There’s a lot of talk in email about stuff like subject lines, segments, send times, and lately, AI. It’s all useful stuff, but none of it really explains why some senders get replies and why many get silence.

Today's guest, however, has built her entire business on the answer.

Meet Fabiana Stringa. Italian, born in Genoa, and someone shaped by a decade living across three continents.

Everywhere she’s lived, families have all wanted the same thing while working with her, and that’s not merely a trip but a sense of belonging.

Fabiana has also spent an immense amount of time in marketing, but for 12 years now, she's helped families fall in love with Italy through storytelling, comics, and game-based systems.

She's also an email copywriter for ecommerce brands and coaches, with results like +300% sales growth in under 30 days, and now she's turning those same instincts on her own newsletter, Belonging in Italy.

And today, she's making the case for the one thing in your inbox that AI still can't touch: you, unmistakably yourself.

Let's get stuck into what doing things the Italian way can teach you about writing emails nobody else could have written.

È tempo di imparare!

Four "men".

The first painted a smile so quietly haunting that people still line up by the thousands, every single day, just to stand in front of it for fifteen seconds.

The second carved a block of flawed marble (the one every other sculptor in Florence had rejected) into a 17-foot man so perfect that grown adults weep when they round the corner and see him.

The third taught bronze how to breathe. He made a boy standing over a fallen giant look as if he might actually turn his head and speak to you.

The fourth painted rooms inside the Vatican with such grace that five centuries of artists have measured themselves against him and quietly lost.

Leonardo. Michelangelo. Donatello. Raffaello.

The titans of the Renaissance. The men whose hands rewired what human beings believed they were capable of.

And you've known all four of them since you were six years old, sitting too close to the TV in your pyjamas, eating cereal straight from the box on a Saturday morning.

Holy Cannoli.

Yes, I'm talking about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

In 1984, two broke comic-book guys in New Hampshire needed four names for four turtles who knew karate and loved pizza. They could've called them anything. Mike, Joe, Steve, and Carl.

They reached for the Italians.

Not because it was funny (okay, partly because it was funny) but because some part of them knew those four names carry something. Mastery. Beauty. Genius. Fire.

You hand a kid the name Leonardo, and you've handed him five hundred years of "the best who ever did it," whether he can spell it or not.

That's the strange and beautiful thing about Italian blood. It doesn't stay put. It leaks into everything. Into cartoons and cereal commercials and the name on a pizza box. Maybe even a few branches up your own family tree.

That gap between what a thing is and what people feel when they meet it is the whole game we're in.

Here is what I mean.

A robot can tell you the turtles are named after Renaissance masters. It can summarise the plot in nine seconds flat. What it cannot do is make you smile the way you just did, remembering the couch, the cereal, the theme song you still know by heart.

Personality is incompressible. A machine can summarise what you said. It can never summarise how you made someone feel while you said it.

That is your moat. Possibly the only one left.

But why am I telling you all this, {{first_name|friends}}?

Well, because the principle behind it is the one thing AI can't copy from you, and once you own it, you stop competing with everyone else.

Let me show you the Italian way.

Italian talent doesn't localise itself to fit a market. It brings its world to the world. Ferrari doesn't ask Tokyo what engine it would prefer.

Ferrari has orders booked into 2027. Not because it can't build faster. Because it decided not to, in 2025, it kept deliveries deliberately flat. A three-year waitlist, on purpose.

Most businesses would call this insane. Money left on the table. I call it the strongest positioning move in Italian culture, and almost nobody copies it, because it takes nerve.

Here is the trap it avoids.

The instinct, once you have an audience, is to fit for everyone. General template, AI-written email. Say yes to every subscriber, every "just one more discount," every reader who was never really yours.

We call that growth.

It isn't. It's erosion wearing growth's clothes. The moment everyone can have your thing, the moment you feel like "everyone", nobody desires you, and they drift to someone else, because you don't stick.

So here is what I would burn down: the belief that a bigger list is a better one. That you have to be a shop window during sale season, shouting at everyone who walks past.

You don't. Scarcity only works when there's something worth being scarce about. Chosen on purpose, it's not a limitation. It's a statement.

And notice what Ferrari is selling. Not a car. Belonging. Membership in something with a door, and the quiet pride of being on the right side of it.

The best email senders work the same way. They don't water themselves down to sound "professional" or "on brand." They bring their actual world: their kitchen, their grudges, their ordinary Tuesday, straight into the reader's inbox.

The flood of sameness in every inbox right now is not a copy problem. It's a personality problem. Everyone learned the templates. Nobody learned about just being themselves.

So if you want to be read in a world where anyone can generate "good enough," there is one thing worth destroying: the version of you that sounds like everyone else. The safe voice. The one built to offend no one, and so reaching no one.

I once read that our deepest fear is not that we're inadequate: it's that we are powerful beyond measure. I think most copywriters shrink for exactly that reason. It feels safer to sound generic than to sound unmistakably like yourself.

Don't.

Your audience wants you, not your product.

And the fastest way to find out is to ask them to reply and watch what happens.

If you can get your people to reply to your newsletter, that's the whole thing right there. Powerful and human.

It's like the reason people want to come to Italy: they don't want to just sit on a bus; they want to speak to the barista, to a lemon market vendor, to a great leather artisan, because they want to be connected to another human being.

That's why, when you ask them to reply, and they actually do, you strengthen the bond with your audience, and you form trust.

The benefit of this is ultimately more sales as well (also, your deliverability improves, but that was never the main point). You become different from the masses. You are building your own world with the people who trust you.

This is, almost exactly, what I do for a living, only in a different medium. I apprentice families into Italy the way Leonardo trained in a bottega: not from a book, but by living it.

And it starts the day you subscribe to my newsletter. You don't just read my stories, you play inside them, you travel by imagining them. I build belonging in my own little world, and I let people in.

Come where the turtles led you... And just for this community, if you’re looking for inspiration, I’ve put together a quick 3-Step Guide to Belonging in Italy.

Your friend,

Fabiana

(P.S. This resource was put together just for our community, so if you’d like to tell stories like the Italians do, then add this to your list of favourites).

Who’d have thought the Ninja Turtles could inspire your emails?

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Your friend in email,

Des