Kelly Whelan (00:10)
Welcome to the Member Engagement Show, the podcast for association and member-based organization professionals. I'm your host, Kelly Whelan from Higher Logic If you're looking to grow membership, boost retention, increase non-due revenue and get members more engaged, you're in the right place. Subscribe to the show to keep up with the latest episodes and visit higherlogic.com slash engagement show to access past episodes and resources. Now let's meet today's guests.

Welcome back to the Member Engagement Show. Today's guest on the show is Amber Worthen, founder and CEO of Email Maven. Amber is an email strategist who spent years helping organizations rethink how they connect through email. After HigherLogic's email benchmark webinar in March, she and I got talking about how she's exploring the impact of AI on email inboxes. And I thought listeners could benefit from her tips. So I'm excited to have her on the show today. Welcome, Amber.

Amber Worthen (01:08)
Thank you for having me, Kelly. I'm always happy to be here.

Kelly Whelan (01:11)
it's always great to chat with you about email stuff. So I wonder if to start, you can share a bit about your background and how you've come to focus on email strategy.

Amber Worthen (01:21)
course. So I worked for the American Physical Therapy Association for seven years and during my last few years there I managed our email program as well as some other website. ⁓ even though I had gone to school for marketing communications, you know, that's really where my love of email came in and working for an association I just realized the weight of how much we utilize email to talk to members for associations and how we can all just be doing it better.

Like I love associations and nonprofits who are changing the world via their members and all that they do. And I just wanted to get into a place where we could continue to service members as best as possible. And the number one way to communicate to them is via email. So I created email maven and since then I just loved email through and through we do everything from strategy to staffing to projects and

I have just a deep love of email and helping create email mavens or email experts wherever they are.

Kelly Whelan (02:26)
That's so awesome because I feel like in my experience with associations, it's rare that you have someone working at an association where email is like the only thing they're doing. First of all, like that's very rare. And then my own experience was that a lot of it had to be self-taught. Like I had a little bit of a background in communication and marketing, but the strategies that we actually used or the testing that we did or the measurement that we did.

had to be things that I was exploring kind of by myself. So knowing that there's resources like Email Maven to help with stuff like that, if you are a small organization and you're struggling or you just want someone to take a look and see if they can make improvements, I think that matters a lot.

Amber Worthen (03:11)
Yeah, and like I said, we also just do a ton of thought leadership. we just want to make sure that people are utilizing this tool as best as possible. If you're a marketing or comms VP all the way down to just the person clicking send on an email every day. Like you said, most people, it isn't their full-time job. So we can help you get the work done if you need that or just stick around and watch out. And we're happy to just give you all of our tips and tricks everywhere we can.

Kelly Whelan (03:40)
And on the thought leadership front, I know there's a lot of buzz around AI in every industry right now, including marketing. But I'm someone who doesn't care as much about the hype stuff. I want to know what the real impact is, what someone can actually do. So from your perspective, what is actually changing in the email landscape right now?

Amber Worthen (04:01)
Right now, things are changing, right? But there's ⁓ a good amount of fear that's happening. So the story I've shared recently on my blog is I received an email from someone I admire in the nonprofit email space. And she basically said, Gemini is taking over Gmail and your emails aren't making it through anymore. And I just about died because I was thinking, I am a leader in this space. How did I miss that information? And so

For the next couple of hours, I was doing research and quickly figured out that no, ⁓ her intentions were right, but the bottom line wasn't true. That really, yes, Gemini, Copilot, all these things that are attached to email boxes are making changes, which we already knew, ⁓ and they are developing and piloting different things all the time. But as of today, there isn't any...

major change that we're seeing except for summaries. They're summarizing some emails, but we do know that some big things are coming down the pike here probably at end of the

Kelly Whelan (05:07)
Yeah,

and I think when we've talked previously, the interesting part of this particular shift, ⁓ excuse me, is that even if you're not using AI yourself, the impacts that AI is having on email are things that could impact how your members receive messages either way, because it's the email clients that are making the changes where they're having a summary show up.

or having ⁓ inbox sorting happening. those are things that whether or not you're using AI, those things are going to happen with your recipients.

Amber Worthen (05:45)
Yep, exactly. that's, so that's the biggest thing we need to always be aware of is, you know, there's the part that we can do, right? As we're building emails, we're developing that content, we're using AI more and more to do, to create our graphics, create our content, et cetera. There's that aspect that is changing on the daily. I think just as people are getting more comfortable with it. And then there's the aspect of these email providers, such as Gmail, Outlook, and all the ones, they're adopting AI more and more. And

how it's gonna impact the inbox and if your emails really make it to your members in the fashion that you want it to.

Kelly Whelan (06:21)
So in my mind, there's two different pieces of that that come to mind, and they are kind of around what you're measuring and also what you're doing. So on the measurement front, how do you think these AI-driven inbox changes might impact traditional email metrics like opens, clicks, and maybe even deliverability?

Amber Worthen (06:42)
Essentially what AI is going to be doing in the inbox is just pushing us to adopt email best practices faster. when it comes to the metrics, we already know that open rates are flimsy, is what we call them, right? So with the Apple update, Gmail, Yahoo updates, like over just even the last five years, there's a number of things that ESPs have done that have impacted open rates. So we need to know them.

We need to care about them generally, because we need some type of metric to know if our subject lines and pre-headers are working or not. But in general, we need to continue making sure that we're not making groundbreaking decisions based on open rates or just clinging to one of my favorite edges I hear all the time is like, well, our open rates are really good. I'm like, well, that doesn't matter that much. ⁓ So AI is going to keep impacting that. The little bit we've seen so far from people that are piloting ⁓ some new

Gemini use in Gmail is that it is impacting open rates, but we're not 100 % sure exactly how it's going to do it, but we know it is going to impact it. So just like always, best practice, we need to make sure that we're caring about click rates always and conversion rates. So the more we can understand what someone's clicking and if they're actually purchased that thing or registering or reading that article, that's what matters the most. Delerability as a whole,

We're mostly gonna be talking about this Gemini Gmail situation today and deliverability is probably going to stay the same, but deliverability is tricky. Deliverability is very complex. When we truly are saying, does it take to get someone an email delivered into a person's inbox in front of their eyeballs as fast as possible, it's actually a lot of factors combined. A lot of email platforms will say,

their deliver rate is 99.9%. A lot of times that just means that it did hit something in the inbox. That could be their junk box, it could be their spam box, it could be the promotion tab, and so the main tab, whatever it is. So that is continuing to be ⁓ tricky. We will have to come out with more reports from the Gmail Gemini update to really say this is what's changing, just so you're aware. We're gonna be watching the stats.

So what I would say the tip there is right now, keep an eye on your deliverability. Keep an eye on if suddenly you're bouncing a lot more or you're hitting a lot more spam complaints or anything like that. Again, that is a best practice move, but just keep being aware of your stats as these things update. Cause we might see a big change, which was what we saw when the Apple update happened. There was a big change, but then there's been other updates where we were honestly didn't see any changes. So.

Keep an eye on those stats.

Kelly Whelan (09:34)
this stuff always drives home for me that it should always be about your overarching goals. Like you can obsess about individual metrics and I'm not saying not to look at those metrics because to me metrics are just ⁓ something to make you think and say, why did that happen? Like it's not that you're trying to achieve those metrics, it's more that you're looking at metrics to say, okay, I see a downtrend or I see a huge uptrend that seems weird.

why did that happen? And like, can I dig into that and see what's going on? And it makes me think about, this is before male privacy protection, before the AI stuff, it makes me think about how we used to send out emails to advertise our webinars at one of my associations. And when we would do them, we got pretty good open and click rates on those webinars. And so then the education department would always be like, we're not getting registration, so send more emails. And I...

I always had to say to them, okay, the emails are getting opened and clicked. So the email is doing what it's supposed to do. It's driving people to your registration page. And then they're getting to the registration page and they're not understanding like how to register or they're not understanding the value of the webinar or the webinar is there's not enough information on the page or something. And it was kind of like the email can't fix that. The email, and that's not the goal. Like the opens and clicks of the email.

It's not that I don't care. Obviously I care if they get opened or clicked, but the ultimate thing we're trying to achieve is that registration for the webinar. So I feel like with AI, it's just bringing home some of those things that people always should have been thinking about. Like, are you actually getting the conversions? Are you actually hitting your goal and the engagement side of it? Like on the, on the deliverability side and on showing up in targeted inboxes and stuff.

Like it's my understanding that engagement goes into that. That if you're not getting engagement, if you're sending emails that people like don't want to read or don't want to get, you're not letting them unsubscribe, you're hurting yourself.

Amber Worthen (11:38)
That's exactly what we're going to see. So especially with the Gmail changes, what we know the people that are piloting it already, what we know what's happening is they're getting what's called an AI inbox. And this inbox is basically filtering their emails for them and saying, these are the things you want to see. Obviously, you can still go into your regular inbox and sift through everything else. But the new goal is going to probably become that we want to get into that AI inbox. And what the AM inbox is looking at

is it's seeing if this person is regularly clicking, opening, clicking, and or spending extra time in that email, that it is of value. The other thing that it's going to be filtering is, is it high value or high volume sends but low value relevance, meaning are we sending a ton of emails to this person but they're not clicking much? That's a problem. ⁓ AI doesn't want, is going to be filtering

exactly what we want. Like, I think we just need to remember and put ourselves in the shoes of our members or just of anybody. I don't want someone to keep emailing me a million times over and over again if I have not opened or clicked anything, right? Like, we just don't. Again, all AI is doing is like recognizing that, that our inboxes are out of control and it's trying to help us. It's going to try to help people just get to the things they actually care about faster.

Obviously a goal then as an association is we want to be one of those things that people care about. Which means we have to be clicked. Our emails need to be clicked. They need to be open and read. And I love that story you shared because it's just so common. It's the number one story we hear, which is just the problem is we send too many emails. And a lot of times it's because we have something that's struggling a bit and everyone internally just says, send one more email.

send one more email. Well, we can look at your data as a whole already and show how that isn't helping you. But as this keeps progressing, we're going to continue to prove how that's not helping. And that hard conversations are actually what needs to happen. Because when you look at that data and say, just like you said, Kelly, people are clicking, but they're not converting. It's not an email or a marketing problem. It's a program problem.

And those are some harder conversations we need to have, but just as AI is developing as a whole across the entire association landscape, I hope these conversations are happening more and more.

Kelly Whelan (14:10)
Yeah, and I think one of the things that you mentioned that stuck with me too was the volume without value and how that's just gonna drive home the problem with not segmenting. Like if you're blasting everyone with everything and you're not letting them say, these are the things I wanna get or these are the things I don't wanna get, I feel like it's only going to get worse. Like maybe you've been able to escape. Honestly, like I don't think it's a good idea to do that.

Anyway, but maybe you've been able to skate by for a bit and not have negative outcomes, but I think it's just going to be worse if you're not segmenting now because there will be more ability on the recipients and without having to do very much work, be like, I don't pay attention to these emails, I don't wanna see them. And then they just stop showing up in the inbox, so they get filtered out. And I think that's where making that effort to segment

is more and more worth it even if it's hard.

Amber Worthen (15:12)
And I think there's two key tips in that is number one, you need to provide people an email preference option. In a lot of the audits I'm doing, I'm still not seeing email preferences as an option in the footer. If you're not giving people the option to say, I don't want that weekly newsletter because I don't care, but I do want to know about webinars. You're going to lose people really fast. Like we need to give people options.

And secondly, segmentation has always been key. The personalization, right? We live in a world and we have for a very long time lived in a world where we get personalized experiences all the time, right? The second you turn on your Netflix, you open your Amazon account, like literally everywhere we are as consumers, pretty much it's telling us what we need based on what we've been interested in. And associations in a lot of spaces have some of that data.

problem is we're just not dedicating the time to do it. We're just not respecting, in my opinion, the time it really takes to make good emails that really do get these good conversions, et cetera. They take time. It takes some time to make sure that we are getting the right audience. We're crafting the messages to be exactly what they should be to get that person to convert. Unfortunately, most of time what we're seeing is this email person's job is 15 things plus email. And then...

were in an on fire situation. So that person has a million things to do. Plus they're getting an email the morning out being like, my gosh, send this out right now. But it's happening over and over and over again. if we don't have this good runway and we don't have what I call email traffic control that makes us have a good runway, that's what's impacting these emails the most. And at the end of the day, when you

have a good runway that allows you to have good segmentation and good personalization as a whole. It's going to make a world of difference long-term when AI is hitting the inbox more and just member satisfaction. I equally would love it if people talk to me about things that I wanted to know.

Kelly Whelan (17:18)
It strikes me too that some of those conversations can be around what can we do? I understand that there are limitations in maybe what someone can get out of their AMS or what someone can track in different ways. But I think if you pause and take a minute, I'm just thinking back to implementing a preference management center in my own organization. We didn't have one, we realized it was becoming a problem because we didn't want people unsubscribing from everything.

And it was tough for me to get buy-in for that. I will admit that too. Sometimes it's not just like the email person knows that would be what they want and that's not what they're getting buy-in for. And it took candid conversations with leadership and other teams to be like, look, I get that you don't want someone to be able to unsubscribe from webinars because then you're like, we won't be able to advertise webinars. But the alternative is they unsubscribe from everything. If they don't wanna be getting webinar emails and you're not letting them,

unsubscribe from webinars or conferences or whatever, the stuff that they're not interested in. The alternative is they're just going to either unsubscribe from everything or worse, they're gonna block you because it's easier. That's one of the things, one of my biggest pet peeves is when people make the unsubscribe link at the bottom of an email super tiny. First of all, if someone really doesn't wanna get your message, they'll still figure out a way not to get the message. Like making it tiny, I don't think that's gonna do anything.

Like I almost want to put the unsubscribe link at the top. If you don't want this email, tell me so I can stop emailing you and so that we can stop hurting our metrics, our deliverability, our sender score. Like just if you don't want to be here, you can leave. So that's a little a tangent that I couldn't help myself going on. But the point being, have those conversations with and candid conversations. Sometimes they just have to be really honest.

with other teams and leadership that if we don't do this, it's going to cause more problems. Like, yes, it sucks if people aren't subscribing from webinars, but that's also a data point that tells you something. If that's, I feel like I'm picking on webinars, but what I mean is just if there's something that people are consistently unsubscribing from, that tells you something too, that maybe that's not providing value anymore to members and maybe that's a conversation then that an education team could have of like, hey,

seems like people don't want this conference anymore or this, whatever the thing is. And just like sticking our head in the sand and not letting people unsubscribe from it isn't really a solution.

Amber Worthen (19:45)
Yeah, one, especially because like you said, the biggest concern then is if we're not letting them unsubscribe, they're going to click that spam or junk button. And that's the worst thing we can do for ability. You know, any associations that are in health care, law, higher education or their members are in any of those buckets. It's already hard enough to get through those firewalls. If you have multiple people that are clicking spam from you, it makes it 10 times harder.

So the more we can just give people the option, the better. And then like we said, at the end of the day, to ensure that we continue to show up in inboxes, we need to make sure people are clicking things and are getting the information that they want. And your example of webinars is spot on because it is, it tends to be the number one pain point is webinars. We just like to send too many emails around webinars. And number two is that, you know, tried and true newsletter.

I see people who are still sending out daily newsletters. see people who are sending out weekly newsletters that are massive. Those are going to be problems because we want to make sure they can be, it really comes down to the data, right? So data-driven decisions are going to continue to be the most important thing we're doing. We need to make sure we're carving out space and time to pull that data, to understand it. AI is making that easier to do that too.

and make sure that you're making conversations, some hard conversations. One thing that we've been talking to our clients about in a guide that we're providing to help future proof your inbox is to saying, like, here's some questions and things you need to be talking about with your teams. And I say teams broadly. When I say teams, mean anybody who's telling you to send another email, they're part of the team, right? Anyone who's contributing to content, they're part of the team.

Email is a team sport. We really need to get everyone on the same page. And we need to ask some hard questions like which emails are actually driving engagement? What can we stop sending? Are we sending these emails just because we've always done it? Is it time for a revamp or to get rid of it? You know, it's just always pulling that data, pulling the team together, evaluating it and having discussions. That's what really makes an excellent email program that

increases conversions and it's not easy to do overnight but it's ⁓ 100 % worth it and it's going to become critical I think as time goes on here.

Kelly Whelan (22:20)
That makes a lot of sense and I feel like it mirrors some of the things that I would try to do at organizations where I've worked at and again, with mixed success. Like it's definitely an ongoing practice and I think similarly in that practice is like taking a look at your data and what you have that you can segment and personalize because personalization has always been a goal in email marketing or marketing in general.

And I feel like AI might be changing what's possible a bit, but there's limitations still. Like it's still gonna come down to what you know about your members and what you think you could then target things based on that. It's not like ⁓ AI overnight is just gonna be able to do it all for you.

Amber Worthen (23:09)
And the best place that we're seeing people utilizing AI to get that personalization is they're creating, they're using AI and they're copywriting or assisting in it. So they're building out that first email to like maybe the biggest member base. And then they're saying, Hey, I recreate this for, you know, our next two, our students are, you know, our young professionals, et cetera. And then you have copy fast for those other groups. So it's a lot easier to make three emails.

when it used to take us a lot longer to do it. However, the actual data to back that up, you still have to do the work, right? Like I do think over time, AI is going to get smarter and be able to help us in those things. But right now, you still need to understand your data enough to say, these are our separate member types. These are people who've recently clicked. These are people who've recently attended this, attended that, et cetera. And you still need to pull that information together to create a great email. That said though,

all the email platforms we work in, which are many, there are options to do that right now. There's a lot of little tips and tricks and places in every platform we're working on where it's like, you just need to click that button right there and bam, you've got everybody who's clicked on that email or you want to know everyone who's clicked on this link in the last five emails about annual conference, bam, you know, it's right there. So I would always advocate.

getting to know your platform the most and really maximizing the use of that from a data perspective, especially, but then also utilizing AI to make more personalized content. And heck, if we can start using dynamic content emails more, that would be excellent. That's something I rarely see, but AI can make that content just a, you know, one paragraph difference. And then whatever your email platform is, you can swap that out and get that little

even just a little bit of content difference to, let's say, your students versus your full professional members, it makes a big difference to them.

Kelly Whelan (25:10)
love a lot of things about what you just said and in part, I liked them because I used HireLogic and work at HireLogic and one of the things that was a really big, made a really big difference for me when I was using HireLogic was getting to know the tool. Like even if you have to like make the case that you need to be able to spend a week doing it or whatever, like, hey, no emails or something this week so we can, yeah, so that we can really dig into the tools we have at our disposal that maybe we're not using.

I think that can be huge because there's stuff that when I pull the data for higher logics email benchmark report, I can also see like the percentage of people using or not using a feature. We de-identify the information so I can't tell who it is, but I can see like the overarching trends. And it always makes me so bummed to see how few people use engagement scoring and dynamic content because I used to set up engagement scoring as like a listening campaign just

to score people on multiple things. Now you can use it just to do like, ⁓ high engagement versus low engagement, but I used to do it for like engagement around X, Y, Z things. So it could be, we have a certification program. I wanna constantly be collecting a list of people who are showing indications that they are interested in certification. Collecting a list of people who are showing indications they are interested in our certificate program in.

non-members who are interested in membership because then I have all those lists, even if I don't use them, I have all those lists that A, I could use and say, okay, now we're gonna run a campaign around this, or B, I could at least be able to tell like trends. I could see, that list used to have, you know, a thousand people in it. Now it has 200. What happened? That was so valuable. And I usually had like the web tracking.

linked up into those engagement scoring too, where I could see, person has, XYZ person has visited membership webpage two times. Now they go into this group that says, they've shown some interest and you can personalize that to what you feel like shows that they're interested in. And I feel like when someone talks about that, it can feel exciting. And then maybe you have that moment of being like, God, but how do I do that? And I will just say from experience, it's like one step at a time. It's like, what does this thing do?

and let me set one up and see what happens, especially listening campaigns like engagement scoring, like, you don't have to use it. If you set it up and you don't like what you find, you can tweak it and set up something else. Dynamic content took me a little longer to get good at because I had to start rethinking how we structured emails if I was going to use dynamic content so that the common sections were together and then I could drop in like the dynamic block so that it could

have that specialized thing, but newsletters were awesome for dynamic content because then instead of it being this enormous thing that had things for everybody in it, but then everybody saw stuff that they didn't want, I could say only show these sections to these people or only show these sections to these people, but we still only had to send out one.

Amber Worthen (28:19)
I couldn't agree more. think engagement scoring and dynamic content are the least utilized things, yet the most beneficial. I would also add in personas. I think associations get kind of stuck on like having very elaborate personas in their email platform. So they just end up not using it. They're like, well, we don't know if it's, you know, all these deep, deep things. I'm like, just put in your member types to start. Like, you know how beneficial it is when you can pull a report with three clicks, you can pull a report.

that crosses over your engagement scoring and your persona so you know it's your student members that aren't clicking anything. They don't care at all about this or whatever. That is so beneficial to start off with. And I just think what we're seeing here is as the world is changing drastically with AI, hopefully we're setting aside time to test out things, to try things, to see what's happening. The same thing goes for your email platform. You said like,

Set aside time to really learn it or learn something new in it as best you can. Utilize it, try it out, see if it works for your use case or not. Because I, associations all the time, feel like even though they have limited budgets, they go and chase the new shiny thing and they might purchase new things or do other things. I'm like, we could have done that in your email platform. You just didn't know it was possible. So set aside any amount of time you can and I'll do a call out, especially to higher logic.

You guys do the onsite like a whole day training. love those things. They went away for a little bit. They came back. I loved that meeting because it's so nice to go to higher logics, beautiful offices, nice people feed you good food. You're just in a completely different brain space. And then you're like, okay, let's learn about this platform. So beneficial to me when I first started using.

Kelly Whelan (30:07)
I've been to them both again as a customer and now an employee and 100 % when I would go to them as a customer it was so helpful to see how and this goes for the virtual ones too like HugConnect were huge for me because just seeing the way someone else set something up might either show me something I didn't know I could do or show me a tweak I could make to something I'm already doing.

or validate, like honestly, even when I used to see things, like I think I remember vividly going to one higher logic training and watching someone show people how to like set up buttons. This was like a little, this was kind of a ways back. So now I'm really dating myself.

Far back I was working on email, ⁓ but I saw them setting up buttons and I was like, I figured that out like on my own. I did that. I did that. And I'm glad I'm doing it right. Cause I thought I was sort of bootlegging something, but, and this was back when we were using real magnets. So it was like the way I set it up, was like, man, I'm really bootlegging this thing. And then I saw other people doing it and I was like, I guess I'm not. I guess this is the way that you should do it.

Amber Worthen (31:18)
Yes, I even asked, like we staff multiple higher logic, inform from magnet accounts, we're in them all the time, all day, every day. I have my staff go to those virtual trainings once a quarter because exactly that, just when someone else is showing you what they're doing, it's like, ⁓ we could probably be doing it different like that, or maybe it's more efficient and changes are coming, right? Things change. And so just watching the experts do it, always beneficial. And so reach out, use the resources you have with your ESP because

The more you can utilize it, the better off we are to get those personalization and segmenting down. And that's just what members are begging for. They're craving so much. We can give it to

Kelly Whelan (31:58)
Yeah. And that goes for any vendor, honestly. Like, again, I'm using HireLogic as an example, because this is a podcast sponsored by HireLogic. But no matter what vendor you're using, whether that's an ESP or I just did this this week with a different vendor I use for a social media effort I'm doing, I realize like, I don't think I'm using all this stuff that they've added. I don't really understand how it works. So let me reach out to my rep and say, hey, do you have some trainings on this? Or could you walk me through it? Because I want to make sure that we're using it.

because we're paying for it already. So it's kind of like, is there something that can make my job easier? Especially I think this just occurs to me as we go into this era of AI and how you can build some things yourself in AI. Like one thing that came into my mind when you were talking about personas is if you really want to get into it, can build, at HireLogic we call them digital twins. You can kind of like build.

a person that is meant to mimic, well, I say a person, but like an AI account that is meant to mimic your persona so that you can test messaging with them. And it's kind of difficult and they work better if you can put data into it. So that's like a little bit of a next level thing, but there's other things where I've started building something in like chat GPT, making a custom GPT. And then I was like, wait a minute, let me just see if the vendor I use already does this.

If I'm building something for SEO, maybe I need to just go into SEMrush and see if SEMrush already built this. Or if I'm trying to build something special for email, maybe I need to just go into Hierologic and see if they already built this, because chances are they did. And then you don't have to spend your time and energy trying to build something and testing it and trying to figure it out, because it's already in there.

Amber Worthen (33:45)
You did definitely touch on the one thing that we are encouraging everyone. It's one of my pet peeves with AI right now is, everyone's become like an email content creator with the help of AI and you can spot it real fast. You're like, Ooh, that's a bad email. I bet that just got popped out of AI real fast there. But my favorite thing is when you do create those custom GPTs for each of your membership types, and we provide some guidance on that. It's really fast. Again,

I just feel like associations get a little bit too sucked down and they get overwhelmed and they quit. So we try to make it easy of just like, what is your member type? What do they care about on a day to day? You know, all these things tell chat GPT or GPT of choice of like, what are each of your member types? And what are they, what are they interested in and give them a name? like I have mine as an ideal client, right? Like that's what I've got my GPT set up is, and her name is Natalie. Why? I don't know. That's just the name I picked, but.

At the end of the day, everything I do when I'm writing content for emails, when I'm looking at my social media, when I'm looking at my marketing and sales, you know, all these things I'm trying to do, it is a good sounding board from ChachipiTea in my case, where I'm like, what would Natalie even think of this? What would her questions be back to me? What would be the barriers for her being able to come to this thing, whatever? And if nothing else, it's providing a really good sounding board in place for us. ⁓ And then in the end,

We're also seeing when we, with our clients, when we are able to set up those types of GPTs and then create emails off of them, it is so much

Kelly Whelan (35:22)
I think that effort is key. I definitely, even on the content side of things, if I'm running something through ChatGPT to check it, like with our digital twins and stuff, there's always a layer where I wanna make sure it has the information it needs because just straight up ChatGPT sometimes gives me bad advice. So I feel like that's kind of where we're at now is where you do have to give it a little bit of context so that you know that it knows what it needs to. I also started keeping a

like an AI tell list, like things that we see it doing a lot. And I usually upload that to all of my custom GPTs with an instruction, like as a last pass check for these AI tells, like see, and not that I'm expecting it, like I know there's like a demonization of the dash. I'm not telling it like remove the dash from everything, but it's more to say, like if you go through this custom GPT and you find that there's an dash in every sentence, please dial it back.

And that's a document then that I can update over time if I'm seeing shifts in the way that GPT's are drafting things. So I get that that's a very specific example, but I think I share it more to point out like anything that you feel like it needs to know to do a good job is the stuff that you have to give the AI so that it gives back stuff that's better for your intended purpose.

Amber Worthen (36:42)
Yeah, I think that's an excellent pro tip. Just having a running list because you're right all the time. We're like, oh man, just shift this a little bit. And there's more settings coming out too. I did see something yesterday in chat, GPT, where you can actually go in and say, please don't put emojis in unless it's like these two emojis, you know? And I'm like, I did, I went in and changed that setting. So was like, you're emoji heavy. I'm not. So I just clicked that thing.

Kelly Whelan (37:05)
Well, I wonder, I feel like we've talked about some common mistakes and misconceptions that you're seeing organizations make as they do try to adapt to AI. Are there any you feel like we haven't covered that you would want to call out?

Amber Worthen (37:18)
We are talking about 10 main things to future-proof your inbox. It's kind of the thing we're looking at right now. Again, I don't want people to be terrified about what's happening in inbox and have a freak out moment, but I do want to call out the main things that are best practices that we need to really get on ASAP to make sure that we keep showing up the inbox. And so we've definitely talked about not sending too many emails, being more segmented.

simplifying things, making sure some of those things are working. The other things that we're really talking about is email design, making sure that your emails are scannable. And this is going to be interesting to watch. So what we know right now is people don't read emails, they scan them. So we need to make sure they're scannable for that reason. Number two, we're watching how AI is scanning our emails to determine if it's going to show up in an inbox or not. So

So stay tuned on how design elements might be changing to say, you know, we're seeing the AI scanning this when it's an AI, you know, an H1 to an H2 to an H3 header situation better or whatever. So keep up on making your design and contents are best. Simplify that newsletter as best you can. Make sure that all of your links are easy to find and clickable. This is one of the hardest things in my audits that I see that I'm just like,

Your click rates are bad because people can't see that hyperlink. They can't find that button. You've buried it so far beneath. If we want to make sure that our emails are getting clicked, so we show up in the inbox, we need to make it findable at the end of the day. And ultimately, we just need to work together and make sure that our emails are attached to a goal and that we're sending them to the right people at the right time. And...

that's gonna be the biggest thing and that's a bigger shift. I recognize that that takes some time. We've done a number of work with associations to kind of do that over time. But if we start today, it's really gonna be beneficial.

Kelly Whelan (39:26)
Yeah, and I like a lot of that advice because I think it goes back to things that you should do anyway. Even if the AI stuff wasn't happening, this is stuff that we should be doing as marketers anyway. It's like you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, like take a moment and think how you as a recipient of emails feels when you get stuff that like where you can't find a link or you can't find the unsubscribe link and you want to unsubscribe or it feels like

totally random to you or you're like, I don't even know how I signed up for this list. Like all of those things make you feel like annoyed. That's not the feeling you want to give your members. So ask yourself when you are planning an email or drafting an email or testing an email, like are there moments here that are going to cause annoyance or friction that I could ease? And you're not necessarily going to be able to fix all of them immediately, but at least taking that moment.

to think about it and ask yourself, do we have a data point where we could segment this list or do we have a way we can make this button more obvious? I also remember learning from you a couple years ago, Amber, that dark mode, like testing for dark mode, I wasn't doing that. And that was a big deal too, because I feel like depending on your color scheme, your stuff, might not be showing up. Accessibility stuff too, I feel like is always worth checking because that can go through

for even if someone doesn't have an accessibility concern, a lot of accessibility tips just make emails easier to read altogether.

Amber Worthen (41:02)
Yes, exactly. All those best practices add up at the end of the day. And like you said, the point of this is we want members to have a good experience with us. We want them to keep coming back. Our emails are like our salespeople, but our emails should also be like the mentors to our members. Like we should be there to guide them in their journey and be like, hey, here's this webinar. We genuinely think you're going to love this because it's going to help you solve this problem that we've heard you've had. Right? Like

we really need to create that personalized experience as best we can and be guides and mentors and not just like people yelling at them to buy stuff at the end of the day. And I do appreciate that you brought up those tips, dark mode, accessibility in general. The next big test that we need to be watching for is how are these inboxes summarizing your emails? So as of today, it's Outlook who's summarizing your emails a lot. Gmail is only really summarizing personal emails, not

yet in our testing of like that newsletter you're sending or anything else. ⁓ But when it comes to copilot and Outlook, when we've sent all of our clients like newsletters to our Outlooks and we've tested the summarizer copilot, we've been concerned, honestly, because there's just things that we think are the most important thing in the newsletter. And copilot just summarizes that down to a paragraph and we're like, ⁓ you missed this, you missed that. We don't have a silver bullet.

for what to do to make it summarize correctly. But what we do know is we need to make sure that we're making our most important points as high up in the email as possible. And we need to make sure that it's not trying to summarize too much stuff, else it just kind of gives up. Like a lot of times with our clients that have huge newsletters, it just stops halfway through. It's like, and then it talks about a bunch of other stuff. Literally one time copilot said that. And then it talks about a bunch of other stuff. And I'm like,

Okay. Well, that's interesting. So the point is test it. Just keep testing it. Send it to your outlook. Send it to your Gmail. I'm sure here soon, Gemini is going to be summarizing those emails more. And we just need to be aware. We need to be aware how things are showing up in the inbox, where they're landing, how people are able to read them, what, you know, AI is saying about them. At the end of the day, we can just test our best. What we've learned with our co-pilot testing too is the minute you kind of train,

your email, your copilot, it changes, right? So like a lot of newsletters, they put events and education at the bottom, even though they're actually really important. We might want to move those up. So the minute on one of our clients, I said back, Hey, next time, will you please tell me about those events? Cause I really want to go. what? The next summary, the next day, it was the first thing it said was here's these events in education. think you're going to be interested in. So we know it's all going to change and

Kelly Whelan (43:52)
Yeah.

Amber Worthen (43:55)
The member experience as a whole is going to change with AI as we continue adopting in their own personal emails. But as long as we stay on top of it, we keep inching towards those best practices, keep pushing for them, have some hard conversations, but also keep testing things. That's what's going to matter.

Kelly Whelan (44:15)
And again, it just struck me while you were describing some of that, that none of it is earth shattering. And in part, that makes sense because AI is trained on human behavior. Like its algorithms trained on what they think humans want. I'm not saying they always get it right, but like what you said about, if the newsletter's really long, it just kind of like forgets the stuff at the bottom. Do you think that wasn't happening before? Like that someone was seeing some giant email in their inbox and they weren't like,

kind of falling off towards the end or just scrolling straight to whatever they were interested in. I'm sure that was happening. And it also reminded me of ⁓ when I took journalism courses in college, and I don't want to say how many years ago that was, but back then they were like, don't bury the lead. And that just like lives rent free in my head. And I feel like that should be ⁓ something that maybe lives rent free. And email marketers had like, don't bury the lead, whatever the things that you really want people to take from this email, make sure they're at the top.

Amber Worthen (45:13)
Yes, and that's exactly it. None of this should terrify us. It should just push us to accelerate. Like I said, I think AI across associations as a whole, kind of, feeling in a bunch of areas. And this is just me saying to marketers, it's time to accelerate. It's time to really, if your association is extremely behind and has not adopted any of these best practices, which unfortunately in a lot of my audits, I see, you know, it's time to really pick it up, pick up the pace. Let's get going.

But then there's a lot of associations who are in a really good spot. They're doing a lot of the best practices and they just need to keep adopting them, keep moving, keep honoring them. And we're going to show up in the inbox, but we need to be aware and we need

Kelly Whelan (45:54)
to

moving. And if you need to use AI as a reason to try to get your leaders to buy in, like maybe do it, maybe just do like, ⁓ all these things I've been saying we should do, they're even more important now. So we really should do that. Well, I really appreciate you coming on today, Amber, because ⁓ I don't send emails every day anymore. Like, I'm still very interested in it, because I spent a long time doing it. But I

Amber Worthen (46:07)
Absolutely.

Kelly Whelan (46:18)
Feel like every time I talk to you, I learn so much. So I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your knowledge with our listeners.

Amber Worthen (46:25)
Well, thank you for having me. I always love the conversation with you. Of course, that we get to swap our association knowledge, but also there's just a lot of exciting things coming down the pike. just, I'm hopeful for where we're going and I'm excited that we get to create these experiences with our members that are better for them at the end of the day. And if we got to kind of tap the bad AI situation to get our leaders to understand that it matters, let's do it and let's keep making it better. So thank you for having me.

Kelly Whelan (46:55)
Thanks for joining us on the Member Engagement Show. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and check out past guests and resources at higherlogic.com slash engagement show. I'm Kelly Whelan and we hope you'll join us for the next episode of the Member Engagement Show.