What have we found to expand your email knowledge today?

Here are a few of our favourite links from across the email and business world, carefully curated just for you:

Find of the week ⭐

Here's a neat one!

Most of us are using AI to save time…and stopping there. Our friend Hazel June reckons that's roughly 20% of the ROI you could be getting.

She's built a free 3-minute AI Audit that shows you exactly which parts of your business AI is actually working in (and where the gaps are costing you output and revenue).

It's quick, and the results might just help you get you thinking differently about how you use AI (even in your emails)

Take Hazel's free AI Audit here.

We’re also constantly on the lookout for new resources, news, tools and links, so hit us up if you’ve got something valuable to feature!

We literally got that question in our DMs last week after sharing a quick take on making sure you keep to the knitting after those Google announcements.

It’s a fair question, because it sure as heck feels that way.

In case you’ve missed this, what’s essentially changed is that AI has shifted away from inboxes being a container (Emails arrived, sat in order, and waited for a human to decide what mattered), into a matrix where it pretty much decides what’s important.

Okay, fair, that’s an objective view, but it’s kinda what it feels like and summarises what inboxes are turning into (yeah, thanks, Google).

Gmail's AI layer now reads what lands, decides what's worth your subscriber's attention, and increasingly hands them a summary instead of your email.

The inbox is evolving away from that container into what we’d call an “editor” here.

And it’s a pretty big deal. Most folks use Gmail/ Google for email, and many inboxes tend to follow what they do anyway.

And, as with any editor (us bookish folks know this), the main aim is to “cut” what’s not deemed important…you see the potential problem here.

The problem, however, is that if an email can be reduced to two lines without losing meaning, that AI is gonna be snip-snipping.

This means no opens. No clicks. No replies. A reader nodding, moving on and leaving you with a problem (especially if you monetise using ads, impressions or using that content to drive what you sell).

And if something can be summarised that cleanly, was there much to summarise at all? 🙃

If that question gets the gears turning, then we’re on the same page.

It should, because email strategy differs from a social or search strategy. Yes, brevity matters, but where do you lose the nuance of why readers are reading in the first place?

If an AI can read your email and capture everything that matters in 200 characters, the honest truth? There wasn't much there worth more than 200 characters…

Pure information summarises beautifully. You know, those "Five tips for X", or "Here's what happened this week", or even the "Our new feature does Y."

The machines eat that for breakfast (because the value lives in the facts, and facts compress well).

But they're a commodity and, honestly, anyone can serve them.

You know what doesn't compress? You.

Your take and your story, friends. The way you'd explain things to a mate over coffee. The inside joke your readers are part of. The argument only you'd make, in the order only you'd make it.

That's the stuff a summary flattens (and, frankly, a flattened version is a worse version). Which is exactly why the reader still has to open it.

So the goal isn't to confuse the AI or hide from it. It's to be the kind of email where the summary makes your reader think: "…yeah, I should probably read the actual thing."

Sound familiar? We've been banging this drum since Volume 64.

This is the next chapter.

There was a fantastic email this week by Tyler Morin from the Chief Newsletter Officer newsletter that broke this down insanely well (and some great nuggets on those summaries, too).

A lot of what he said echoes something we shared in a guest post recently, too.

Give your readers a good reason to open your emails.

These are tactics or hacks, folks. They’re a simple midset shift that echoes what good senders do anyway, and we’ve distilled those into 3 key concepts we want you to think about carefully:

1. Have a perspective on things

Tyler mentions this, but AI can tell people what happened, sure. What it can't tell them is why you think everyone else has it backwards.

Facts, not opinions, are built for summaries. A summary that says "Des thinks AI summaries will help good newsletters" loses every bit of that why (and the why is the whole damn point).

Honestly, if you're not slightly nervous pressing send, you're probably just reporting news.

2. Keep it human

Humans trust other humans (it’s what we sign up for in newsletters anyway). We've said it before, and we’ll say it until the robots annihilate us. The more your newsletter humanises and builds relationships, the less there is for a machine to neatly strip out.

Personality is, rather conveniently, uncompressible. A robot can summarise what you said, but can't summarise how you made someone feel while you said it.

3. Build belonging

When opening your email is how someone stays in the club; no summary substitutes for that.

We think about this a lot with these emails. Our Easter eggs, our memes, our use of somewhat foul language at times…even the way we address all of you, friends. You aren’t merely subscribers because this is a community.

No two-liner summarises this stuff. And that’s your advantage, as we’ve highlighted in that Glasp article. AI can’t do that (well, not yet anyway).

Here's where this all ties together.

If AI summaries mean fewer people technically "open" (and let's be honest, open rates are already wobbly), then maybe we can finally stop treating the open as the number that matters.

Replies matter.
Clicks matter.
Forwards matter.

Those are the signals that say a human chose you over the convenient summary (and they're probably the exact engagement signals the AI uses to decide whether you make the cut next time anyway).

You need to give the robots every reason to keep showing you, by giving humans every reason to keep choosing you.

The fundamentals are no longer optional (and never were, seriously).

If a robot can read your email for your subscriber, your email needs to be worth reading anyway.

Would yours survive the summary?

It’s not an easy road (we don’t think it ever has been), but that’s why we’ll be right here with you, and there’s a lot to come as we learn how to work with all these changes coming our way.

Our (free) June workshop covers exactly this! We’re going to get practical on ways you can go about writing your emails to work for the AI inbox.

We’ll be announcing this one soon, but you get first dibs.

Make sure you grab a spot here, because bookings are limited.

It’s June, and we’re making great progress toward our resolutions! 😅

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