Hey Marketing Bestie,

My Bearcats won. Michigan game was intentional. I still haven't had to watch Earle Meets World even though Ari has tried.

I even saw The Odyssey this weekend. A+. I'm sure my time with Earle is coming but I will ride this high for as long as I can until my luck runs out.

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EVENT OF THE WEEK

Your Q4 problem probably isn’t budget. It’s timing.

Big brands can outspend you. They shouldn’t out-prepare you.

Matthew Gourgeot from Thryv and Shana Krisan, CMO at Goldfish Swim School, are bringing 6 tactics you can copy/paste straight into your plan.

Because once the holiday rush hits, you don’t get to go back and prep.

Bring your specific mess of a Q4 plan and ask them directly.

Or RSVP and I’ll send you the recording.

The 7 email rules to remember

Recorded a podcast episode with Jay Schwedelson this week, and about 4 minutes in he said something that made me rethink how I'm going to write emails. Episode drops tomorrow, but this part couldn't wait. We're urgent here at The Marketing Millennials.

The path we've all had memorized prior was:

FROM NAME ➡️ SUBJECT ➡️ PREHEADER ➡️ OPEN

is now turning into:

FROM NAME ➡️ SUBJECT ➡️ AI READS YOUR EMAIL ➡️ AI SUMMARY OR PRIORITY SCORE ➡️ maybe OPEN

And it's heading somewhere even bigger than that. Gmail already lets people ask their inbox questions directly, stuff like "when's my package arriving" or "pull up my outstanding invoices," and Gemini goes and finds the answer across old emails. That's not summarization anymore, that's retrieval.

Your email doesn't just need to get opened once, it needs to be findable weeks later when someone asks their AI helper a question you could've answered by realizing that this is COMING.

Basically: this is SEO, but for your inbox. Call it AIO if you want a name for it. I'm going to. Thanks, Jay for making us smarter.

What to do??? Thank you so much for asking...

1️⃣. Figure out what "live text" actually means...

This was the term Jay kept circling back to. Live text is the real HTML text in your email, the stuff that renders as actual, selectable characters. Not a screenshot of text, not text sitting inside an image.

The part that surprised me: he said alt text doesn't count as live text either, no matter how you use it. Boo.

A lot of us have treated alt text as a fallback if images don't load, assuming it gives us some coverage either way. It doesn't help here. If the tool summarizing your email can't find real text in the code, it's not pulling anything from that part of the message.

Here what you need to do:

Pull up your last campaign and check what's actually in the HTML, not what you can see on screen. If your offer details or your webinar time are locked inside a JPEG, an AI summary can't see them. Spot check this please.

We will wait.

2️⃣. Put your most important line in the first 150 characters

The AI summaries are scanning roughly the first 150 characters of live text to figure out what your email's about. That's the same real estate that used to just be "the opening," now it's doing double duty.

So don't just front-load it, write it cleanly. Compare "so what does this all mean, there are a lot of ways to look at it" to "brands can no longer optimize only for Google rankings, they also need to be cited by ChatGPT and Gemini." The 2nd one is a fact AI can copy straight into a summary. The 1st one gives it nothing to grab on to. Boo again.

Same logic applies to offers. "Our biggest sale ever!!" tells a model nothing. "30% off annual plans through September 8th" hands it an event, a number, and a deadline, which is exactly what someone's inbox AI needs if they get asked "what deals did I get this weekend."

So long story short, here is what you should do: rewrite your first 150 characters as a sentence you'd be fine seeing pasted into a summary verbatim. Make sure it's in the HTML.

3️⃣. Keep writing your preheader, just don't count on it showing up

The subject line side of things hasn't changed,

What's changing is what comes after it. He mentioned that within the next 6 months, half of preheaders won't be the ones Marketers actually wrote, they'll be something the AI pulled from the message instead.

Which means the move isn't to give up on writing preheaders. That would be too simple lol. It's instead about making sure whatever the AI would grab from your email says roughly the same thing your preheader would have said. If those two things are telling different stories, you're leaving it up to chance which 1 your subscriber sees. That's risky.

And so, a takeaway: Please put your preheader next to the first sentence of your email body and see how closely they match. Close that gap if they don't. As a rule!

4️⃣. Give AI nouns

We've built years of subject lines around "you've gotta see this 👀," and I get it, that stuff works on humans. But an AI skimming it has nothing to grab. No name, no topic, nothing. "Nike's new marketing strategy is wild 👀" gives it something real, and you still kept the hook.

Nobody at Apple has published this as an official rule, so take it as my read, not gospel. Still, it's more interesting to say more these days anyways. Because the you've gotta see this type of trick is everywhere so nobody actually wants to see it.

This tracks with what I've seen: give the thing a noun and it's easier for anything, human or robot, to know what it's about.

My rule of thumb is to never let your subject line and your opening both go vague at the same time.

Vague subject, clear opening, fine. Clear subject, playful opening, also fine. Vague on both and there's nothing for either side to hold onto. It's also lazy.

So what you need to do: Please read your subject and first line back to back. If someone couldn't name the topic from those 2 alone, make 1 of them explicit. Easy!

5️⃣. Pick 1 thing per email

Sale, new drop, referral push, survey, all crammed into one send? That's 3 or 4 emails instead of 1 clear 1.

It's a lot for a person to sort through, and it's worse for something trying to boil your whole email down to a single line, it has to guess which piece actually matters.

Here is what to do: Please name the 1 thing you want someone to remember from this send before you hit go. If you can't name just 1, something needs to get cut. Clarity is rewarded!

6️⃣. Say the actual action

"Get yours today" and "don't wait" sound like calls to action, but neither 1 says what actually happens if someone clicks. "Reserve your spot for the Oct 12 workshop" or "Redeem your $10 credit before Sunday" tells them exactly what they're getting and by when.

1 of these can get repeated back accurately. The other can't.

So, read your CTA on its own, with no context around it. If it doesn't name the specific thing being offered, rewrite it until it does.

7️⃣. Put the important stuff in text, not just the image

Pretty hero banners are great. They're also invisible to anything scanning your email for actual facts. If your product name, price, or offer only lives inside an image, that information doesn't exist as far as an AI summary is concerned.

Takeaway: Please turn your images off and see if the email still makes sense. If it falls apart, move the key details into real text somewhere. Also, plain text emails are great. Use them more. Saves time.

MEME OF THE WEEK

JUST FOR FUN

🤩: Brand of the week: LESET
😛: Favorite meal I ate: Costco Pizza
🎵: Favorite song this week: Dreamin
💍: What I bought my wife: Leset LOL.

Any good Labor Day Weekend sales we're shopping? I have a case of the shoppies and I want to get influenced.

Your friend,
Daniel