectors, templates, brand data), a method (the steps) and you refine it until the result tastes right. From then on, you ask Claude to follow the recipe and it does the task the same way every time. No rewriting prompts.
Not all recipes are equal. A skill from an average chef makes an average cake. The goal is a Michelin-star skill: specific steps, the right connectors, your brand's voice, and a test that proves it worked.
I package my skills as a plugin in Cowork rather than loose skills. Every time I build or improve one on my own store, the plugin ships it to Academy members, so they never rebuild what I have already made.
The five skills that run the marketing
- Email marketing campaign. Asks the goal, the campaign type, the product and the deadline, checks Klaviyo so it does not repeat a past campaign, then drafts the emails on our framework: four emails over two weeks, launch, educate, proof, sell. It can push them into Klaviyo.
- Brand intelligence. The skill the others lean on. It researches the market, competitors, offers and customers and writes a brand profile. A full build takes about 25 minutes; a quick grab takes two. When another skill needs brand context, it calls this one automatically.
- Ad copywriting. Headlines and primary text for Meta from a landing page, in the brand voice.
- Blog writer. Research, write, insert products and publish posts that rank in AI search. There is a full guide to this one.
- SEO audit, competitor analysis and UGC scripts. Each a repeatable task that used to need a specialist.
Watch what happens when one skill needs another. I ran the email campaign skill on a new product launch ("caramel coffee"). It realised it had no brand information, pulled in the brand intelligence skill, offered a full build or a quick grab, scanned the store, and then wrote four emails with hero image notes, body copy and calls to action. That is a marketing team talking to itself: the brand person briefs the email person.
How to build your own: the TEACH framework
Every skill follows the same structure, so we built a skill that builds skills. Run it and it asks five questions:
| Letter | Question | Example: reply to product reviews |
|---|---|---|
| Task | What is the one repeatable task? What phrase triggers it? | "Reply to product reviews" |
| Explain | What is the outcome? What are the steps? | Log into Shopify. Check Judge.me for new reviews. Approve positive ones. Reply to them. Send me a list of negative reviews to handle. |
| Actions | Any templates, tone rules or examples? | Always friendly, helpful and thankful. |
| Connect | Which tools does it need? | Shopify (Judge.me via the browser). |
| Hone | How will we test it and know it worked? | Run on the last five reviews and draft replies for approval. |
If you are not sure what the steps are, write down what you do yourself the next time you do the task. That list is the method.
Build it draft-first, then trust it
The skill builder shows you a brief before it writes anything: trigger, steps, connectors, test. It asked whether replies should post automatically or be drafted for approval. For a new skill, always choose draft for approval. Run it, look at what it produced, tweak the skill, run it again. Once it is reliable, let it post, then put it on a schedule.
In the video the new skill opened Chrome, logged into Shopify, opened Judge.me, found one unpublished review, drafted five replies ("Thanks so much Lynn, really glad the jig is helping you get a consistent pour") and, after I said yes, published the review and posted the replies. I did not touch the mouse.
What to build first
Any task you do more than once a week that follows the same steps: review replies, customer service triage, the weekly performance summary, product descriptions for new arrivals, alt text on new images. Start with one, get it to Michelin standard, schedule it, then build the next. You can run several skills at once, and you do not need to watch them.
Members get my marketing and operations skills as plugins inside EcomOS, and the Elite Team builds store-specific skills with you. If you want the bigger picture first, read how I run 80% of my store with Claude.
