Interview Summary

Kiran Kapur joined Kim Arnold, the "email whisperer”, to discuss the art of persuasive writing, specifically in emails. Kim Arnold identified common mistakes people made, such as writing emails that were too long ("dumper truck"), lacked personality ("white bread"), or buried the main request ("undertaker"). She emphasised that effective emails, especially for internal stakeholders, required brevity and a personal connection. She explained that persuasion was driven as much by emotion as by logic and that writers should consider the emotional response they wanted to evoke in the reader. She provided actionable tips on crafting compelling subject lines, structuring emails for clarity, and strategically using different communication platforms like Microsoft Teams. The conversation concluded with her top advice: be ruthless with length, start strong, and use AI as an editing partner rather than a ghostwriter.

 

Key Points

  • People often fail to write effective emails because they focus on the flaws in others' emails rather than reflecting on their own.
  • The three most common email mistakes were the "dumper truck" (too long and dense), the "white bread" (lacking personality and connection), and the "undertaker" (burying the call to action).
  • To influence senior stakeholders, emails needed to be brief and establish a personal connection. Arnold noted that senior people tend to use fewer words, and brevity signals confidence.
  • Persuasion was driven by emotion, not just logic. Kim stated, "We justify with logic, but we decide with emotion," arguing that writers should focus on the feeling they want to evoke in the reader.
  • For mass internal emails, it was effective to focus on creating a single, unifying emotion (e.g., excitement, reassurance, curiosity) for the entire group.
  • Email subject lines were critical filters that determined if an email got read. They should be written last, aim to create curiosity, and convey a benefit to the reader.
  • Established marketing principles like social proof (e.g., "80% of your peers have already responded") and reciprocity could be effectively applied to internal email requests to increase compliance.
  • Her top tips for immediate improvement were to be ruthless with length (aiming for under 80 words), use AI as an editor to shorten text, and start emails strongly without generic preambles.

 

Interview Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

 

Kiran Kapur (00:00):
Hello and welcome this week. We are in the very exciting world of persuasive writing and specifically emails.

Kim Arnold (00:06):
We use a lot of the stick and not much of the carrot. No one wants to feel pressured. Read me. Urgent action required using those, it needs to be like a sprinkle of salt on your stew. Use it really sparingly.

Kiran Kapur (00:22):
I'm delighted to welcome Kim Arnold, who is the founder of a company called Email Attraction, and describes herself rather brilliantly as the email whisperer, influence obsessive and all about persuasive comms. Kim, you are very welcome to the show. Let's start with why are we so bad at emails?

Kim Arnold (00:41):
Oh, that's the killer question, isn't it? I actually had a woman at the back of the room, a recent talk, and I'd given a sort of hours session on how to write persuasive emails and how to engage people. And she said, Kim, this is all well and good, but I don't think the problem are my emails, it's other people's emails.

Kiran Kapur (01:08):
Brilliant.

Kim Arnold (01:10):
How do I get other people to send me better emails? And I thought, wow, that really is the microcosm of this problem is that often we tend to point the finger at other people. You are too aggressive, your emails are too long, you're bossy, or you are patronising or you are too waffly. And actually, we don't spend enough time looking at the emails that we send. So there's a lot of activity when it comes to emails. We might send out 20 emails in a morning and give ourselves a big high five, woo, fantastic. I'm going to have a cappuccino and a Kit Kat now and celebrate because I've done so much work. But actually there's very little action that comes from those. And the same really can apply whether that's external marketing emails or sales emails, but also internal emails in terms of trying to get stuff done.

Kiran Kapur (02:06):
And I think that's very important, particularly for marketers. We're often influencing internally, quite often influencing people that we have no actual control over. They are stakeholders, they are peers, but we have no budget control over them. We have no sort of authority over them. We're just asking them very nicely if they will do something, as well as the sort of standard sales emails that we all think about. So, before we get into some advice, what sort of mistakes do you see people making?

Kim Arnold (02:35):
Oh, there are very many. We could fill several podcasts with those, but I'll give you my top three, and I like to give them some catchy names. So number one in my top three is the dumper truck. So simply those emails that are just too long, and typically that's when we don't have much time. So we think I'll just put it in case, the classic quote attributed from everyone, I think from Mark Twain to every million other people. I'm sorry, this letter is so long I didn't have time to make it shorter. And it's the same really applies in our emails, that we are so busy that we don't have time to edit down. And you've probably had this in the last week, I certainly have when you've been sent an email, and you open it up and your heart sinks just by looking at it because it looks like hard work. It's a wall of text. So the dumper truck is really a big one. Too long, too heavy looking, long paragraphs, just makes your heart sink. The second one is what I call the white bread, bland, personality-less, nothing really much to it. And it typically will start with, I hope you're well or something like that. I hope this email finds you well. If we're going to be a bit posher.

Kiran Kapur (04:05):
,As if the email is going to find anyone, anything. That's usually me when I've just written somebody a really short, sharp email and thought, oh, I better put a bit of softening in.

Kim Arnold (04:13):
Yes, yes, absolutely. We do it all the time. Yes, I'm asking for something quite directly so I need to soften it up. Increasingly, we are seeing emails that have zero personality, and when we look at what creates connection with people, personality is a really huge part of it. And with the advent of AI as well, now so many people are using AI to supposedly enhance their emails. Sometimes that's true, but most often we're actually stripping out the personality. We're stripping out all of the connection that we're creating with people. So the white bread is a real problem when it comes to getting people's attention. If it looks and sounds like everything else, if it looks like it might've been cut and pasted, if it looks like it might've been written by ai, we are not getting that personal connection. And ultimately, when we look at those pillars of influence and persuasion, a lot of what we do is based on Robert B. Cialdini's work 'Influence', his brilliant book.

(05:24):
If your listeners haven't read it, it's number one on my list of marketing books to really read. But one of those key pillars of influence is liking. Simply put, we do things for people that we like, and if we are not sharing our personalities, our connection through our emails, people are less likely to do things for us. So number one, the dumper truck, number two, the white bread and the third one we call the undertaker. Which is where it's a bit ominous, but it's where your call to action or your ask is so deeply buried in the email that no one can find it.

(06:06):
And that is really the death of your email. So we know when we're marketing, if you are creating a webpage for example, and that Buy now button isn't really clear and shouts, click me, people won't buy what you are offering. And the same happens when it comes to emails. If it's not incredibly clear what it is that we're asking for, people will skip over it. And the reason for this is because we skim emails, so we don't read every word. We write them as if people are reading every word, but unfortunately, that's not what we do. We are skimming, we're scanning for information, we're zipping across, we're just spending a few seconds. So if our ask is buried in paragraph three in amongst all this other information, then people aren't going to understand what it is that we're asking for, and they're not going to do it. So those are my top three.

Kiran Kapur (07:04):
And I think I'm about to ask you how I grab attention, and what is the psychology of attention. But I think one of the things you've just demonstrated is I'm much more interested in those because you called them something, you called it the dump truck, the white bread and the undertaker. Now suddenly I want to know more, whereas if you just said, let me show you how not to write a bland email, I'd be very interested, but not into the same level. So I suspect this is one of the things that you're going to say. So I'm sitting there at my desk and I've got to write an email. Let's start with an internal email because I don't think we talk enough about those. And yet we all email colleagues all the time, where do I start? I don't want to be bland, I don't want to do a dump truck, but I do need to get some information across so I need to persuade them to do something.

Kim Arnold (07:48):
It's a really good question. And actually we worked with a marketing team in a big law firm recently, and they were having trouble getting the attention of partners to engage on marketing initiatives. So whether they were trying to do a campaign, or a client event or even, can you contribute something to the next newsletter. Partners were just so busy with their client work and with their own business development initiatives, the marketing team was seen as a bit of a nuisance or fluffy staff. So this sort of image of the team wasn't very strong. So they asked us to look at their communication to see what really is the crux of the problem here? Why is it that we aren't seen as that valued business partner? Why is it that we can't get responses from people? Why do we spend all our time chasing just checking in?

(08:49):
Have you had a chance to look at this email with people who were very senior, who were higher up in the pecking order, who had a lot of authority, but course they were quite scary characters. In this case, it was a big American cutthroat law firm. And so the marketers were very, as you were saying, that real tight rope between being polite, feeling that they needed to be deferential, but also actually getting things done and asking for what they want. And we found a few things. So number one was length of email. So the dump truck was the biggest problem. When you are communicating with senior stakeholders, brevity is key. If people want more information, typically they will ask for it. But you really need to think about how do you get to that next step? What is the next step that you are asking for?

(09:45):
So I like to say each email is like an hor d'oeuvre. It's not the full six course tasting menu or the turkey dinner. It's just what is that next step that you want to happen? So if you need your stakeholder to review a presentation, send them just the three slides of the deck. Don't send them the whole presentation or can you cut and paste that information into the body of the email so it's much quicker and easier for them to do it? How can you make that as easy, and as simple, and as quick as possible? So brevity and ease, is probably the number one there. What we typically find is as the more senior people get, the fewer words they use when it comes to communicating and the more junior people are, the more words they use. And that comes from confidence. So typically when we are more junior, we are not always so sure about what's relevant to our audience isn't.

(10:50):
I'll just put that in to cover my back, or I might put it in to try and sound clever. Often we are doing that, we're using longer words, but actually when we look at senior stakeholders communication often it's very pithy. It's very to the point and it's very direct. So brevity I think is the number one thing. If I know that your emails are going to be short and easy to action, I will look at them first. It's as simple as that. So that's kind of number one for internal stakeholders. I think that the second thing that we found as well when we worked with this law firm was that connection piece. So whilst they were asking for information, they weren't building that connection, so they weren't always thinking about that individual stakeholder. What is going to really connect with that person? What's their style of communication? Typically, yes, it might be brief, but maybe they're the warm and fuzzy type. That's still possible with senior stakeholders. Maybe they want that connection. Maybe there's a little bit of humour that you can add in. One of my favourite subject lines that I use is if you're sending it to a finance team, did you get buried under a pile of invoices? Sometimes in the right circumstances, we can use humour as well. So brevity and connection I think are the two really important things when it comes to senior stakeholders and getting them to act.

Kiran Kapur (12:34):
That's really interesting. Yes, and I hear staff, well, I've put everything I'd like to tell everybody everything, so I haven't missed anything. You get that one a lot. Building connections is interesting because I think sometimes we think hope the weather's all right there. Writing from a grey Cambridge is nearly always grey in Cambridge, that sort of thing, but it comes across as a little bit fake hope. Well, so how do you build a connection that's a bit more real than that?

Kim Arnold (13:09):
It's a great question. It is really difficult because this is all so personal. So we have our own style. We have to think about who am I and how do I want to come across. We have our organisational tone of voice potentially, or ways of working or just some of those unwritten rules about what you might do in an organisation and then you have the other person to think about as well, and their likes and dislikes. So it's this triangle of needs that you need to consider with each email. I think the one thing that we often -miss as an opportunity is simply reiterating things that we might know about that other person. So if we've had a conversation with them last week and we know that they had their daughter's birthday party or their dog or something that we know about them that's really personal and not generic, that shows that we are listening.

(14:14):
It shows that we're engaging with people. We don't need tonnes of it. Again, we mustn't let it cloud that brevity, but just showing people, yes, I hear you, I see you as a person, and actually I'm going to give you a little bit of myself as well, so that when people are talking to you, they know that this is a real person. And sometimes with organisations, we actually work on toxic email cultures as well, where there might be passive-aggressive emails going backwards and forwards. We see a lot of that. And often that's because we're just seeing email addresses, we're not seeing real live people. And that's really important. And I'll give you another example actually. We work with the finance team of a large events company, and I think it was such a fascinating project for us because it was about cash, it was about getting money into the organisation faster.

(15:18):
So they had quite a complicated business model where they were billing for different events and they were having to chase people constantly for money. So individuals as well as organisations. So their accounts payable team had a really, really tough job, and they were only meeting their targets about 50% of the time. And what they found was that they were chasing constantly for money. So we tried a number of different approaches, which all had a reasonable level of success, but the number one strategy that worked for getting faster replies and getting bills paid faster was liking. So simply adding a bit of personality in there if they were working with another accounts payable team, just acknowledging, I'm sure you are really busy here, but it would mean the world to me if you could just push this forward and push this to the top of your list. So we got some really interesting results there in pure hard cash, when it comes to using that personality and connection.

Kiran Kapur (16:28):
That's really interesting. And again, I suppose the other side is if you are trying to do one of those dreaded bulk emails, we all have to do them sometimes, and it could be a bulk email to a group of people internally. I might be doing a bulk email to our tutors, I need to update them on something. Or you could be doing a bulk, let's stick with the internal, we'll talk about the external in a minute. I can't necessarily come across to them or what do I do now?

Kim Arnold (16:59):
Yeah, so how do we take into account multiple different personality types, approaches, communication preferences, all of those things? Yes, really difficult. We work with a lot of internal comms teams actually on this and HR teams. So my number one tip there is thinking about the emotion that you would like to convey to the group.

(17:24):
So how is it that you want them to feel after reading your email? And it may be that you want them to feel excited or reassured or relieved, oh gosh, this has been a long time coming or maybe a little bit anxious or nervous. Oh my goodness, we don't want to this deadline. Or it might be curious, oh, something really interesting is going to come down the line. So creating a unifying emotion for that group is a great way to set intention and to create that kind of power throughout, because obviously you're not going to be able to cater for absolutely everyone's preferences, but if you can be really clear on that emotion that you want to get across, then that sets the tone really beautifully for your email and it always will make it much, much more powerful. We tend to think that we need to persuade with logic always.

(18:33):
That's particularly true in the business to business world that most of our clients are from. We need to give them all the features of this product or service or we need to prove that we are the biggest and the best and we need to talk about our end-to-end solutions and all of this stuff. But actually we are all individuals, and we decide based as much on emotion as anything else. We justify with logic, but we decide with emotion. And that goes for pretty much everything that we buy in life. So we've all done it. We bought that expensive pair of shoes or bag or I dunno, watch and calculated our cost per wear. And actually it's great because I'll be able to wear it at this wedding and that party and it's really going to be great, so I should definitely buy it. When ultimately it might just be that pair of shoes makes us feel like a million dollars. It makes us feel powerful or sexy or attractive or whatever it might be. It might be a watch that improves our status and our standing with people. It makes us feel maybe superior. All of these things, these emotional responses. So emotion is just as important as logic, and we really need to consider the two if we want people to act.

Kiran Kapur (20:03):
I really like the idea of thinking about the emotion that I want the other person to feel, because there often, one, I'm sending out information, but actually nobody's excited by information, but you are right, sending out the information, I want you to be relieved or excited or reassured or what is it? So I really like that thought. So sticking with internal communications, of course a lot of the time we now don't use email, we use notes or that sort of system.

Kim Arnold (20:36):
Yeah, Teams, Slack

Kiran Kapur (20:37):
Teams, thank you. My brain went there. So what do we do with that? Because we strip out a lot of the extra stuff. We don't go so we write, dear him, we just go, hi. Or even just straight into the message, should I still be thinking about emotions? Do I treat these in the same way or a different way?

Kim Arnold (20:57):
It's been really interesting to watch what has happened with communication, because it is been a bit like adding another lane to the motorway because there's been too much traffic. So it's like there's too much on the motorway, three lanes isn't enough, let's add another lane. And then suddenly there's going to be all this wonderful space and we'll all feel much calmer and there'll be less traffic on the road. Well of course that hasn't happened. There's just more communication now across more channels. I think Teams is a really interesting one because yes, there are fewer conventions that apply to it ,and there is more of that sense of urgency. So often we are using teams to circumvent email. People don't reply to their emails, senior stakeholders, oh just ping them and see if I can get round that. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

(21:53):
But yes, I think with Teams the really important thing is to remember how you want to use it. So what's the information that is appropriate and right to put on teams, it's horses for courses. What is the right? Anne Handly, the brilliant copywriter, I adore her stuff. She says, what is the right container for this information? And I love that. I always think of a sort of Tupperware container, what's the kind of right size of shape of Tupperware to put your message in? So I think that's really important. Sometimes we are thinking about, oh, I'll put it on teams because that's the quickest way to get to someone rather than it's the best way to get to people. It's the best way to contain that information, to package it and to send it. So I think that's kind of number one, the really important part. Number two is to think about, still have that person in mind.

(22:59):
So the speed of Teams as with WhatsApp messages or texts, can work against us. So we are firing out messages much, much more quickly and less thought is going into each one, and at the time it feels really efficient, but actually we are creating problems down the line. So slowing down a little bit on Teams, thinking about am I making sure that I hit those three that I talked about earlier? Is my call to action really clear? Am I putting a little bit of personality in there? It doesn't have to be tonnes. And am I making sure that I'm not just putting a stream of consciousness in there. So we can apply whilst Teams messages and Slack messages that they're really short, we can still make sure that the information that we're putting across is structured? Well, what we see a lot with organisations is that Teams messages actually turning into streams of consciousness, and they're just as long as emails.

(24:03):
So you've now just got these two massive platforms with loads of random information, and the auditing information and storing information is becoming a real problem because you dunno which chat it's on. Some of that is a real problem. If we want to reduce email traffic, we need to think about those containers. So for example, using project management software, there's no reason that projects should be managed on teams or email, just not. They're not really good at that. You increasingly get, when you're talking about people being CC'd, you've got these huge group emails coming along. If we are using it for projects, that is a mistake. All of that should be centralised. There's brilliant software out there for project management, there's no reason to put that on. So thinking strategically about how you're using those platforms and what you're using them for, and is this the best container? That is really important.

Kiran Kapur (25:06):
Yes, that's very good advice. I think one of the things I know younger listeners struggle with is the dreaded email subject line. And I think they feel about writing an email the same way that a millennial might feel about writing a sort of formal letter. I mean, I can still remember being taught how to write a formal letter in English classes, and you started Dear Sir, because obviously women didn't work or whatever, but it was always dear sir or dear sirs, and you finished up your sincerely or yours faithfully. That started to disappear once people used emails. And of course now the next generation is much more used to texting each other and using discord channels and what have you. And I've watched them being absolutely flummoxed with an email subject, not knowing where to start. And yet presumably that's one of the best ways to get attention.

Kim Arnold (25:54):
Absolutely. I mean we are increasingly using email subject lines as a filter for, shall I even read this? So 10 years ago, you as a marketer, as a salesperson, as internal emails, you could probably guarantee that most of your emails would be read even if they weren't replied to. But that's not the case anymore. So we are seeing the more senior people get, the more they are using that email subject line as a filter for Shall I bother with this or not? I know that I can't get to all of my emails, so who's it from? How important are they? What does the subject line look like? Is that going to be interesting or important or useful to me? And if not, I'm not going to bother with it. So I think that's the first thing to really mention about emails, about subject lines. I'll come back to that in a moment, but just to relay an interesting conversation I have with my teenage son recently, and I was helping him write an email to one of his teachers and he's like, right, I'll just send it now. And I said, but you need to write thanks and your name at the bottom. And he looked at me like I had two heads and he's like, why? They know who it's from. You don't put your name on a text.

Kiran Kapur (27:18):
Yes.

Kim Arnold (27:19):
That's so weird. And even after I told him, I'd literally written the book on email writing as he well knew, he really didn't believe me. And I was like, wow, you really have a point. So much of our email convention is much more akin to a letter than it is to a text. So we are definitely seeing a lot of change coming through with formality, with use of emojis for example, all of these things. And there's quite a clash in terms of generational approach to emails, particularly in more traditional businesses like in professional services. There's a lot of challenge there and we're doing a lot of work with some of the more junior members of the team to bring them up to speed. Just coming back to subject lines and your question, one of the things that we do is we write the subject line first.

(28:22):
So we sit down, we open up our email and we think, right, what am I going to put in? And then we write the email and then we just send it. We shouldn't do that. We should write the subject line last. So we need to give it its due importance. And often we don't know what that subject line should read until we've written the email. So if we think about one of those group emails, for example, and we're thinking about what's the emotion that we want to convey, then we've written a really powerful email. What is the most important part then of that email that needs to come through in your subject line? So writing your subject line last will be easier. It stops you having that panic and that blank page syndrome, and then you don't get anywhere. So I would advise you get on with writing the email and think about what is that key feature that is going to be the most persuasive point.

(29:24):
It's not necessarily the most important point to you as the writer, but what is it going to be that gets people's attention? And the number one emotion that we need to think about in a subject line is curiosity. It's all about getting people's attention, and curiosity is the number one way to do that, even with our internal emails. So obviously we don't want to be too click baity about it. We don't want to be too gimmicky about it. But it could be instead of meeting update, it could be project X, three things that you need to know. It could be just really thinking about if you're trying to get someone to do something, two minutes of your time, then a big bonus. So showing them, if you look at this for two minutes, you are going to get something really important out of it. So thinking about how we can convey a bit of curiosity. If we can communicate a benefit to our reader as well, that's always really great. Using the word you, is always powerful as well so that they feel engaged already. A lot of emails, subject lines are just too boring, meeting up, update FYI,

(30:54):
All of these things. And also, I actually had someone in one of my workshops recently, he said, I put read me in capital letters at the start of every subject line. Do you think that's a good idea? And I said, how's it working for you? And she said, well, not very well actually.

Kiran Kapur (31:18):
So I think she knew the answer. Yes.

Kim Arnold (31:20):
Yeah, exactly. But often we use a lot of the stick and not much of the carrot. So no one wants to feel pressured. Read me urgent action required using those. It needs to be like a sprinkle of salt on your stew. Use it really sparingly if you use too much of it. People are just going to, it's like the cry wolf situation, we're going to get bored. We're not going to believe that this is urgent anymore. And of course, what's urgent to us, it's not always urgent to other people.

(31:54):
So it can really get people's backs up. They can really be annoyed if they're sitting there thinking, this is literally number 278 on my priority list, and you are hounding me for it. It's going to be annoying to them. However, if you make them smile, if you make them feel good about themselves, if you make them feel curious, they're much more likely to do that. And again, it comes back to that liking factor. How do you create that connection with people? And humour can be a great one in subject lines as well. Again, you sparingly, used in the right situation, but it's a great one for creating connection and sometimes just for acknowledging that things are a pain in the backside to do. And I'm sorry to have to ask you this with a millionth time, but this is it and we can all have a laugh about it.

Kiran Kapur (32:45):
So let's try one example because again, I know this is something that my students often have to do, which is contact senior people to say, could you check your profile? Could you check your profile on the website? Could you just make certain your CV that we use is updated? These are standard things that you're often the poor or junior marketing person gets asked to do them quite often early in their jobs actually, which something we'll give to the apprentice in their first sort of three months. So they've got to contact everybody and ask them to do this. And it's a horrible job, and most people can't be bothered. And usually they want me to update my profile picture, and that means finding another photo and realising I've got another wrinkle and I don't really want to be bothered and all those things. So how do you as that poor apprentice, probably in your early stages, not really knowing anybody, you've got to sit there and then contact everybody in the company or everybody that's outward facing. Where would you start?

Kim Arnold (33:41):
So here is where we can come back to our marketing principles. So some of those foundations that I know you teach and apply them to those internal emails. So if we are thinking about how we might persuade clients, customers, we can use those same principles. So social proof, for example, is a really powerful one. So in that instance, you might say something like 80% of senior management have up-to-date profiles. Or you might say that 80% of people have now updated their profiles. Or you might say, we're so grateful that 90% of senior management have got back to us within two days on this.

(34:38):
So social proof is a really, really powerful one. Don't get left behind. Here's what your peers are doing. That's a really, really powerful ones. So social proof is great. Looking at some of those other pillars, reciprocity is a powerful one. So it could be that you do a small favour as a starting point. So to make this easier for you, I've pasted your bio into the body of this email, and I've highlighted some areas where you might want to update it. I've also seen that there's this great photo that you've got on LinkedIn, perhaps you'd like to use that. So that idea of offering value upfront, so that people are more inclined to respond in kind. So thinking about get back to all those bases. What have you learned as part of your marketing training, and how can you apply those two internal emails? Because often we think about customers in a completely external, clients in a completely different way, but all these principles of persuasion and influence apply just as much for internal stakeholders as they do for external people.

Kiran Kapur (36:02):
And my final sort of question is what I always ask, which is, have you got some top tips? I've got to go and write some emails later on. Kim, what would you suggest I do?

Kim Arnold (36:13):
So number one, be ruthless with the length. And actually, here's where AI I think can be really useful. AI is not always great at writing emails from scratch. Tends to be overly long, often quite formal. Again, not your personality, even if you write really, really great prompts. But often the prompts end up being longer than the emails themselves to get a really good result. But AI can be a great editor and a good thinking partner. So how would you make this email, turn this email into under 80 words, which is what we recommend. So that's around five or six sentences. It's really not very much. So using AI as your editor asking AI as well, what is the most important point of this email? Say you are a head of finance at a large organisation, what would be the most important point of this email for you?

(37:14):
And then it might draw it out or show you that actually it's not very clear or the main point has got lost. So using AI as a sounding board is really useful. I wouldn't use it to draught because you'll lose your voice, you'll lose your power. But using it as a sounding board as an editor can be really helpful. So be ruthless, 80 words or less in the email, short sentences, 16 words or fewer. Typically our sentences are way, way, way, way too long. And that really turns off our reader. When we get to full stops, we pause, studies show it gives our brains a little micro rest, but when sentences are too long, we are being forced to hold all this information in our head, and we forget it. So then we have to go back to the start of the email and reread it.

(38:06):
If we ask our readers to do that a couple of times, they'll give up. We give up incredibly easy when it comes to emails. So short sentences, short paragraphs as well. Lots of white space. Make it easy on the eye and overall 80 words or less. So that's kind of number one, and that's stakeholder 1 0 1. People are going to really love you for that. No one ever said, oh, I really wish this email was longer. Just doesn't happen. Typically we have about three seconds to get someone's attention with emails as well. So second tip I would have for you is start strong. So don't go in with a preamble by way of introduction, or and writing to introduce myself. No one really cares about that. They care about what's in it for them. So start with something engaging. Start with the word you if you can. So immediately you are talking to your audience and ditch those generic openers. I hope you're well. You don't need that. If you're going to start with something warm and connecting, which I always do, make it personal to the other person, or if they are a super direct stakeholder, just get on with it. You can just get straight to the point. So be short, get to the point. It's probably the two biggies that I would recommend.

Kiran Kapur (39:36):
That is fantastic. Kim Arnold, you have completely demonstrated why you are the email whisperer and an influence obsessive. And for anybody listening, can you tell us about your book?

Kim Arnold (39:46):
Yes, absolutely. So my book is called Email Attraction, Get What You Want Every Time You Hit Send. And it's a pocket rocket of a book, a really short read that is going to transform the way that you send emails. It's going to get you first replies, it's going to help you create connections with stakeholders, boost your client emails as well, and transform the way you work.

Kiran Kapur (40:10):
Kim Arnold, thank you very much indeed for your time and your expertise. Thank you for having me. It's been great chatting.