50th Episode Bonus: global voices, big email takeaways, + ChatGPT in the kitchen?

Nikki 0:00: It is so much easier to fill in templates or consult cheat sheets.
0:04: Instead, we are so often tackling problems that keep us theorizing and testing and iterating and iterating again.
0:10: Welcome to Email swipes, where we peek behind the scenes at the emails that catch your attention and earn their place in your swipe file.
0:17: Every other week, we’ll talk to an email expert about an experiment they ran, and in the following episode, we’ll dive into the strategies and methods used in the email so you can inform and inspire your My own email work.
0:27: I’m Mikki Elvas, the copywriter behind winning emails for 8 and 9 figure sassin e-commerce brands like Shopify, For Sigmatic, and Sprout Social.
0:35: And I know that hearing the background stories to these emails will help you turn pie in the sky insights into plug and play actions.
0:41: Ready to make inspiration tactical?
0:43: Let’s go.
0:44: Woohoo, 50 episodes.
0:47: I want to hear how you think I should celebrate, but first, let’s talk about some interesting themes that kept popping up throughout the season.
0:53: The first interesting thing I noticed from this season is how global it was.
0:58: We opened the season with Annlo, originally from France, now in the UK.
1:02: On to Jay, who is also in the UK.
1:05: We had Jasper from Belgium, Heather, who is American, but living in the Netherlands, Taylor is also in the Netherlands.
1:11: Adriana, who is in New Jersey now, but from Venezuela originally.
1:16: Did I miss anyone?
1:17: Well, there’s also me, born and bred in Midwest America, but now living in Israel.
1:22: And I’ll be honest, being an expat has been a huge influence on my work.
1:26: I was definitely a ginormous.
1:28: America is the best snob, and it took some humbling experiences as a foreigner on decidedly different soil.
1:37: drill into my very patriotic skull, that culture is real, that a concept as simple as air conditioning is vastly different depending on where you live, that there are things that tie us together as humans and other areas where you need to dig deep into the cultural psyche if you want to make an impact.
1:54: So it was quite cool this season to get viewpoints from across the email world, some which spoke to specific localities and some which had to resonate globally.
2:04: Another interesting theme was teamwork.
2:06: More of our guests this season work with more robust teams, and it was so cool to see how each one structures things, how they balance collective strengths and weaknesses and how they allocate resources.
2:16: Working in a silo definitely doesn’t create the same caliber work as work created with a team.
2:21: Yes, that’s a little nudge to find a mentor or even at the playing field with your clients if you’re working solo.
2:27: Just because you’re working solo doesn’t mean you can’t build your own non-team team.
2:33: And the last theme from this season is simply how email is so awesomely interesting and complex in just this season alone.
2:40: So essentially from only a cross section of 8 particular stories, we saw that sometimes winning an email can be as simple as changing the sender name, like Heather’s experience promoting web root services, or it can be as complex as an all-night multip spreadsheet coordination, like Jay’s hyper personalized election results campaign for the BBC.
2:59: We saw how sometimes you have to lean into the relationship side of email like Anne Laura did when sending the Nest Labs community her book launch.
3:06: And other times you need to silence your default instinct and listen to the data, like Jasper saw from the sentiment ratings on the Col shop birthday emails.
3:14: This complexity is both good news and bad news.
3:18: Bad news because it ain’t easy to be undefinitively poke fun at its mistakes.
3:23: Because I can’t just take the recipes at face value.
3:26: I need to remind it that you don’t need to double baking powder, that bread crumbs don’t stick unless you coat your chicken strips with a binder, that chocolate chips don’t melt as well as chopped bars do, until it finally hit me.
3:36: I was expecting AI in my kitchen to be what clients are expecting AI to be for their email marketing.
3:42: By expecting a personal flawless food scientist, I am so to speak, expecting the email equivalent of strategy and copy.
3:50: I’m expecting it to be the expert instead of using it as a tool, together with my skills to give me good results.
3:57: I can get a super delicious pie from Chat CBT, but it needs my brain to get there.
4:03: We can get super effective emails from Chat GBT, but it needs our brains to get there.
4:08: Speaking of super delicious chat GBT pie, I will give you the final together with my brain recipe, if you fill out the end of season survey.
4:15: Yes, that is a shameless bribe, but hey, you want to give me your feedback anyway, no, and tell me how I should be celebrating this 50th episode too.
4:24: So head off straight from here to ikkielbas.com/podcast survey and help me shape season 4.
4:30: And get delicious pie.
4:32: Thanks for geeking out with me about that email story.
4:34: If you enjoyed either of these episodes, you’ll probably enjoy getting my emails, plus you’ll never miss another episode.
4:40: Sign up at nickylbus.com/subscribe, and yes, that link is in the show notes.