All right, we do have a pretty packed schedule today so I'm going to let Ashley and day kick us off right away. Welcome everyone we're so glad that you're here to join us, Ashley and day Do you want to get started. Yes, we do. Let me make sure I'm sharing the right thing. Hello everyone. It's so nice to see some faces. I know we've got a big group. Um, I hope you can see our slides, if you've got your camera on if you give me a nod you can see our slides yes great and see them yes, beautiful. You are in advanced email strategy and writing, and we have a two hour workshop for you today with no breaks. There's no breaks. So, if you need to take a break, you take a break. This is recorded, no call pass needed. Yep, you take care of that. We are, yeah, we're really excited we're going to try to keep this interactive, and please feel free, feel free to meet your email friends in the chat. You don't often get a group of people who want to learn about email all together in one room so please make friends. Use the chat to, you know, comment on what you're seeing or ask questions, because we have each other to bounce off of when one of us isn't speaking, the other will will be in the chat. Anything else we need to start with this morning now okay these are what our headshots look like. Here's another picture of us. And Dave, do you want to just share why we're why we're here why we're talking about email. Why are we talking about email so Ashley and I are very serious about email because we've been doing it for a while. As part of our jobs, and as some kind of consulting work that we do with nonprofits and educational institutions across the world really. And what we've noticed over time, working with email through our careers is that what we, we, what we do works and at first we didn't know why and then we started digging into why. And then we realized when we started digging into why and we got to watch each other speak that what we had was very complimentary that Ashley had an approach that was very behavioral based and the science of the brain and how people think and behave. And I had an approach that was a bit more tactical like how okay but how do you get them to do the thing and what do they need to hear or see in order to be compelled to take the action so together. We have a lot of content for you that starts all the way at how do you, how do you even get on their radar to how do you get them to take the action you want them to take. And why do we do this. We want better email for everybody has a soft spot in our hearts. We think email is the ugly duckling of the marketing mix unfairly, and it shouldn't be. And so we want to change that. Sure do. Well, thank you all for having an interest in email, we're excited to get this going, and we want to start out with an interactive poll. So I already see Sarah's got her phone up if you have, if you have another device handy I find it's handy to just go ahead and scan the QR code. And when you do that you're going to be right where we want you to be. But you can also use your browser. So, if you're right there in your browser, I want you to type in slido.com. And when you go to slido.com like I'm about to do. You're going to type in the code inbox, and then you'll be exactly where I want you to be. So hopefully now you're all seeing the Slido website. If you don't have the code go ahead and scan that to join us or go to slido.com and use the code inbox, and we just have two questions for you to get things started. Our first question is a little bit of reflection. So we want you to think of your own email inbox, that might be pinging away right now, your own email inbox when you think of your email inbox, what words come to mind. All caps. Nice. You are all very fast. Look at we have some organized people. So if you see a word that you like and you're you want to double down on that you can type it in exactly as you see it and it'll make it bigger. And if words aren't coming to you and you want to use an emoji expression to express yourself. An emoji can be a thousand words. Here we go. Oh the melty face is growing. And I'd like to kick off these workshops with this question and we have asked thousands of marketers at this point this question, and there is a trend. Overwhelming tends to be in the top three words we see. We also see chaotic or chaos. Do we see that here? Yep, I see chaos over here. Chaos sometimes is leading. Some kind of expression some of these emojis that you're seeing tend to also show up there in the top three and in this group we've got overwhelming we've got cluttered but we also have organized people, which I can really appreciate. The unsubscribe is popping up here there's too many. Yeah, I mean, what else are you seeing in here Day? I mean I love the emojis and all these expressions that are a little bit whimsical too right it's not a little bit wild in there. See, too professional. Too fast. Yikes. Too furious. So, so yeah, we, you know, we like to frame this we like to, we like to take you to a dark place first to get you started, and we like to take you all the way down to what it feels like to be in your email inbox, but what we want to say is that this is, this is what it feels like today in 2025 to try to get to receive email and this is how it is for us and this is how how it is for our readers to. Okay, one more question for you all before we get going. And that is to tell us what your biggest email marketing challenges if you could pick one today that's top of mind. So, your biggest email marketing challenge, we want to make sure that we tailor this workshop to what is on your mind. Already seeing getting people to open clicks deliverability oversaturation getting email addresses conversions. Convincing people to get involved. Click opens. Spam. Not knowing what to say sometimes appealing to Gen Z. Getting all the content in this one, how to use a subject line, putting all the content in a small space tailoring email to reach the right recipients, getting people to open. Nice and slide is doing a really nice job kind of categorizing for us here, they think that our biggest email marketing challenge is people reaching multiple audiences, how to not come across as a scam. How much is too much. I think we'll, we'll address all of these things or most of them appealing to individuals 70 plus creating effective subject line not being too wordy managing stakeholders need for better calls to action the bots. Yes, the robots have entered the inbox. Getting responses, what are we doing with the subject lines. How, you know, how do we get opens and clicks. We're managing unsubscribes. The content, the attention segmentation deliverability. What are we going to do with links, all of these things. How to not make it sound like a canned email. Continually generating fresh content we're going to talk about that. People say they never get their email but it shows up that they opened it might be a robot might be the robots under names. Great. So, like we said, lots of content for you today. Use the chat. We will address questions there. And I want to get us going. So thank you all. This is super helpful for us to get us back over to the slides and share a little bit about what we are going to teach today I'm going to kick us off and share data points and kind of the state of the email communication environment, so that you both understand current state, where we're at. And also have some evidence to back up the tactics that we're going to teach you, because if you need to change things in your organization, you might be met with some pushback and we want to make sure that you have data points that you can you can point to in your presentation to so that you don't just have to say well Ashley and Day said so, but that you have some other research that you can point to and metrics that you can point to so we're going to start there. And then we're going to talk about how do we get the you know the marketer's dream, how do we get the right message to the right person at the right time. And I'm going to describe an exercise that I do with my team every quarter so that you're able to generate that fresh content and stay ahead and stay really audience centric. And then I will hand it over to Day, who is going to spend the second half of this workshop teaching us how to write and how to use all of the real estate that we have in the inbox and in our emails to make sure that we are optimizing them to their fullest potential. So lots and lots to cover. I'm going to get us going. Part one, why email matters, what is the current state of this email environment and some email science to back that up. So here are just a few data points that we like to share to really establish where email performance is in 2025. It is working. So if you are feeling like it is not working for you. We've got the tactics to turn that around and help make sure that email does work for you. So that big ROI number that you see front and left, not center. That is, you know, that is proof that investment in your email program, it will bring you a return on your investment. This is across all industries. For every $1 invested in email marketing across all industries, we're seeing a return of $36. And that goes up even higher in like a retail space. They're seeing $46, $45, $46 for every dollar invested. So email does work. It is where the conversions are happening. And we often are, you know, looking at not just email programs, but all like full suite of marketing programs, integrated marketing programs. And I want you to think about where you are investing your time and where the return is. Because we do see a lot of our marketing teams investing a lot in social media. And it's not to say that we shouldn't be investing in social media. But think about where that balance is because we're seeing three times the conversion rate in the inbox than that of paid media. It's also where our audiences want to receive information. I'm the senior, what am I, I'm the Senior Director of Advancement Marketing at Cornell. And we just surveyed our entire alumni base and over 95% of the responses said we want to be communicated by email. Number one channel that they want to be communicated on. Number two channel was e-newsletters. So they want newsletters, they want email communication from us. And we see this across all sorts of industry reports where they're asking audiences what their communication channel preferences are. Donors are preferring this not only for how they receive appeals from us, but also how they receive updates after making a gift. Prospective students want email, parents want email. It's across all channels. So we're, that's why we love focusing on the channel, it gets us results, and it is what our audiences are telling us that they want. So let's start with the big landscape. Okay, I'm going to ground us with this really large number. This data set is the number of emails that are sent and received, both personal and professional emails sent and received worldwide, not every year, every single day. And this study was done and projected out into this year, into 2025. They didn't predict or know that we would have chat GPT in our hands in this same timeframe. So we believe the curve is even more dramatic than this. And we've done the math too. We've done the math to say, to see what does that number really mean for everybody with an internet connection in the world? That means that every single person with an internet connection is receiving 70 emails a day. And if that tracks for you, you know, you can imagine somebody who is a professional getting significantly more than that. And so it's a giant number. This is what we're dealing with. If for you, if you feel like you have been getting more email than ever, yes, yes, you have. And here is your proof that that is what is happening. The other data set that I love to look at is just how email behavior has evolved. And I really like to get nostalgic and reminisce about, you know, my first email account as a teen and, you know, the, you've got mail pop up and how exciting it was to get an email from somebody. And boy, those days are gone. That is like a sweet, sweet memory. But I can also think back to even just my very first professional job out of college and my relationship with email and my job at that point was, you know, coming into an office, sitting down at a desktop computer. I think I had email on my phone, on my BlackBerry Pearl, but I would definitely wasn't like doing email on my phone in those days. I would sit down at my desktop and read all 12 emails that I had. And then I would go and do my job, which included like a landline phone and talking to humans in a reception area. And it is just a different world now in the amount of volume that we're getting, which we just saw, but also when email came into our hands and our mobile devices, our behavior with email changed. But what hasn't changed is how we're writing, how we're designing these emails to meet this moment and these behaviors. So what you're seeing in this data set is a situation in which workers in the United States are checking their personal email. And it is, you know, it's fun to see the generational breakdown here because it just shows you that millennials like me are more comfortable checking email on the toilet than my parents are. But it also is just showing that like we are checking email all the time and we're doing it, I think, to keep up with it and to get through it and delete it. And also that we're checking our email in these like very distracted and sometimes very intimate spaces like the bathroom or in bed, while we're watching TV, while we're having a conversation with somebody else. And we don't like the driving one. No, millennials bad, not while driving. But you can see that we're in a totally different, you know, more distracted environment, higher volume. So what are we going to do about it? I want to show you my aha moment. This is the thing that really like lit up my brain when I was benchmarking with three other Ivy League institutions in 2020. We were all using the same email tool and we wanted to compare our open and click rates with each other, you know, presumably similarly resourced institutions here, same email platform. And what we found was that we were doing really well. We were outperforming our peers, which is, you know, great. You know, I feel good about that. But I didn't know why. I couldn't understand why. These other institutions have very similar advancement programs to us. What were we doing at Cornell that was different? And I learned that our approach to our audience was different and the kind of content that we were delivering was different. The kind of sequencing of that content was different. And so you can see here, this was, again, 2020 prior to the robots entering and opening our emails in the inbox, really high click through rates, really, really strong, consistent open rates. But I wasn't competing with these other institutions for attention, right? Like, it's great that we're doing better than these other institutions. I knew in the inbox, I was competing with other nonprofits, industry news, thinking about, you know, our alumni audience being coming out of our institutions, going into their careers. They're now seeking other career resources through industry news and political emails. So I did some benchmarking, again, against what we were doing with our audiences at Cornell against these other industries. And again, I could see, great, we have a really strong open rate. Our audience is consistently opening our communication at a higher rate than any of these competitors. But I had a new metric to chase, which again, made me very excited to explore and do more research. And that is that industry news click through rate. Look at that thing, over 20% click through rate in industry newsletters. and why is that? It's because they deliver value. If you think about what an industry newsletter is, they are serving their audience, trying to help them in their career, and the content that they are providing is in service to that audience. These other industries, right, in the political emails, we know why their click-through rate is so terrible, right? It's such a stark comparison to the non-profits and educational institutions like ours. This is really where I started to hone in on what is the balance of communication that we're putting out, how much are we serving our audience, and how much are we asking of them? Because if you could think about across the spectrum, who is doing the most asking here, you know it's the political emails, right? Just think about what's happening in your inbox. Okay, so here's our first lesson. How do we break through all this noise? We know it's a noisy environment. We know behaviors have changed. Well, the only way we're going to break through the noise is if we have the trust of our readers. And so we like to start here because all of the fun tactics that we're going to show you, all the hacks that we show you at the end of this presentation, will not work unless your reader trusts the sender that they're getting an email from. So we're going to start with trust. How do we build that trust? How do we do it in the inbox? We have this really simple model for you to follow. It's the trust triangle. And this is from an article in the Harvard Business Review that I came across in a leadership context. But I couldn't help myself and translate this into marketing for all of our benefit. So what the authors say in this article is that the most trusting relationship has three core drivers of trust. And this is not new. This is not new. Like that part is not new research. Aristotle taught ethos, pathos, and logos for persuasion. This is the same thing here. It's authenticity, it's empathy, and it's logic. This is how human relationships are built. But what the authors say is that we have to have all three. We can't be weak in one of these areas. We have to have all three to have a strong relationship and the strong shape of the triangle. And if we're weak on any of them, we will have a wobbly triangle, which I think is very cute. But we don't want that. We want a strong relationship. And this is how you can apply that to your communication. So when you think about authenticity, I want you to think about having a voice. Having a voice in your communication. And in this more and more robotic world, we want this to be a human voice. It needs to sound human. It needs to be honest. We need to keep it real. Not only in just like keeping it real, like we are human beings on the other side of this email, but that we are meeting our audience in the moment where they are. And if we know the inbox is this overwhelming place, let's make sure that we're addressing that in the way that we talk, the way that we use our writing as marketers. We can get really excited about things. It's easy for us to get excited about things when we're writing. And we can get excited about things that are not exciting. And that's what we have to be careful in the authenticity piece. If anybody can poke a hole in that, we're going to lose them. We're going to get deleted. And so it's important to keep it real, to show emotion. And we're going to show you how you can use emojis to show emotion. And then the empathy side of the triangle, the next piece of this, is all about them. It's all about their feelings. It has really nothing to do with us. Empathy is all about them. And so we need to be able to anticipate their needs and be helpful and show up as, the email needs to show up as something that is serving them, even when it's an ask. So we need to anticipate their needs. We need to be invested in their success. And sometimes in the inbox, what somebody needs is an email that's going to put a smile on their face. If you are met with this overwhelm, if you're feeling like the melty face emoji, what if your institution was the one where every time they saw an email, my audience, every time they saw an email from Cornell, if they knew that it was going to put a smile on their face, if they were going to laugh, there's going to be something punny in there for them. They would open it every single time. So what can we do to anticipate how our audience is feeling? How can we meet them in the moment? How can we invest in their success? How can we show up to nurture that relationship that we have? The last piece of this is logic. We can be the most authentic, the most empathetic organization out there, but if people cannot follow our logic, we are going to lose them. So we have to have logic. It means being consistent. It's being consistent in how we show up, in our language, in our frequency, the timing of these things that we're sending. And every time we have a call to action, we need to make sure that the steps are really easy to follow. So we're going to do that. We're going to have all three. And as I kind of show some examples here, I'm going to show how we tie this back to the trust triangle. All right. So let's get into the marketer's dream. How do we get the right message to the right person, the right time? And I want you to know two things about email. Email can do two things for us. It can build relationships, and it can guide people to take an action. And I think we know that, and I think most institutions are using email to kind of guide people on this journey, or down this path, or in this... We're driving them to take action. That's the way I think most of us think about our email program. And so yes, we should be doing that. We should be using email to explain things. We should be using it to send timely reminders. We should be using it for those direct asks. But I want you to know that it can also be a program that builds relationships with your audience. And in fact, we need it to be both of these things. We have to have the relationship building. So we can use email to make connections, to connect the dots between what our institution is doing and how that relates to the lives of the people that we're communicating with. We can do that. We can use email to be entertaining, right? We can put smiles on faces. We can build relationships that way. We can show empathy, and we can add real value. But we need... We both can do this, and we need to do both of these things to have a really strong email program. So how do we create content that serves our audience? I'm going to start with this example, which is the Cornell Alumni Newsletter. We have been sending a newsletter to our audience every single week for the last five years. And this newsletter is for them. This is not an institutional messaging blast. This is an email that is designed for them. And the way we pull this email together is through a series of creative exercises. But then also, I'm going to show you a few ways that we kind of freed ourselves from the template that we were in prior to kind of fit this new initiative that's now five years old. But how we fit and how we transformed thinking about our traditional alumni newsletter into a newsletter that was for them. So the first thing that we do, and that is so helpful, is we do a quarterly brainstorm exercise where we think about our audience. We spend 90 minutes once a quarter, pull everybody together who communicates to that same audience. We all get on a Zoom room, and we time travel to the future, and we think about our audience for 90 minutes. And we brainstorm themes that we will leverage in the next quarter. So this helps us get an audience mindset, but it also helps us plan ahead. And I have found that if we do this exercise three months in advance, thinking about the quarter that's coming after, we have enough time to produce really awesome content that is for the audience and that is really relevant and timely for them. So that's the first thing, thinking about themes, thinking about our audience in that season of life that they're going to be in. The next thing is thinking about what is going to go in those, what news stories are going to go in the newsletter. And sometimes I like to think about the newsletter being much more letter than it is news. It's much more about what is for them that's in here, what value are we adding, and less of a broadcast news source. And one of the things we did that was a shift was rather than looking at what were the most recently published stories on our news site and picking three to put in the newsletter. Instead, our approach is what are the most relevant news stories that we can deliver to our audience. And sometimes those are stories that were published months ago, but are now part of the current, they're part of current events, as part of the current culture. And what we know about our audience is what they want from a news story is something that they can share with others. Something that, you know, my audience is full of Andy Bernard's. Something, you know, places, they want pieces that they can brag about. They want to be able to take a news story and tell somebody else about it. So it needs to be relevant to now. And sometimes, especially in higher education, especially at big research institutions, we're ahead of the more current news cycle in some ways. And so sometimes we have to kind of reach back farther to find the stories that are actually super relevant and timely now. So kind of freeing ourselves from just picking the most recent stories to instead picking the most relevant stories, we started to see an uptick in our click rate from that. We still share the most recent or the upcoming events. Those are still relevant to our audience. But the other two things that we did that were a shift were first having a go-to source for stock photography. Prior to this, we were reliant on our university library, photo library. And you can see this newsletter here has a very heavy fall theme to it. I would have thought like, oh, we need an apple picture for this newsletter. Let's get a student on the Ag quad holding an apple. We don't need that. Like all we need is a juicy looking apple to do the job for this newsletter. So freeing ourselves from that was so important because we were increasing the volume of the amount of emails that we were sending. And if anybody has combed through a university photography library, I don't need to say anymore. Like, you know that struggle to find the right photo. And when you do find the right photo, it's used a thousand times. So our go-to source for stock photography at Cornell is free pic. It's really good. Even with humans in it, they're not too stocky, too cringy. They're pretty good. And then the other thing was a go-to source for digital downloads because we found that the most clicked thing in every single newsletter was a little freebie that we were adding in there. And so early 2020, you know, it's a lot of Zoom backgrounds. It's a lot of these kind of like digital wallpapers and things. But you can see in this one, we've got a beginner's notebook to maple tree tapping, right? Like what kind of guides can we provide? What are the things that are not physical objects, but are like digital downloads that are actually tangible and useful for our audience that we can serve up in this newsletter every single week. And so our go-to source for digital downloads is Etsy. That is what we're creeping on at least once a quarter to find out what are people paying for as a digital download? What is trending? And we've gotten so many great ideas from like garden planners to bullet journals and all sorts of like printables and crafts and things that we can align with the season and meet our audience at the like most relevant time that they would need that little download. Okay. My next, this is my next tactic here. I want to talk about clickbait and I want to talk about clickbait for good. And at this point you're probably like, oh, that's why you have a high click rate. Ashley, you are a clickbaiter. And yes, yes. And for good reason, I'm going to tell you. For good reason, I'm going to tell you. So the strategy behind a clickbait strategy, like the reason behind this is that I am trying to create a habit with my reader. I'm trying to create a habit so that they subconsciously without even knowing it, when they are in this noisy email inbox and they see an email from their alma mater, I want them to think like before, before they're even consciously thinking there's something in there for me and I'm going to open that email. And there's probably something that I'm going to click on. And the only way that we can build that habit and that recognition in the inbox is by every single time we send an email to have something that's so irresistibly clickable in there that they start to build this habit and they start to build this muscle. So it's clickbait for good. I'm going to give you some examples of how we do this. The first is inline links. And the email that you're seeing here is an email example from our chief of police to the campus community, primarily to students. How do we get a Cornell safety email to be effective? And how do we get students to open and click on this thing every single time? Well, the trick with this one is the inline links. And you can see there are a lot of inline links in this email, but what you don't know until you start clicking is that these inline links are delightful. And so when you see, I think when I click through here, when you see something like use extra caution, because it's going to be winter and slippery, what you will find on the other side of that caution link is a funny meme. Imagine that you are, if you're really driving snow, pretend you're taking your grandma to church. There's a platter of biscuits and two gallons of sweet tea and glass jars in the backseat. She's wearing a new dress and holding a crockpot full of grady. Just funny. Again, like if the chief of police can do this, we can all do this. Here's another example. I'm talking about imposters here and the little meme that would show up. Now, some of these links are helpful resources, but a lot of them are just fun. And so what happens when you do this is people click every single link because they're just so curious and they want that smile put on their face. And so you can do this in your own communication. My favorite example from our alumni newsletter was a Groundhog Day issue. Groundhog Day happened on a Tuesday. We always send our newsletter on a Tuesday. And so we just peppered that thing with links to giphy.com. Doesn't even have to go back to your website. They're linking to Giphy with all sorts of gifs from the Groundhog Day movie and lots of clicks on that email. And then you see it in subsequent emails because they're just curious what could be behind this link. There might be something funny in there. So that's your first clickbait trick to use the inline links. The next one I want to show you is a quiz. People cannot help but click on a quiz. This is not fancy technology. This is four buttons that all go to the same place with the answer. So easy. The answer happened to be in an article. So now we're sharing a news article too at the same time. And so how many apple varieties were developed at Cornell? It's over 70. People cannot help but take a quiz to try to find the answer. Super easy. I already mentioned the digital downloads. When people see that, it's something for them. It's a gift. It feels like an added value. And then the last one that I want to show you is asking for instant feedback. Asking for feedback in your email. This is another one of these tricks. People cannot help but give you feedback. And so you can add the bottom of your email. Or maybe it's a bottom of like a new feature, a new section that you're offering. Let's just say you added student quotes in your newsletter this week. And you want to know did you like the student quotes? Or do you want to hear more from students? And you put the little thumbs up and the little thumbs down like I have on the slide. And you link each of them to a place that says thank you. And people cannot help but give you feedback. So what is happening is again we're building this click habit. And it's also helping your engagement metrics. It's helping your sender reputation. It's doing good for your email program. You can also do this just you know to engage your audience. Sometimes we'll do one like right before the holidays are kicking up. Are you ready for the holidays? And we'll put the thumbs up and thumbs down and link out to funny memes or gifs. And you know this shouldn't be treated as scientific especially if you're doing it with something funny on the other side because people will come back and they'll click the other one just to see what you put there. All right. So at this point sometimes I get a question like well what are what is what do these emails look like when we're trying to get people to do something for us? When we're when it's time for them to take an action what do we do? The same thing. We need to be consistent. We need to use the same voice. It needs to sound like it's coming from the same place otherwise we're going to lose trust. So this is an example of one of the Cornell Giving Day emails. I hope you can see how it relates to the newsletter that people get. We're using the emojis in the header in the same way. The voice is that same conversational voice. This button says let's go. And you can see in our solicitation results that you have here, that the metrics that we're turning out for giving emails look a lot like the metrics you would expect to see from a straight up engagement email. And this was a giving day probably three years ago now, $2.26 million raised from the email program in that year. So directly related to this program, really proud to say that the Cornell Giving Day event that happened two weeks ago raised $5.2 million online. I know you see the big number that's up there was over 10 million, but behind the scenes, those individual transactions that were happening online, $5.2 million raised. All right, so this is how we're doing it. Oh, let me show you where this is first before we click. I wanna call your attention to this PS statement that is in this email. And for those of you who said that one of your challenges is unsubscribes, this tactic is for you. You can see that the PS statement is the same size font as the rest of this communication. And we know that people read PS statements. And so we're not only using, we're putting this in a place that we know people will read and we're even emphasizing it by using the italics here. So I wanna show you this. This is not, this is an opt-out message and it is not in the six point unsubscribe font. And when we started implementing this tactic, we call our self-aware opt-out, we saw a huge drop in unsubscribes. And since we've been teaching this tactic, we have heard from folks who have implemented it that they've seen a 75% drop in unsubscribes by doing this. So this is definitely an empathy play. We know people are gonna read it. And so if you can imagine getting an email that you don't wanna get and you're frustrated, but you're looking at it and you see this statement, it kind of takes people off, like it takes the edge off, right? Because we're acknowledging that for that example, that our Giving Day program is a lot. Like we send a lot, hundreds of emails in a two week span. And we want people to know that if Giving Day is not their thing, they can opt out. We do not wanna bother with them if it's not their thing. So this is the statement you saw, is Giving Day not your thing? That's okay too. Opting out of Giving Day emails from the university as quick as easy will keep your inbox clear. And when people click to opt out of that, they're just opting out of the Giving Day campaign for that year and they're gonna get put back in next year. But they're not in that rage unsubscribed moment where they're gonna globally unsubscribe from everything that we're doing. The second one that you see there is what we will have on our email newsletter. Is this too much for your inbox? Let us know that you'd like to get less email. And that is sending people to a form. It's actually outside of our email ecosystem. We haven't baked it in yet. But it's a form that says, I wanna put my newsletter on pause till December 31st or till July or till June 30th. And they pick which date and they're, we remove them until that date and then we drop them back in on January 1 or July 1. It's really easy to maintain. Ash? Yeah. Can you explain how you maintain it? Folks are asking if you have preference management and how are you doing that? This is a tool that, it's just a form. And we will take anybody who submits that form and we'll put a blocking code on their profile essentially. And that's a blocking code just for that amount of time. And so we try to keep it with just these six month time, these six month timeframes to keep it manageable. And what we found is just putting the statement on there is enough to drop the unsubscribe rate. Very few people click through and take us up on this offer to pause. But we found like it really lowered the amount of people that were completely unsubscribing. And I had asked my team, if this is too manual for us and we need to bake it into our process, let's do that. And we've been getting in the way with just like this manual form for five years. It has not been too difficult. So really easy to manage. The last statement that you see on there is something that we would put on a different kind of solicitation outside of giving day. Are you unable to support Cornell financially at this time? We understand. Like that is such an important empathetic move on every single solicitation that comes out to know we understand you can pause this. Like we can stop soliciting you for six to 12 months with a simple click. Okay, I'm gonna give you the brainstorm exercise framework here. I mentioned it when we were talking about how we make content that is for them. And I mentioned that we do 90 minutes of this exercise once a quarter. We are flipping over to a new quarter next week. So my team has this on the calendar for Thursday next week. 90 minutes is on our calendar. We just set it for the whole year. The very first week of every quarter, we do this 90 minute exercise. I'm advancement marketing. So we invite everybody who talks to alumni, like you are welcome to join our brainstorm. We do it on Zoom because we know that's how we can get the most people together at one time in one place. And this is how it looks. We start with an introduction and icebreakers. And there is like most stuff that I do, there is science to back why this exercise is designed this way. In order to get real creative ideas, we need to flush all the obvious stuff out of our brains first. So the icebreaker is meant to flush obvious ideas out of our brains. So I do a very short introduction at the beginning of the brainstorm, mainly for people who have never been there with us before. And so next week I'll say, hey everybody, we are here to generate creative ideas for content for, it would be the first, our first quarter of fiscal year 26. So the summer, right? It will be July, August, and September, those months. That is what we're here for. We're gonna start brainstorming content ideas for that quarter. And then I give icebreakers. I use that same Slido tool that we used at the beginning of this workshop to ask some simple prompts to the audience, just to start getting them in the mindset of summertime, end of summer, back to school, right? That's what's happening. And then because we're on Zoom, I wanna give everybody some time to do some solo brainstorming. But as the host at the same time, when everybody is brainstorming on their own, I am moving people into breakout rooms as the host during this time. But again, this is part of, it's all part of the exercise. If you can have time to brainstorm alone before talking to others, you are again gonna flush out a lot of those really obvious ideas, and you're gonna start hitting on some more creative ideas on your own. Sometimes if you jump right into group brainstorming, somebody might dominate the conversation or really heavily direct the conversation. So again, this is all part of the science to get to something that's really strong and creative. So solo brainstorming time, everybody gets five to 10 minutes on their own. I usually tell people they can turn their camera off, go look at something natural and not a screen, write down some ideas, and I am moving them into breakout rooms. Now, if I have a big group, I'll have four breakout rooms. If I have a smaller group, I try to keep it to maybe three. You probably want at least three people in a breakout, but you can go, this is really, really scalable. So I tend to put a lead in every breakout room. So the lead is somebody who is gonna take notes and report back, but they also might direct the conversation a little bit to make sure that we get a really good variety of content ideas. So I will pick two writers, one to lead a messaging group. Now, what do we wanna say to people during this time? One, and one to lead a storytelling group. What stories do we wanna tell to support our messages? And then I typically have a designer who would lead a breakout group. And a lot of times they're asking like, what's the vibe? Like, how is this gonna look in summer? Like, what's trending? What do we think we might wanna, what elements might we wanna pull on in our visuals? And then somebody else would be leading a group that might steer the conversation a little bit more into digital content, maybe helping us develop some of those digital downloads. And then finally, people are in those breakout rooms for about 20, 30 minutes, and then we're all gonna come back together as a group and report out. And this is where you will see the strongest themes emerge for the next quarter, because every time I've done this, and I have done this for five years now, people in the separate breakout rooms will come to similar conclusions about what people need and what is relevant, and that's where you're gonna start to see these really strong themes. So you'll do the report out, you'll have all of these meeting notes, bless AI for like streamlining this so much over the past year, consolidating brainstorming notes has gone from like hours long process to minutes long, but you are going to then take all of those ideas and tell your brainstorming group, thank you very much. They don't really have any homework after that, but I do tell people who participate, if there's anything that sticks with them to let us know, because we're gonna have to take all of the ideas and decide what's feasible, look at where to plot things on the calendar, and it's helpful to know if anything stands out to others that's really sticky, yeah. Someone is asking if you would still do breakout rooms if the size of the group is small, like someone who has only 10 people on their team. Yeah, I would definitely still do, I would still do three, three groups of three. It's good to break people out in small groups like that. I would say also, if your team is 10 people, who else in your organization also communicates to the same audience that you do, or even consider bringing in some audience members into this conversation, because it is just a brainstorm, it is just to try to think of what should we be talking about, what should we say, and what do people need during that time? So you can bring more people. I've had administrative staff to vice president in these, because it's really fun to come up with creative ideas, and not everything sticks, and that's fine. So you can definitely do it with small group. I would do three people in a room works, and you can, I've had 12 in groups, and that's worked too. All right, here are this, you will get the slides. We didn't say that, but you will get these slides. However, this is a screenshot moment, because both Day and I look back at this slide whenever we're trying to come up with icebreakers or these prompts, it's a helpful guide to go back to, but I'm gonna explain to you why I use each of these, and you'll see that I used one of them already on you this afternoon. So the first one, I think, is a really helpful prompt to get people to time travel, right? So every winter I dot, dot, dot, and you will just start to get, again, those obvious ideas are gonna come out of people's heads. They're gonna give you, for winter, it'll be like, I go skiing, I do ice skating, and sledding, and all of these kinds of outdoor activities, but then by the end of the stream of consciousness, you're getting like, my back hurts from shoveling, and some of these really more specific ideas. And so you start to see the creative process happening in action, going from really obvious ideas to something that seems a little bit more unique, more individualized, more personal. So every blank I, really good for getting people to think about a different season. When you think about your inbox, what words come to mind? When you think about back to school, what words come to mind? When you think about spring, what words come to mind? This is a good one to use with the word cloud, like we did. And a lot of times, this is one that visual designers will pull from, because people will start using words that can also extend to a visual identity. Like when you think about spring, what words come to mind? It might be sunshine, and flowers, and bright colors, and these kinds of things. Name as many blank as you can. This is another one that really helps flush obvious ideas out. Name as many holidays as you can, and you'll see people be very methodical. They're like, okay, it's Halloween, and then it's Thanksgiving, and then it's Hanukkah, and then it's New Year's Eve, right? And they're like, but then you're going back through, you make them think of as many as they can. Now we're gonna get Friendsgiving, and we're gonna get Cyber Monday, and we're gonna get like all these other niche holidays. What do blank do? I like to use this one if there's something complicated that we need to unpack. What does financial aid do? What do annual funds do? What do endowments do, right? If we know we have something that is hard for us to articulate, I like putting that right out there in the brainstorm, in the prompt. Maybe we have a brilliant team member that can explain it, but I think even just going through what that struggle is in the icebreaker is a helpful exercise. And then the last one, what makes you blank? This can be helpful when you want to understand different motivations. So what makes you register for an event? What makes you give a gift online? What makes you click on an email? And what you'll find is a variety of answers, right? You're gonna find a variety of motivations from people, and that will help you develop content that serves as many people as you can based on all of those different motivations. What's gonna happen is you are going to leave this brainstorm with a whole lot of ideas. And when you have that big list of ideas, I want you to keep this pie chart in mind. Now, when I do communication audits, when I'm looking at like a full suite of communication from an organization, I categorize what those communication pieces are, and this is what I find. That 80% of the time, that 85% of what we send is a call to action. We do a little bit of awareness raising, and I have to give like props to our events people because they send save the dates, and that's mostly what that 10% awareness is. We do a little bit of awareness raising, right? Like awareness raising means we're letting people know what it is we are doing, what it is our campaign is, why we're doing things, what offers we have, right? We don't do enough awareness raising, but we do about 10%. We do very little to build the relationship with our audience. Instead, it's ask, ask, ask, ask, ask. And so 3% nurture content in there, we've got to do more with that, and that is what the brainstorm is gonna deliver to you. It's gonna give you a lot of ideas that will help you build this relationship and help you nurture the relationship. Same goes for stewardship, very little stewardship. We will send a thank you message, but what are we doing to actually report back on the action that people took to build that next step in the relationship, right? To set them up for the next phase of this cycle. So I want your campaigns to look like this. 50% of our communication before that like direct call to action needs to be related to raising awareness and connecting the dots for our audience. We need to do so much more in stewardship if we want to retain our audiences. And when we do this, we can actually spend less time with the calls to action because this is just how our brains work. If we spend the time being primed with the idea, we will believe in it easier. And when the ask comes to us, it is easier for us to rationalize why you are asking us. And so people, it won't take nine reminders, right? You'll find more people converting on that call to action the first time. So I want your campaigns to be balanced and that creative brainstorm exercise is going to give you so many ideas. It's gonna be up to you how you're gonna use them. Are you gonna use them to help raise awareness? Are you gonna use them to nurture the relationship? Are you gonna use them on the other side of that call to action to steward the relationship? And before we jump into the next, there were a couple of questions when you were talking about the clickbait for good that I think are answered in this part of how you think about campaigns. Can you give some advice to the folks on the call who write solicitations? And people get nervous about putting all these links in a solicitation email that are for fun because you want people to make a gift. But I think what you're saying is, well, not every email we send should be an ask. So what is your balance for someone in annual giving? Is the nurture email just the newsletter or do you always ask, what would you recommend there? Yeah, okay, so here's something really simple to take away if I had to give you a really straightforward example. When I think about a solicitation, I'm not thinking about a single email that's sent. I'm thinking about a suite of emails that are sent. And I, like right now, my sweet spot is five emails. I have found over the years that we have had to send more email to get the same result. So if you think about your solicitation campaign, not as a solicitation, but a suite of communications, if we want to think about them as five, that's kind of my sweet spot right now. The first email that we send is not a direct hard ask. That is not the, it's time to give. It is about raising awareness for what it is, right? That you have a campaign going on. Let's use back to school because that's where we should be planning right now. We should be a quarter ahead. So you have a back to school campaign. What do we need to do to raise awareness about that? What is it? When is the campaign happening? When is the fundraising window happening, right? Like we're explaining what it is. We're setting up the timeline. This is also your time to kind of set the tone. Is this gonna be fun to follow along with our back to school campaign, right? Like, is this lighthearted? Is it gonna be fun and visuals and the links that we're sharing, right? So the first email, while it could have a link to give in it and your most loyal diehard people are gonna be like, oh my gosh, they sent an email about giving. I have to give right away, right? They'll click and give on the first one. But really the purpose of the first email is to raise awareness that you are fundraising. The second email is gonna be your nurture email. And that's the one that is going to connect the dots for the audience. Okay, I know you're in a campaign. You told me that. Why does that matter to me? So connect the dots for the audience between the campaign that you're running and why that matters in their life. And it might just be that this is gonna make you feel really good to participate in this because you can make a difference. But let's spend that email connecting the dots for people. And again, yes, you can have a link to give in it, but it's not a direct ask, like go, I need you to give to this right now, right? Now we're in our third email. They know we're in a campaign. They understand why we're emailing them about it. The third email can be a direct ask. Okay, now it's time. Now we need you to give right now, to give before this date, right? Before the end of this campaign. And then maybe the next one that you get sent is a reminder. And then your last email, you're planning in that first stewardship message, right? And I have found that our youngest alumni are giving on emails four and five. And so if you are doing a suite of communication, that is only one or two emails, and you're like, where are the young people? It's because they don't have all the information that they need, right? We haven't primed them. We haven't given them the reasoning. We haven't taken them through these steps. So that's how I could think about, yes, that was all part of a solicitation, but how you might break this out into reflecting the needs of the reader and how they kind of behaviorally are thinking through their own decision-making process. There's lots of questions in the chat, but I think, Ash, you should answer them in the chat while we move on to part three for time. So folks keep asking questions in there. We're gonna switch roles. Okay, sounds good. Awesome, I'll share. All right. Okay, so we meant it when we said there are no breaks, and so we're gonna jump straight into this tactical portion of today's programming. And this is the part of the training that is going to feel a little bit like a hack, like a little bit like magic. And the reason we don't start with this is because even though it absolutely works, it doesn't work if you don't have the trust of your readers, if you don't have the trust of your audiences, and if you're not creating content that is relevant for them. So we want you to do all that planning and do all that thinking for the trust triangle. But once you do, then how do you actually get people to open and click and do all the things? That's what this part covers. This whole part is also great for the emails that you send each other, for the emails that you send to faculty members or Central or the people in units that you need things from that you need to schedule a meeting with or you need a document from. This is for any and all emails to get people to actually see what you want them to see and do what you want them to do. So we'll start here. Lots of emails, lots and lots of emails going out in the world every single day. At the same time as email volume has been increasing though, a day still has 24 hours. How rude is that? How come we don't get more time for more emails, right? And so what our friends at Litmus have found is that naturally the read rate per email has been going down. They have not updated this since this data set here, but I would assume because more emails are happening that we have even less time today to read an email. So think about optimistically nine seconds per email. That's how much time people are spending. And you would see that and you would say, oof, that's rough. What, like nine seconds? That sounds like, oof, I don't think I can manage. And I'm here to tell you it's even worse news, my friends, because that's only 30% of your readers who actually read get to the nine seconds, but really it's two thirds of everyone else who are spending less time looking at your emails. About 40, 41% of them, it's two to eight seconds. They call this a skimp. And then there's this entire third, entire third of your audience who is only glancing at your emails for two seconds. So if you've ever said no one reads emails anymore, you are 100% correct. It includes you, by the way. None of us read emails anymore. We glance. And in that glance, we determine whether we need to actually pay attention to this thing or not. So if we know this about the behavior of people in their inbox, and if we know this about what's gonna happen when we send something, then we know how to hack it. If we know that people are only going to glance for two seconds, then we know we only have two seconds to get our message across. And our job becomes not getting upset that people are not spending 10 minutes on our communications, but instead figuring out how we actually get them to see what we want them to see in two seconds. That's what I'm gonna show you in this entire part. How do we do this? It's not going to be rocket science. It's not going to be scary. It's going to be something you can do with any email tool with the email real estate that you have available to you already. No matter what tool you're using, no matter who you're communicating with, we all have access to these things. The from or the sender, the subject line, and its accompanying preheader, the content that you're using in the body of the email and how it's written, the links and how you are labeling the links, and how you put it all together, what it actually looks like when it's formatted. So I'm gonna go one by one, each of these, how do you optimize it so you get that message across in two seconds? Starting with the from. Now, when you think about the from, it's kind of, it really dawned on me when I really started thinking about this, how important it is, because this is where the trust comes from, right? When we started this and we talked about trust, that trust comes from the relationship that you have with the sender, right? And that relationship, that name that you put in the from, represents that entire relationship. When you look at the inbox though, it becomes even more shocking and more obvious how important it is because this is a screenshot of my personal Gmail. The from or the sender is bigger, bigger and on top of the subject line. On Outlook or a desktop client, it's first, it's before the subject line. That's what we look at first. Even the clients make us look at it first by giving it a bigger font size. But how many of us actually spend time thinking about the from, versus thinking about the subject line, right? We spend way more time thinking about the subject line than the sender. And for the sender, we usually end up writing the title and the year and the whatever of the person who's sending it and really not taking advantage of this space to generate trust. So that leads me to the final question on this slide, should it be a person or should it be an organization? And there's been a lot of debate about this in the email world because some people say, if it's a person, I'm gonna trust it because I trust humans, right? Other people say, if I don't know who the human is, I'm not opening that because I'm gonna get scammed, right? Now, these behaviors change depending on if it's a human that you know works in your organization, but you don't know them personally, there's implicit trust because you know they're a colleague, right? If you're in your own personal inbox and you're getting an email from someone you've never heard of before, your behavior will be different there. So the answer is, it always depends. And what it depends on is, who is your reader going to have that pre-existing relationship with? Who are they more likely to recognize, right? So if I think about prospective students, they're going to recognize the name of my institution way before they recognize the name of admission counselor C, right? And it doesn't mean that you can't change the sender name as the relationship progresses, right? The first email comes from the institution and then as a few emails have been exchanged between that person and their admission counselor, then it can come from the admission counselor. But just listing the admission counselor's name right off the bat doesn't guarantee that it's going to be a more trustworthy email because they don't know who you are, right? Same thing if you're in fundraising or alumni engagement, is someone going to be more likely to recognize the name of the current dean of the college they graduated from versus the name of the actual department, right? They probably didn't even know the name of the dean while there were students there. And so that's what you see here in this example in the screenshot is a few different senders from Cornell University on their giving day. I get a lot of emails from Cornell on their giving day so I can have a screenshot like this for you all. So you're welcome. And I don't even soft unsubscribe or anything. I just let them all come in just for you. But you see here how these different choices show up in the sender. Those units that decide to just go with the name of the university, I would recognize that right away, right? Cornell. Those units that choose to go with the name of the department, I would recognize that if I graduated from that department, right? Like AP or engineering or whatever club I was a part of. But am I going to know who Cindy Van Ess is or Ryan Lombardi? No, not unless they're my boss, right? I'm definitely not going to know that if I was a student there 20 years ago and this is the new dean of that department, I'm just not going to know, right? And so you really have to think about who is the sender going to recognize because that's the name that you want in the from. Okay. Once you clear the hurdle of the sender and the from, then people go and look over at the subject line. Now, subject lines are so important because over half of your recipients determine whether the email is relevant to them or not based on the subject line. So trust first with the sender, and then, all right, is this relevant for me? Am I going to pay attention to this? Happens in the subject line. So the job of the subject line is not to get people to open the email. The job of the subject line is to show people, demonstrate to people that it is relevant to them. And the only way that we can do that is by simply telling them what the email is about, right? If we try to write a subject line that is cute and enticing and intriguing, and we frame it as a question to trick them into opening the email, that they can't determine if it's relevant to them or not, right? And the likelihood of them opening the email actually goes down. The likelihood of you getting marked as spam goes up, right? Because what you really need to use this space for is just tell them, just serve them in their inbox. Go back to how you felt when we first asked you this morning or this earlier today, this morning, what felt like eight hours ago. What, how do you feel when you're in your inbox? You feel overwhelmed. And if there's an email trying to get you to like, be, you know, intrigued, you'll be like, I roll, what is this? Versus an email that's just telling you what it wants from you. You'll be like, oh, thank you so much. If you care, you'll act. If you don't care, you won't, right? And so it's really important for us as folks who are communicating with email and email marketers, especially that we shift our mindset. It is not our goal as marketers to get people to open the email. That is not our goal, especially today when we can't even rely on open rates that much. Our goal is to make sure that our message is received. And if our message is received in the subject line, we did our job. And if our message is received in the subject line and it is relevant to our audience, they are going to act. They are going to do the thing, right? And so our job is a lot more strategic and a lot more thoughtful and a lot more empathetic than tricking people into opening an email. Okay, so how do we do this? Well, you have about six to nine words of space in the subject line to summarize everything that's in your email. That's kind of hard to do. So what do you prioritize? First, if there's an action in your email, so this is for my solicitation friends, right? If it's a, you have to donate now because this is the last day to do it, that might be what goes in the subject line, right? If there's a date attached to the action that you're asking, that is a great example of real urgency, right? You have to register by date or you have to register because capacity is running out or you have to register because whatever, like real reasons for urgency, capacity or time are great to add to your subject line because they trigger those kind of fear of missing out emotions that are so human, right? But it's really important that we don't lie and we don't exaggerate. And that's why we like the real urgency. Lying or exaggerating sounds like give today or give now. There's no reason for anyone to do anything right now unless I no longer can do it in an hour, right? There's no reason for me to register today if I could register tomorrow, right? And so think about back to that data set that we showed you about email behavior. If people are waking up and checking their email in their bed and then they're going to the bathroom and they're still checking their email, are they really going to give now when they're sitting on the toilet? No, they are not. So we only use urgency when it's real and we don't lie and we don't exaggerate because it makes us lose their trust, right? It's very common too in advancement and fundraising especially that we like to say things like your gift will change the world. No, no, it's not. Students are counting on you. My $25, they're counting on my $25. My $25 is going to buy them two iced coffees. That's not, you know, so it's don't exaggerate. Don't exaggerate in a way that it feels empty because people see right through it, okay? The last thing in your subject line that is super, super effective is personalization. One way to do this is of course using your beautiful merge fields and adding a first name. However, when you overuse that it starts to feel disingenuous. I like to think of it as imagine you're having a conversation with somebody and every single sentence you say their name. Like, hi, Ashley. How are you, Ashley? I have this update for you, Ashley. Would you like to learn more about it, Ashley? Well then put, you know, that feels weird. And if every email that you're sending, right? If you think about your appearance in someone's inbox as that conversation every single time there's a first name you are obviously a robot. Like a human being wouldn't do that, right? So there's different ways to personalize your subject line that are not first name. And they start with all that planning that we just went through. If you are thinking about what's the mindset my readers are gonna be in in the summer they're definitely thinking about mock tales and sunlight and all my emails are gonna be about that summer vibe. That's gonna feel really personal to me because I'm in that moment. I'm in that space, right? You can think about it if, you know from an enrollment point of view if someone is making a decision of where to go and your content is about that that feels personal to me, right? So you don't have to think of personalization as individualization that requires very sophisticated CRM technology and very smart programmers. That's awesome if you have that. It's simply, did you make this for them? Did you think about them when you were making this? And the most powerful personalization word out there is available to all of us is using the word you or your in your subject lines and in your content. And we'll get into this a little bit later too but if you are writing to one person in your mind when you make your emails it's going to feel personal to the person receiving it. If you're writing emails to a group of students and you say all students must I know this is not personal to me. So the word your and you and your subject lines much more powerful than the first name. Okay, so we're going to go through two examples. I'm going to show you two subject lines. Let's pretend they're for the same email content and you write in the chat if you would open the top or the bottom one. So the top one, the time is here. The bottom one sign up for union by April 3rd. Which one would you open? Lots of bottoms and a little bit of top. All right, I see a lot of bottom and a few tops. So the bottom, right, does all the things we just said. What's the action, what am I doing it for? And by when do I need to do it? Great example of, thank you for telling me. If I'm interested in reunion, I will click this. I will open this, I will probably sign up or I will sign up later tonight when I can when I talk to my partner and I figure out if I can go, right? But the time is here unless I have a already very engaged relationship with you as my, as an email sender. Like if I know that every email you send me every time is amazing, I might open this. But if I, if you are just trying to rebuild that trust and that relationship or you're cold emailing a group or it's a brand new list of subscribers or something like that, that's probably not going to work because immediately you think for what? What am I excited about? I don't even know what the time is for. And so see how powerful this is? It's even more important nowadays, I will say. We were talking a little bit about the robots in the chat because one of the ways that emails get flagged for spam nowadays is that the robots in the email clients like Gmail and Outlook and all of Apple Mail, what they do is they scan the content of the email and they compare it to the subject line that you wrote. And if that content doesn't match the subject line, best case scenario, you're ending up in a promotions tab, worst case scenario, you're ending up in spam. So it is important for us to summarize what's in the email because that's what the AI filters are going to try to do to help the readers in their inboxes and we don't want to get caught in that trap, okay? All right, second example is a newsletter. Pretend this is a newsletter. Which one would you open, top or bottom? All right. Some tops, some bottoms. All right, so here's my theory. Yes, Molly! Yes, you went there. My theory is, if you know who the sender is, and everything I just said before, if you know who the sender is and you already have, like, you trust that what they're going to send you is useful to you, there's, like, an established behavior and pattern for this newsletter, you probably will open that second subject line. If you're, again, trying to build that relationship and that trust, you might open the top one. Now, yeah, great call out, Virginia, about the burger and it feeling like an ad, right? Like, if I got this email from Uber Eats, I might ignore it. If I got this email from my alma mater, I'd be like, what? You're sending me a burger? I'm in! So you see how the relationship between the subject line and the sender, really important. But one of our tips for when you're sending a newsletter, and you need to write a subject line, and you need to summarize what's in there, pick the most important thing that you want the reader to know is in this newsletter. What is the most important piece of content that if they didn't look at anything else, that's the thing you want them to know that month? That's what should be in the subject line. If you are sitting there and you're thinking, oh, my God, there's too many good things here. I can't pick just one. I can't pick two. Then you probably have enough content to make a more frequent newsletter, my friend. If you're sitting on all that awesome content for a month before you can send it, you probably could send every two weeks, maybe even every week. And a lot of people freak out about sending more email because we know volume is terrifying, right? But what Ashley and I have found is it's not the volume that makes the inbox overwhelming. It's the density of each email that makes it really overwhelming. It's when you open up the email from your child's K-12 school and you're like, oh, this is 10 pages long. What in here do I need to pay attention to? That's overwhelming. It's not overwhelming to get four emails that you digest in two seconds and you feel good about, right? So don't be afraid of frequency. Frequency actually helps you. It helps your deliverability score. It helps you land in the inbox. It helps establish the behaviors that we want from your readers. What is overwhelming is very lengthy, irrelevant content. OK, so once we clear the subject line, we head into that little part that's right next to it or below it, depending on how you're looking at the email in your inbox, which is the preheader or the pretext. So this really only applies if you're sending mass emails with an actual email tool, right? This doesn't apply if you're emailing a colleague. We can't edit the preheader text. But what happens in those one-to-one emails is that it actually pulls that first line from your email as the preview. Otherwise, we have the ability to do this for marketing emails. What should be in that field? Well, anything that you couldn't fit in the subject line that explains what's in this email should be in the preheader. So I like to think if there's any questions or outstanding things that, you know, the subject line would bring up, I want to answer those in the pretext, in the preheader, right in the inbox. So, for example, here, assume you're sending an event to alumni answering your MBA questions or live on March 15th, or maybe it's prospective graduate students and someone might be like, what time? Like, do I need to register the time? And if you need to register or not, is right in the preheader, right? They shouldn't have to open the email to get as much information as possible. The second one is that burger, the fake newsletter from the previous slide. What what is this? What what guides? What perks? Oh, it's a 10 percent discount at Panera for alumni and all your spring digital downloads. OK, now maybe I trusted a little bit more. Now, let's talk about the burger. Let's talk about emojis. Emojis are we are fans of emojis. We love an emoji. We are actually in our millennials and we are proud of it and we are all in with emojis. And but we only believe in using them if they add value. And if we determine that they add value, then we only put them at the end, which no other AI tool out there will do. Like if you ask an AI tool to write an email for you, I will put the emojis at first. And we're going to explain to you why we like them at the end. So first, let's start with value. What this means to us is two really important things. One, it should add context or emotion. So an image is worth a thousand words or whatever. I don't even know the saying properly. But if you see an image of a cow, an emoji of a calendar, right, then you're going to know it's a date. If you see a little gift, you know, it's something free for you. Right. Or something for you. So when you can use an emoji, so for people to understand your message faster. Great. That's context. If you can use an emoji like a heart or a party popper to convey an emotion. Great. That adds value. Right. Like if we want to be if we want to show affection, if we want to show congratulations, that's a way to add value. What we never want an emoji to do is to replace words or replace meaning. OK, so if I want to say I love you, Ashley, I don't want to write I read heart, Ashley. I want to write I love you, Ashley emoji. And the reason for that is every single emoji has a hard coded name attached to it that we can't change. And so when our reader receives the email and if they are using a screen reader to to consume the content, if they are, you know, they have a visual disability or maybe they have a low Internet connection and the emojis don't load, maybe they're using Microsoft Outlook, which hates emojis and just displace them as a box, then your words get lost, your meaning gets lost. And that's just not accessible. Right. So we never, ever, ever want emojis to replace words. And that is the exact same reason we want them at the end of our sentences and of our subject line. Because if you lead with the emoji. Right. And someone is using a screen reader or someone can't see it for some reason, then it's going to appear like it's going to be these blank boxes first or it's going to say these hard coded names out loud to your to the listener, which is not your subject line. Right. It's not your words. It's not the point of the email. So we want them when they add value and then we want them at the end so that if someone's using a screen reader and has your words read out loud to them, your words come first and then these red heart, red heart, love letter, party popper descriptions come at the end. Okay, the last thing with emojis we have to be very careful about our interpretations of emojis, especially all those of you who are emailing Gen Z. Emoji meanings change fast. They change very fast. And there's some things that are just cringy like we're not allowed to use a thumbs up anymore because it's passive aggressive. That's okay. Right. That's fine. But there are some things that are just plain inappropriate that we cannot be doing. Right. So, you know, like eggplant emoji, peach emoji, three water drops, like there's a bunch of them that are really inappropriate that are used in different ways. So if you're ever in doubt, look it up. UrbanDictionary.com is a great place to check all the possible meanings of an emoji and if there's at least one that you're like, oh, that's suspicious, just don't use it. And that's why it's important that we only think of them as adding value so we don't feel like we need them, or that we're like, we must send this emoji for this eggplant recipe. No, you don't. You don't need to. It's just a value add. Okay, once we clear the inbox, my friends, we are finally, finally at opening this email. And when we first open the email, what we want above all is for it to be simple and easy to consume and understand. How do we do that? The scientific way to measure language that is simple to understand is using this concept of a reading level. Now, I don't love that it's called a reading level and I don't love this scale for it because what it makes people think, especially for us in higher education, is that we can write at a higher reading level because of course all of our audiences are highly educated, right? Especially those of us communicating with alumni. A lot of them have PhDs, right? So we don't have to write at a seventh grade reading level. These are very highly educated people, but that's not what it means. What it means is, what is the language that you use every day? What is the language that you use when you're talking to each other? What is the language that you use when you're reading things you enjoy reading instead of work to read, right? Or read as work. And so when we think about that, the level at which those things are written is seventh to ninth grade reading level. This is kind of like, think about it as conversational mass market language. And your favorite novel, your favorite blog, your favorite news outlet is writing at this level because it is proven that this is the reading level that makes us take action. It is proven that this is the reading level that we understand quickly without anxiety, hesitation, or doubt, and that we just quickly get through it. So the Nielsen Norman Group are, I believe, the authority, at least for now, on this kind of research. They have a ton of research about this. They put different types of language and different reading levels and all sorts of things in front of people and test how quickly they take the action, how quickly they understand things, and how people feel through that. One of the things that they found that I think is super important for our audiences is that even high literacy users or readers prefer this reading level over something more complicated. Because when we're in our inbox trying to sift through all these million things that we need to do, none of us want to have to pull out a dictionary or a thesaurus. None of us want to reread a sentence four times if you're asking me to renew my parking permit. Like, just please make this easy, right? An email is not a dissertation. And so we need to think about how do we actually create that simplicity in our copy, because it's what works. Now, how do we do this? It's actually quite simple. We write like we speak. My best, like, my favorite tip, my favorite way to do this, as you begin to shift your language a little bit, is to imagine one single person from your audience, just one sitting across from you at your desk or on a walk or a coffee shop, whatever, and tell them. Tell them what you're trying to tell them. Hey, listen, we have these new perks for you. I put together these downloads for you. Oh, and reunion is coming up and you've got to register by June 3rd, right? We wouldn't sit in front of someone and be like, in order for you not to miss the opportunity to attend this once-in-a-lifetime event curated specifically for you, right? None of us would do that. None of us would do that. I get really excited when I talk about this and I start yelling. Oh my god, one time I was teaching a spin class. I used to do that. That was pre-baby me. And somebody came up to me after class and was like, you know you have a microphone and you don't have to yell, right? That person would not survive this email training. Anyway, anecdote. So sit down, say the words you want to say, and write those words down, the verbal things you said. Because what happens when we just sit down with an open blank document and we start writing and we skip that part is that we get transported like the Twilight Zone. We get taken back in time to like your English teacher, your English class for your more strict English teacher you've ever had. And they're yelling at you and they're saying, no, there must be five paragraphs and the introduction must be three sentences and each sentence must be connected to the previous sentence with a connector word. And every paragraph must be indented. And yeah, people are laughing. You know, we all go there, right? First of all, that person is not going to know that you're writing emails in this way. And that is not how people consume email. So write like you speak, write down the verbal draft, edit that draft down. So remove verbal filler, remove any extra phrases or words, any intro or leading phrases, things like in order to or in case you like none of you don't need any of that stuff. And you can use these tools that we have on here. Hemingway editor is one of our favorites, you can paste your entire content in there for free and it will tell you what the reading level is to know if you're in that sweet spot of seventh and ninth grade. It will tell you which sentences are complicated for you to fix. Grammarly does the same thing. If you have the paid version of Grammarly, it will even change the sentences for you. And then, of course, you know, for a few years now, we've had ChatGPT. And I actually find that ChatGPT is pretty good at this. It's pretty good at simplifying text. So I might write something and drop it in there and say, please simplify, clean up and simplify, super simple prompt. And it will do a pretty good job at that. There was one time when I was when prompt engineering was a thing. And everyone was like, be really specific, tell it its role, give it a series of instructions that I went in there, I was like, you are an email marketer. And I want you to write this email at seventh to ninth grade reading level. And it gave me like a children's book. It was terrible. So don't do that. Just say simplify, simplify, and it will do that for you. Okay. Once we do this, we got to think about what we're asking them to do. Before I go into that, though, I will say one more thing that I found really insightful with this is when we write like we speak, we tend to use shorter sentences in general. And shorter sentences increase the cadence of how people are reading your content. So it's faster to scan. And that's what we want, right? We only have two seconds. So use periods instead of commas. Don't be afraid to start your sentences with but or and. Nothing's going to happen to you, I promise. Your English teacher will not know it was you. Okay? All right. Now let's talk about the links. Once the content is as simple as it can be so that our reader understands what we want from them, what is it that we're asking them to do? And how are we asking them to do it? Well, it's very simple. Almost like the subject line, really. What is it? What do you want from me? What do you want me to do? Somebody asked this in the chat earlier. It's usually always going to be an action verb that is what you're asking them to do. And then some sort of explanation or context for that. So instead of donate or donate now, which is fake urgency, what am I donating to? The student fund or whatever. Why? Like if it's during Giving Day, donate within the next hour or donate before the day ends might be a good reason for urgency, right? But usually just the word donate or donate now is not enough context for me to know why I should do this in the first place, right? And so really think about the verb and then some sort of explanation as to what they're getting, what's happening when they do it, why they need to do it or by when they need to do it. So next example, learn more. We hate learn more. Please stop using learn more. Also read more. Don't switch learn to read and think that's okay. That's not okay. Ask yourself, what am I learning more about? What are they learning more about? What do you want them to read more about? What about? That's your link text. Okay, so learn more about the courses. Okay, explore the courses in your program. Dive in the courses in your program. Download the syllabus to this course, right? What am I learning more about is the link, not learn more, okay? Same with click here. What, what, where? Why am I clicking this, right? What happens when I click here? Oh, when you click here, you get your event guide. All right, well, then tell me that. Just tell me that, right? When you click here, you fill out the form. All right, well, then just tell me to fill out the form, right? Tell me what is going to happen or what you want me to do. Not that I need to click here to do it, right? Register is not terrible. It's a very common CTA, actually. But for what? Why? By when? Why am I registering? Register before seats run out. Grab your spot by June 3rd, right? Register first to get a free perk. Why am I doing it? That should be your link text. And this becomes really important when you ask yourself this question. If your reader only sees the link text, only the link text, will they know what you want them to do and why? And if the answer to that is no, then you need to add more words to your links, my friends, okay? And if you're wondering, oh, my God, that's going to make really long links. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Try to keep them to four to five words. Usually more than that starts to look really weird. And that's our scientific measure for, okay, you went too far. Weird is not good. But four or five words is usually pretty good. Remember, you want people to know exactly what you're asking them and why or by when or what's going to happen when they do it just from the link, okay? Awesome. All right. Finally, we get to formatting and how we put it all together. Now, this is the part where we want to take you back to the science a little bit. So back in the day, two decades ago or so, again, the Nielsen-Norman group wanted to understand how people interacted with digital screens and how people read on the web. And this was early web, early web days, when most websites were just blocks, like paragraphs of text on white backgrounds, right? And so what they found is that when presented with information that way, most people would follow the same reading pattern, which they called the F pattern. And it's called the F pattern because it looks like an F. There's a lot of people reading that first line, a lot of people reading the middle line, and then there's this kind of vertical left-hand scan. Now, since then, of course, the web has evolved a ton, and we have different sizes of screens, right? And so through design and deliberate choices of how we position content, we can guide the eyes now. So many different reading patterns have emerged since then. You see some of them here. But still, when just presented with text on a plain background, our eyes are going to follow the F pattern still today, still on mobile screens. You just scroll a little bit more. You try to look for more kind of headings, more break points, but you still do the same first couple lines and then left-hand scan. And also, even cooler, still with right-to-left reading languages, it's the same thing. It's F, but it flips around. It's kind of cool. So the brain's going to do this, folks. People open an email, they're presented with text, and your brain is just going to do this. Their brain is going to do this. For most of the emails that we send that are single-action emails, so we're asking people to do one thing, it's a solicitation, it's an event invitation, it's a doodle poll, it's a reminder to do something, for most of those emails, people are going to follow the F pattern. For emails that have more content, like your newsletters, or multiple kind of sections to the same story, what is going to come into play is this layer cake pattern, because we divide the content into chunks. So think about the layers of a cake. And the reading pattern for each of these, you see the F is the top line, middle line, and left hand scan. For the layer cake pattern, what people do is they just read the headings. Think of how people read a newspaper. You grab a big newspaper and you read the entire headline, like you read the heading, heading, heading, heading. And if you like the heading, you'll read the story. But you don't read every single word in order in that entire page of content. And that's the same way people behave when they are presented with your emails. Now, if you have a very sophisticated design team in your operation that can do different reading patterns through design, awesome, good for you. You're so lucky, get in touch, I want to see. But if you are like the rest of us or most of us, and you're just like, no man, I have one template in my email client, and it has some headings, and it has some pictures, or I'm just an Outlook emailing the faculty member that never replies, then F pattern and layer cake are the ones for you. So let's look at them. This is our template for when it's a single action. So you want someone to do one thing. You want to tell them one important thing, and you want them to act. Every single one of you who put in that poll at the beginning, I want people to do the thing, take the action, this is the hack right here. So take a look at the part on the left on the slide. And the font, the words that are in black color font, those are the words that your reader will see. That's what's in the F pattern. The first line, the middle button, obviously, you'll look at the button because it looks different than everything else. And then you see these bullet points, right? But you see that they're not reading the entire bullet point. They're just reading the part that is in black font, right? So look closer. First line, most important line in the entire email. Tell them what the email is. Just tell them, OK? And this is even more important if you're emailing a colleague, or it's a one-on-one email that you don't have a preheader text for, because that's the first line it's going to grab and put in the preheader. Now, most of us waste this line with what? I hope this email finds you well. It was so great to see you yesterday. I can't wait. This came up in the chat already, too. So I've been waiting for this moment. Yes. Do we have to be nice? We have to be nice, but we don't have to be nice in the first line. No, don't do it. So our advice to you, because we feel the pain just like you do, just write it. There's this mental block that you sit down to write an email and you're like, but I really do hope it finds them well. Please, I just need to write it. Write it, OK? And then put your cursor on top of that line and hit Enter a bunch of times. And then go back up and write your email, OK? The advantage of this is that you will get it out of your system, and they will also receive it. You can use this line as your signature instead of best regards or thanks or many thanks or sincerely or whatever else we're doing in there that's a place filler. And it adds a little bit of a quirk, like, oh, they're wishing me well at the end. How unique, how unexpected. So you're still being nice and unexpected and delighting at the same time. And you're not wasting the most important line in your entire email, which is the first one, OK? Now, the second line, the beginning of the second paragraph, let's call it, in this template, it's a button. It doesn't have to be a button. If you're in an Outlook writing an email to a colleague, it's the beginning of your second paragraph. That reinforces your action. Tell them what they need to do. Tell them how to do it. And then the rest of the content is why or who cares or context or whatever you need to add. What's important with the rest of the content is we all know. We all got the memo that bullet points are good. But what we didn't learn with that memo is that you can't just put paragraphs or full sentences in your bullet points, right? You need to front load your bullet points with the verb. So instead of writing, in order for you to keep your parking permit active, you need to renew by Friday. You should write, renew by Friday so your parking permit stays active, right? We have to front load the verb, what we're asking people to do, because in the F pattern scan, it's all they're going to see. So then they're like, oh, crap. I have to do that. Why? And then they'll read the rest if they're interested. But if your bullet point starts with, in order for you to, that's all they saw, do you think they're going to keep reading? Absolutely not. Would we? No, we also would not. And so if you know that the eyes are going to do this, we can take advantage of this real estate. And we can make sure that the eyes see what we want them to see in those two seconds or less, OK? Last thing I'll point out here is whenever you want to break the F pattern. So if you're like, oh, man, I really can't fit everything in these three lines, then you use bolding. Then you use kind of a different font or a link to point the eyes somewhere else. So that's why you see here kind of action is underlined in blue. Like, you would look at that. The date is bolded. The eyes would go there. They would look at that. Because that's how we call attention. Hey, brain, break the pattern. Come look here for a sec. But if you bold the entire line, the effect goes away. All right? OK. The next template we have for you is if you have more than one thing in the email. So this is for a newsletter, for example. Or if you're hosting an event and you need to send your volunteers instructions of when to show up, what to do, what to wear, whatever. There's different categories of content in your email. That's what this is for. The way that people read an email like this is they just read your headline, your heading. And then they jump to the next one, and they jump to the next one, and they jump to the next one. Unless, what I just told you in the previous, it looks different. So in this case, our links look different, right? They're a different color. They're underlined. So the way that I would read this is event on date, sign up for event. Activity for you, prep for activity. News about person, read Ashley's bio. One more thing, unless you bold it like this. That's it. So if you know that that's what the eyes are going to see, we all really got to start thinking about these headings that we use. And if you're in a newsletter template situation that has you hard-coded in a world where it's always campus news, or always upcoming events, and you can't change these, then you have to add another layer of headings, or just free yourself from the template entirely, OK? I think this example really shows why it's so important for your links to have enough information to tell people what to do and why, or by when, or what. Because if they're only reading the link, right? If that's the whole thing they read in your blurb, do they know what you want? Imagine if all these links were learn more. It's funny and playful when we look at it this way, but it's reality for people using a screen reader, right? Like, they have an option to ask for all the links to be read out loud to them in a newsletter kind of environment. And if it's just learn more, learn more, learn more, learn more, there's no context, that's not helpful, right? So this serves every single person in our audience, and it helps us get our message across in two seconds, OK? All right, we're going to put this to the test, my friends. Right now, some of you believe me. Some of you might be like, oh, no, I don't know. We're going to test it. And this is a tool that you can use, too. When you go back to your world and you start writing emails again, the two-second test. So what we're going to do is I'm going to show you an email for two seconds only, and then I want you to put in the chat what you saw, what you think the email wants from you, OK? So this is a great time in the training. We're almost to the end for you. If you're multitasking, if you're in another tab, if you're doing something else, come back and play. Come back and play. Look at the email for two seconds and put in the chat what you saw. Here we go. One, two. What did this email want from you? Oh, you guys are, there's a lot of you, and it's very fast. Fall preview, tell us, tell us, tell us. How was the report? OK, let's go back. Let's look at it. Most of you, I believe, saw, tell us how the day went. I mean, it's giant. It's in the middle of the screen. Of course, you saw it. That's what we want. This is a post-event survey we want people to fill out the event. This was the first virtual open house that I hosted during COVID when I was working in enrollment at my campus here locally. And I really wanted to see how the event went to see if we would run another virtual open house even when we could reopen. So I sent this to all 5,000 people who attended. And I had a 98% completion rate on the survey. And I was like, holy crap, what? Clearly, I know how to do magic. It's not magic. It's the F pattern, right? So this email asked them, how was your day? Tell us how it went. Click. The survey was easy, too, so it was easy to fill out. But I will point out that some of you here mentioned, watch something. The Play button, some of you saw these gigantic graphics instead of what I actually wanted you to see, which was my link to the survey, right? And so this is why this test is so effective. If you run this test and there are enough people in your audience who look at something that's not what you want them to see or what you want them to do, then remove these icons. You don't need, I don't need this. I don't care if the audience receiving this email watches the recordings. I want them to fill out the survey, you know? And this is a great example of how images can actually hurt versus help you. And we haven't talked about images at all today. And the reason we haven't talked about images is because, much like emojis, we think they add value. But we don't think that they're necessary for your email communications. A nice banner, like the apples that Ashley showed us earlier that create context or emotion or put you in a vibe, wonderful. An image of three students because you must add an image to every single email, even if it's not related to the story that you're trying to tell, not great, distracting, right? And what's even worse is if you are, if you rely on images to transmit a message, like if you're putting words on images or you're relying, like if the image carries some sort of important meaning and people can't see it or it doesn't load, then people miss out on your content, right? What we have found with this two-second test over thousands and thousands of people testing this with us is that people skip right over the images or they become a total distraction. So in both scenarios, it's not great for us. So really think about images as a way to add a vibe. You can have your logo on a banner at the top because that's a good branding vibe. But don't feel like you must always have a banner in your newsletters because you don't. OK. Next example, two seconds. One, two. What did this email want you to do? I don't know. I know, no idea. I know. Oh my God, Claire, I'm always so jealous of the people who do that little guy. I'm like, do you have it copy pasted somewhere or do you just know how to type that? I don't, I don't know. I always wonder. All right, here's what this is. What? So this is a great example of how too much formatting basically avoids the effect of formatting. Like this person got a memo that colors and bolding helped. And so they were like, I'm going to color and bold everything important in this email. And so what ends up happening is we don't even know where to look. Our eyes didn't know what to do. So when you do the two second test for your emails and you see what just happened in our chat and people are seeing all sorts of different things and they're confused, then you know you've got to go back and put the content in the F pattern. Now, this email, I mean, there's so many things. It's really cute because the event details at the top like this, it's actually a best practice. Although center align is not great in general because it's really hard for us to scan quickly with center align. There's definitely too much going on. I don't know what the action is. I don't know what I'm supposed to look at. If this email was in the F pattern, we would know much, much quicker. Also note the subject line. We probably can't see it. It's a super long line at the very top. What? Annual game and lecture and anthropology. January 26th at 1230. Dr. Nicholas. Harney. Crowds mobility. That is an example of you didn't summarize enough. And we need to summarize in those six to nine words. OK, next example is a newsletter. One, two. What did you see? Yes, call for proposals. Nice. All right. I love this example because as a newsletter, it's really hard sometimes to break away from a template that you might already have. But it's really important with your newsletters that you recognize that the order that you put the content in signals something to your reader. The first story in your newsletter, you are telling them this is the most important. And so if you are in a template that forces you to always put like a letter from the president or something at the beginning, that might not be the most important thing in that newsletter, right? Or if it's always the most recent campus news at the beginning, that's probably not the most important thing in that newsletter. This newsletter breaks that. And what they put at the beginning is what they want you to know. So this is coming from the Higher Web Association, now Digital Collegium. And what they want, this is their call for proposals for their annual conference, right? Like that's what they want in this month's newsletter. They just want proposals. So they tell you right off the bat in that heading, call for proposals ends March 13th, right? And then they put the button, submit a proposal. Did I need to read any of that blurb? No. Awesome, right? Awesome. The second story here, some of you saw Kathleen's face, right? This is a great use of an image. When you're introducing a new person, a new member of the community that people might see in real life, you might want them to know what they look like, right? But this story doesn't have a button. And it doesn't have a button because it is not important for the reader to click on her bio, right? Only if they want to. And so they did it as an inline link, more than 10 years experience. So the buttons that you choose, signal, these are priority actions. The headings that you choose should basically cover enough information so that you don't have to read the blurb unless people really want to. Last thing I'll say on this one is that top image, does it add value? No, of course not. Of course not, right? Kathleen's face does, right? Because it's about her, the story, right? So if you're sending stories of alumni or students, their face, great. If it's just a random banner, especially this random banner, like if what you wanted was to make me feel like the power and the excitement of giving a talk, then you need to give me like an up angle TEDx style picture where I feel like a rock star for speaking, right? But not a beige wall. All right, last example. Here we go. One, two. What did that email want? There's always the vodka person. Good eyes. Oh my gosh, yes, perfect. Now instead of showing you the email again, I'm going to show you a rewrite using everything you learned today, OK? Now tell me what you see. One, two. What was that? Wait, what? None of you said that the first time. Literally not one of you. Where's the vodka? Here they are side by side. So when you saw the first one, right? We all saw that logo. We all saw the pictures. Did they add any value? No, they detracted from the message, which is y'all, we got to rally and we got to save the pets and buffalo. Because it's the middle of the pandemic and the shelters need funds. And Tito's was generous enough to give a matching gift. And all we need to do is give a little bit of money so we can save these pets, right? We missed all that because of all those paragraphs and images that didn't follow the F pattern. Now on the right hand side, you're seeing, I'm not using bullet points, right? Because I can't. Because this is more of a storytelling type of email where I have to explain what I'm saying and bullet points wouldn't feel right. So instead I just wrote my paragraphs and I bolded the most important parts of each one. Half of them will be euthanized. Every dollar you give will double. Donate 10 to save our furry friends' lives. Some of you even saw that, the $10 down there. It's a very long link, but it tells me exactly what you want from me and why. And I don't need to understand anything that's going on. All I need to do is care about pets and I will give 10 bucks, even if I don't live in Buffalo. But the first email, I was like, what? Why are you sending me a vodka ad? Delete. I didn't delete it, thankfully, because now it's like the example I use every single time to demonstrate how this is so powerful. And you can save pets. All right, we've made it to the end, my friends. This is the summary of how you write emails people will read within two seconds. You need to choose the entity that people will know in your from. Your subject line needs to be clear and just tell them what's in the email in six to nine words. Your language has to be simple. And the way to do that is to write like you speak. Your links should be specific, focus on that action and benefit and give enough context to people. Why are you asking me to do this? Or by when? Or what are you asking me to do? And at the end, it's how we put it all together, knowing how people are going to read the emails when they open them up. Use the real estate that you have to make sure your message gets across in those two seconds. Happy emailing, friends. This content that we shared with you is about a quarter to a third of the content we have in our book, Mailed It. And so if you love this and you're an email marketer and you're all in, the book has a ton more from audience segmentation to workflows to the size of your team needs to be and how you measure whether what you're doing is working. Thank you. Thank you all. Thanks for being so chatty in the chat. Chatty, chatty. Thank you so much, Ashley and Day. Just for everybody here, the recording will be uploaded back into that event page by tomorrow morning. And all of the links that Ashley was posting in the chat, I've added them to that page as well. So if you've lost one of them in the frequent updates and the messages, you can go find them there. The slides are also there for download. So just look for a follow-up email from me, hopefully meeting all of these rules tomorrow morning with the links and instructions for accessing them. No pressure, Christy. Use the GPT, Christy. Use the GPT. I will, I will. Thank you so much, everyone. Have a great weekend. Bye.

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