As always there has been a big emphasis on the importance of testing and tracking your emails (which is super important!). I think from someone who regularly builds email campaigns, it can be easy to stick with what you know or be too close to the product that you miss the big picture. But we have so many tools and resources available now to really dig into what our readers want to see (or don't) which can start to build new ideas from.

Similarly to newsletters, a theme which has been discussed over the last three days is how we need to give our newsletters a face. Newsletters are a letter to our audience and need to be personal, and we want our audience to resonate and empathise with our content, which can be done by building a relationship by providing a face behind the brand.

It's great to see tone and company culture being discussed, and how it can impact your audience. These tend to be aspects that are decided upon as an internal desire to be a certain way, but thinking about how it affects your customers is key too.

Things like stepping back and making sure your language lines up across your audiences really helps your content. This could be based on nationality, language, hierarchy, even different company cultures! And if you have a corporate / prestigious company culture, your audiences may not. We like to be talked to in a friendly and engaging way, and on a common level. This especially helps for breaking through to international audiences

I was really interested in learning about gathering, managing and utilising data properly. It was awesome to discover that it enables an organisation to create emails with stronger messaging that's reaching the right people when it's part of a centralised communications approach. Also, the fact it increases the value of your email communication by providing your audience with less frequent but more relevant information is really helpful to know.

It's amazing to know the power of Dynamic Content. It's the #1 design trend for email, and with good reason. Beyond the 26% increase in open rates and 44:1 ROI when it's used, it's awesome to know that it can make emails feel more personal. It's just leveraging data!

But one thing that hit home was the power and need for fallbacks. Not only do they give you cover if your Dynamic Content fails for some reason (as when it goes wrong the user experience can be dramatically decreased), they also cover gaps in your database, such as i.e. "Hi friend!" if you don't know their first name. Simple yet so effective.