Hey, hey Reader, Yesterday marked the first live call inside Emma Stratton’s Make It Punchy messaging course. I honestly didn’t realize how much my brain needed it. So much of messaging work (and freelancing in general) happens solo. You, your laptop, your thoughts, your Slack tabs. Being in a room, even a virtual one, with other smart marketers thinking deeply about messaging and story felt like the back-to-basics reset I needed. The hardest part was choosing which client’s messaging to work...
20 days ago • 3 min read
Hey, hey Reader, My mom has a long-standing family policy that can be summed up as: If you’re standing closest, you win. Need a lamp? A sweater? A sentimental family heirloom?Being physically present is the only qualification. Which brings me to this year’s Christmas drama... For years we thought these handmade Wizard of Oz ornaments, sewn by my mom when she was pregnant with my oldest sister, were lost forever. Then… they reappeared. And because my sister Megan happened to be there when they...
27 days ago • 1 min read
Hey, hey Reader, Phew. As 2025 comes to a close, I want to pause and look back for a moment. Professionally, it was a year of intentional yeses. Personally, 2025 broke me, and I learned that growth and grief can exist at the same time. So let’s look back on those yeses, shall we? Highlights from 2025 🎟️Attended my third BETT conference and developed a partnership that’s still going strong today. (And speaking of BETT...will you be there? If so, reply to this email and let’s make time to...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hey, hey Reader, December is always a time where I think about my year's highs and lows business-wise, and plan for my 2026. The highs have been launching my email marketing course, growing my client-base, and working with companies that are doing incredible things. The lows and what I plan on changing is offloading the stuff I hate doing like Canva slides (I hired a teacher-friend to make them for my course), invoicing, and the work-from-home-isolation. In that spirit, I've been thinking a...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hey, hey Reader, A client of mine shared the sentence every marketer loves to hear: “That email you wrote booked several demos.” And the best part was that this email didn’t ask for a demo in the call to action. There was no sales language, pitch, ‘schedule a call’. Zip, nada, nothin’. Just a simple, story-driven email built on a framework I come back to again and again. So today for our final Anti-Black Friday series, I want to give you that framework. 1. Start with one person and one...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Welcome to Day 2 of the Anti-Black-Friday, Reader, Today we're using a simple dipstick test to see whether your messaging works. If your messaging feels fuzzy or flat, it’s usually because you’re too close to the product. It's the Febreze “noseblind” effect. You’ve lived with the product so long you don’t notice what your audience instantly smells. Inside your company, the scents differ: Sales talks urgency and ROI Marketing talks benefits Product talks functionality Leadership talks vision...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Hey, hey Reader, Welcome to Day 1 of our little Not-Black-Friday series: 3 days of genuinely useful stuff you can use long after the holiday email chaos ends. Today: subject lines. Cuz, if the email never gets opened, nothing else really matters. And there’s one pattern I see again and again with EdTech brands: **You’re trying to sound official. Admins are trying to feel understood.** Most subject lines die because they lean too far into corporate language: “Unlocking Student Success Through...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Do you know how to tell your founder story, Reader? Whether you embrace storytelling or avoid it like a mandatory training session, every company has a founder story. And yes, founder stories can feel self-indulgent (we’ve all seen the LinkedIn posts…). But knowing how to tell yours clearly, briefly, and in a way that still serves your audience is an important skill. You'll need 3 different versions: long, medium, and short. So here’s a simple exercise: Step 1: Write your founder story...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Hey, hey Reader, Between Thanksgiving campaigns, Black Friday blowouts, Cyber Monday launches, and December holiday cheer, every brand is fighting for space and schools are tuning most of it out. That’s why this is one of my favorite seasons to send something quietly helpful. Here are a few easy, high-goodwill email ideas that earn trust without adding to the noise: 1️⃣ Curate something genuinely cool Your subscribers are tired. Share a short, curated list...something like: “5 podcasts worth...
3 months ago • 1 min read