So there are a couple of lessons here. So, this first one is around taking a whole bunch of copy that has been thrown at you and condensing it down. The next lesson is about kind of expanding it out. So first, this example is you’ve got a lot of copy and you need to kind of get that down and make it kind of email friendly. So here is a good example. So, ‘Mailchimp moves into e-commerce’. Now this is a TechCrunch article but not kind of dissimilar and fairly typical of a blog post. So, a customer, the company you work within, they might just send you a blog post and say, here you go, create an email. Now what you don’t want to do is, so ‘Mailchimp moves into e-commerce’ yes that’s a great heading, that’s a good subject line. But what you don’t want to do is put all of this into your email. Two reasons. One is people just aren’t going to spend the time reading it, well, most people won’t, and the second reason is that, as I’ve mentioned before, you want to use email as a channel. You want to get people to the email, open the email, and then click through to read this article. So, the ideal scenario for TechCrunch would be to use email as a channel and kind of fire people into this, onto this page to have a look, because subsequently, they’re going to go all around and have a look at all these other things once they’re on the TechCrunch website. So, you’ve got this article or any kind of lengthy blog post, and what you want to do is condense it down a bit. This is an example. So during 2020-2021, MailNinja ran an email series called TL;DR and what we did on a weekly basis. We took long form blog articles, guides, PDFs, sometimes even eBooks, and we condensed it down and summarised them for you.
So, we’ll probably put these as an archive somewhere, so you’ve got access to it, but it’s what it says it is. So TL;DR stands for ‘too long; didn’t read’. We were taking these kinds of articles and condensing them down. And this is kind of what you want to do when you’ve got something that’s quite long. So here, ‘Hey Ninja’s’, really simple header here, and this is the kind of article we’re looking at in TL;DR, which is basically a summary of what the article is about and then the key takeaways from the article. What we did is we went through it and we stripped out the key takeaways and put it into a really short, digestible email and then if you want to read the full post you can click here. So the format of the TL;DR emails was pretty standard. You had the summary and then you had the key takeaways, and this is kind of a good thing to do, in practice.
Now, as you can see, what we’ve done here is we’ve got, a nice friendly introduction, bit of a summary of what you’re getting in the email, in the article and then you’ve got some of the key takeaways. So, we’ve really condensed down the article, eBook, whatever it might be, into some digestible chunks of information that people can kind of get a summary and a flavour of what it is without having to click through. But obviously it entices people to click through and read more. So, this gives you a bit of a summary as to what to do when somebody, or you know, you’ve even got it yourself. You’ve got a blog post, an article, something really long you want to kind of condense down and serve up to people in a really clear, digestible way that people can kind of scan through and go ah I see what this is about. I’ve got a little bit of information, and if I want to read more I can go through and click it. Remembering that email is a channel, so, we’re giving them a summary, we’re not giving them everything. So that is a good kind of example of condensing copy down to making it email friendly.
