What a Copilot summary said about my long email

I wrote a lengthy email last week about a bunch of things I’d been thinking about.

Yes, even I write long emails sometimes.

It needed to be done.

Then I put Copilot to the test. Right in my outlook inbox I asked it to “summarize this email”.

Here’s what I found from the Copilot summary

It took me about 2 hours to fully write, design, and send that email.

1. Copilot summarized my email down to 2.5 paragraphs.

2. In my long list of upcoming events Copilot simply said “and lists upcoming events”.

Here’s what I took away

1. It is up to individuals to train their Copilot to mine out the information they want. I asked CoPilot to highlight upcoming events more in summaries like this because I mostly care about events and education.

2. I need to let our clients know how it is summarizing events & education. In long newsletters, members typically click the highest on those links, but if it’s not called out will they be clicked as much? We’ll be watching it!

Here’s two things to try

I'm sure your association has a long newsletter too, here's what you should be testing:

1. Regularly have Copilot, ChatGPT, etc summarize your newsletter – what concerns you about that summary? Or is it accurate? Then adjust accordingly.

   • We know that Copilot is summarizing your association marketing emails, but every summary is a bit different.

2. We spend so much time making long newsletters, we already know people rarely read them. With the adoption of AI summaries it stresses the importance of having hard conversations to cut them down or eliminate emails entirely. This is already the best practice, but with AI it is going to accelerate us to make changes faster.

If you want to see exactly what happened yourself, here is my really long email. Here is the Copilot summary:

The sender shares concern that many associations are falling behind in email and AI adoption. After returning from maternity leave in late 2025, she noticed AI had rapidly advanced and that many associations were still struggling with basic email best practices. Her recent conference experiences reinforced that many teams are not yet leveraging AI or modern email strategies effectively.

She encourages associations to accelerate their email maturity, whether they’re currently behind or already forward‑looking. Recommendations include updating email design and content to best practices, conducting email audits, and improving or creating new‑member onboarding campaigns. She also highlights the importance of evaluating an

association’s entire email ecosystem to ensure it reflects what members want.

The email closes with an offer for support through audits, strategy sessions, and training, and lists upcoming events where Email Maven will be presenting or exhibiting.

How Should We Prepare?

At the end of the day, all this AI acceleration is doing is forcing us to do email best practices faster. Here are the foundational email best practices that should be applied:

• Prioritize relevance over volume. Promotional emails with low engagement have the potential to be downgraded if Gemini deems they lack context or prior engagement

• Lead every email with your value proposition in the first 1–2 sentences

• Keep it simple — bullet points, headers, and a single clear CTA

• Segment your list relevant emails to the right people will always outperform blasts

• Make sure you have a compelling welcome / onboarding series to new members! If they click your first email it increases the likelihood that your emails will staying in that person’s inbox by 85% (Jay Schwedelson)

• Make sure you have an unsubscribe and email preference center in your footer that work (double check those links!)

• Make sure your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication is set up correctly (if you're not sure, check it via ZeroBounce One today)

Ways Email Maven Can Help

1. Audit your associations emails to determine what needs to change to ensure you show up in the inbox. This can include doing inbox placement testing and generating a deliverability score.

2. Custom trainings to help your internal team, or National & Chapter leaders to get on the same page about email best practices. Email is a team sport, let’s chat about how to get the team up to date.

3. 30 minute free chat, no strings attached for real. Let’s talk about what you are thinking, what your challenges are. Things are moving quickly I’m here to learn with you too, let’s connect.