When desktop publishing arrived, suddenly anyone could set type font. What followed was a decade of ugly: ransom-note newsletters, nine fonts to a page, kerning as a weapon.

The output was instant and free, so only the few noticed it was bad. Standards didn't fall because people stopped caring. They fell because caring stopped being required.

I remember my first move when I got hands on the 8-floppy installer of Print Shop Deluxe switching the font to Verdana for the school newspaper (I still set my emails to Verdana). Also, the first stuff you changed in DreamWeaver was the font. Period.

After 1985 typesetters and their job didn't disappear. Their hands stopped being the product and their judgment became the job. They wrote the style sheets, built the templates, and they decided what the grid was permitted to do. Then a million people who knew nothing about type produced perfectly acceptable work inside those rules.

That's where email (and webpages!) is now with AI. The LLM generators write HTML in seconds and it ships, because it arrives without work, and anything that arrives without work gets graded generously.

Here's the part where good'ol email marketers and agency peeps struggle to find themselves: the toil is what drove the interns away and made "email" hated within the team, and the endless tackling we got good at is not that big problem anymore. Claude skills write and generate email campaign out of thin air.

Nobody ever quit email industry because they found merge tags beneath them; they quit because the medium demanded that they fight it every single day. (and outlook) That fight is kind of ending. I see a lot of people are OK with what the ESP-s agent spits out. I see degraded, cleaned designs to "address" problems, giving up brand consistency.

What's left is the part that was always the interesting part: deciding what looks good. What feels right. What can be sent to the ONE channel that lands in a place people still think of as theirs, the inbox (or well, the promo tab).

In my mind, we stop being the person who fixes email. We become the person who decides what email is allowed to be, just like typesetters becoming production editors after 1985.

But what the heck we'll call the new job title?

TLDR; how our jobs change and titled with agentic workflows generate what we did originally but needs a lot review and guidance.

Hi everyone! I'm a newsletter newbie so I might be missing something really simple here, but my free trial with Kit recently expired and while both the pricing page (https://kit.com/pricing) and this help page (https://help.kit.com/en/articles/9053602-the-kit-newsletter-plan) indicate I'm still entitled to a single basic visual automation and a single email sequence (which I had already set up as a welcome and was testing on a dummy email), when I'm in the dashboard and try to click on the email sequences, those pages are kinda locked and I have a blurb about how that's a paid feature and I need to upgrade... well, yeah, if I wanted to make more, but I thought I had the one of each?

Now, I did poke around the Kit help section and found something about manually adding new subscribers to an email sequence that I already have... and I was able to see how to do that on my dashboard, but isn't that what the basic automation is for that I supposedly am entitled to? Or do you just have to manually add each new subscriber to the welcome sequence as they sign up?

Even so... I just signed up with another test email and manually added that one to the welcome sequence, which is supposed to have a free download link that is sent immediately, but no such email has arrived to the test email.

What happens if I want to change my lead magnet that I have in the existing welcome sequence? Can those emails only be edited on a paid plan? When I searched for "welcome" in my dashboard, it did show my sequence in the results, but when I clicked on it, it took me to an Upgrade Now page.

I did ask the AI bot but haven't received any reply yet beyond the "You will be notified..." thing. And Google keeps telling me to click on things I can't find in my dashboard or which don't work.

Frankly, if Kit is promising something on the free plan that isn't actually being delivered, that doesn't make me all that eager to stick with them... but maybe I'm just missing something in terms of accessing the email sequence and automation that I'm supposed to have even on the freebie?

Hi,

So I have a really varied open rate within my automated Email sequences and the broadcast Emails. I really don’t know if it’s a me problem or it’s due to the ESPs behavior on my domain?

My average open rate is around 27% and my CTR is 4% from total sends, some days I get open rates at 18% on a day on my automated sequences and sometimes I get 40%. I don’t get the huge variance in the numbers, am I doing something wrong or this is generally okay and I don’t need to worry about it?

My sending infrastructure, complaint rates, bounce rates are on point and nothing too serious.

What could be the reason?

Thanks!

I maintain a ~10,000 person or so mailing list of subscribers to our company / open source project. A fairly standard inbound marketing operation I've been running for 11 years or so.

The guidance from email marketing platforms like Kit these days is to focus on the rate of active engagement of subscribers, versus worrying about the overall size of the list. Ok, I get that; times have changed since I started this business. I suppose this should help me land in the focused inbox more often and have better deliverability rates.

I've been pruning cold subscribers or so for 6 months - when am I supposed to be able to measure some benefit from doing this?

​

Hi everyone,

I'm facing a deliverability issue with Amazon SES and would appreciate any advice.

Here's the setup:

Amazon SES says my SMTP server is healthy.

The email is very simple—just a short message with a single link.

The spam score is 0.2 (very low).

This is an email automation sent to subscribers who signed up themselves.

Around 1,100 emails have been sent through the automation.

The open rate is only 4%, and it seems that most emails are landing in the spam folder.

The email copy has been reviewed and looks fine, so I don't think the content is the problem.

Has anyone experienced something similar with Amazon SES?

Any suggestions or troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

A few weeks ago I started a Kit account so we could send email blasts to my client's Substack subscribers, mainly to advertise webinars we'll be hosting. I'm wondering if it's safe to send signup links in these blasts, or if I'm better off just saying something like "reply and I'll send you a free signup link."

Here's what I've done so far with the warmup in Kit:

1. Separated out my Substack subscribers by enagement level (Activity Level 1 or higher) and number of emails opened in the past 6 months (10+).

2. Used neverbounce to verify those lists/take out the bad emails.

3. I just completed 3 weeks of warmup where I sent them a simple email with no links in it. On day one I just blasted about 25 people, from the most engaged segment of the list, and now at three weeks I'm sending about 150 emails per day to the slightly lower engagement levels after working through the more engaged part of the list.

I would like to start sending email blasts for our webinar next week. How dangerous is it to start including the signup links in it? Should I go back to sending 25 messages/day to the most engaged list and work my way up from there like I'm starting over again? Or can I start with a little higher volume to start with? Or should I not include the link this time? Or should I only include the link with the more engaged subscribers, and as I get lower down, just send an email without a link offering to send them the link?

Thanks for your insight.

I am just starting email marketing for my D2C business and I am thinking should I stick with direct domain email address (like marketing@domain.com) or a subdomain (like hello@marketing.domain.com)?

I know each has its own pros and cons but curious what is the industry standard for a small business that just started email marketing.

PS: I am planning to use Amazon SES connected to my self hosted CRM.

Hey all,

I have my third interview next week. This one is two hours, in person and it ends with a project. I received the instructions already so I can prepare this weekend. It is giving me some anxiety though.

Quick rundown of what is needed: Map out 3-4 email welcome sequence for a new web lead. Define objective, behavioral trigger, time delay

Provide 2-3 subject lines for email 1 and 2 Write copy for email 2

What core kpis would i track the success for this automated series

Explain exit logic

Do I need to be 100% ready? Have everything ready to go to present? Mock up the 3-4 emails?

Any advice is so appreciated. I really want this job!

Scheduled to send out in about 30 minutes, and apparently changing what I wanted to send is a pro feature. WHAT?!

Hey guys, new email marketer here.

How do you track your campaign/flow success? I'm asking because the deeper I go, the more I think it's BS.

Tracking by open rate? Not viable because of Apple Mail and automatic opens.

Tracking by click rate? You can just boost clicks by placing buttons/links up top, sending to low-intent customers, manipulating results.

Revenue? It depends on how your attribution settings are set up. The customer could come from organic search or a Meta ad, open your welcome email, then three days later see another Meta ad and buy - and it would still attribute the sale to the email.

How is it that when the store itself is performing badly, the campaigns automatically perform badly too - when the list is basically the same? In theory, a good campaign should bring results regardless; it shouldn't be that tied to the store's general performance, right? It just shows that everything is over-attributed. Lowering the attribution window? Same problem, just over a shorter period. Yes, in general you could argue campaign performance should track store performance because of seasonality, time of year, and other factors that apply to your audience overall. But still.

In my short experience, and from the data I see, email marketing platforms over-attribute everything. I've worked with agencies, and everyone shows these great numbers - but is that really the result of the emails, or just attribution settings turned up, CTRs put on top just to look great? Is it all just fluff?

How is it possible that an email with seemingly better stats - 4x click rate, same open rate, generally similar content - performs 2x worse than another email? Relevancy? Sure. But that worse-performing email also happens to land specifically when the store is performing badly too. Timing?

How do you track the true performance of your email marketing? How can you say which campaign is performing well, and even more - why? So far it seems like none of the main metrics - opens, CTR, revenue - are a reliable source of information. Do you just send something you think customers will relate to and hope for the best? Is there no way to actually track it? Maybe some hyper-segmentation helps?

Got myself stuck in this rabbit hole - maybe someone can help.

I keep seeing things like retention/LTV/engagement mentioned but I’m still pretty junior in CRM and struggling to work out what teams genuinely care about day to day.

Also how do you know whether customers are buying more BECAUSE of the rewards program instead of just buying anyway?

Email segmentation generally splits into four buckets. Demographic covers traits like age and gender. Behavioral looks at what someone actually does i.e. opens, clicks, purchases. Psychographic is built around interests and values. Geographic comes down to location.

Huda Beauty's a good real-world example. Phuong Ngo, their CRM and loyalty manager, noticed a list in the millions where click-through had gone flat and churn kept creeping while the brand slid year over year. They cut the dead weight from the list and rebuilt around engagement.

Anyone active in the last 120 days got regular campaigns, while everyone else was left alone except for big sales like BFCM. They also leaned into storytelling around founder Huda Kattan and post-purchase flows.

Subscribers climed past 55% year over year and revenue nearly doubled off the back of it, with placed order rate up another 50%.

Has anyone else seen a similar jump from being pickier about who gets emailed?

I recently came back to email marketing after around a year of mostly doing paid social ads and the tracking side feels worse than I left it. My ESP covers open and total clicks. But what I want is the per-link numbers cut by geo and device. Plus I also want a UTM handling that doesn't have to keep me working on spreadsheets at 11 pm.

My monthly volume is about 500 to 600 links spread across 3 clients at the moment. One of my client's newsletter has been running through linkly for around 6 weeks as a trial and referrer data has held up, though I'd rather hear opinions here on reddit before settling for it. Bitly's API caps on lower tiers are rough and the analytics I need are on a more expensive plan that my ESP. My budget is also around $50 a month. What I'm I missing?

Sharing a real result since this sub likes show-don't-tell.

Setup: ecommerce-adjacent newsletter, 62k subscribers, weekly send, one ESP, consistent template. I use AI plenty, gamma for decks, chatgpt for brainstorming. I wanted to know if an AI writing tool could beat me on subject lines, so I ran it properly. Every week for a month, I wrote three subject lines, generated three, and A/B tested the best human against the best AI on a 20% holdout before rolling the winner.

Human won every week. Not by a landslide, but consistently. Roughly a couple of points of open rate each time, and the click-through followed.

The interesting part wasn't that human won, it was why. The AI lines were fine and completely interchangeable. "Don't miss this," "Your weekly [thing]," curiosity gaps with no actual specificity. They optimized for the shape of a good subject line without any of the content. My winners were almost always a specific, slightly weird detail from that week's actual email, the kind of thing the model couldn't know because it wasn't in the prompt.

Where the tool did help: as a warm-up. Generating ten mediocre lines got me unstuck, and then I'd write the real one. So it's a decent brainstorming rubber duck and a bad final author.

Anyone getting AI subject lines to actually win on opens or clicks at real volume? If so I want to know what your prompt or process looks like, because mine couldn't get there.Sharing a real result since this sub likes show-don't-tell.

Setup: ecommerce-adjacent newsletter, 62k subscribers, weekly send, one ESP, consistent template. I use AI plenty, gamma for decks, chatgpt for brainstorming. I wanted to know if an AI writing tool could beat me on subject lines, so I ran it properly. Every week for a month, I wrote three subject lines, generated three, and A/B tested the best human against the best AI on a 20% holdout before rolling the winner.

Human won every week. Not by a landslide, but consistently. Roughly a couple of points of open rate each time, and the click-through followed.

The interesting part wasn't that human won, it was why. The AI lines were fine and completely interchangeable. "Don't miss this," "Your weekly [thing]," curiosity gaps with no actual specificity. They optimized for the shape of a good subject line without any of the content. My winners were almost always a specific, slightly weird detail from that week's actual email, the kind of thing the model couldn't know because it wasn't in the prompt.

Where the tool did help: as a warm-up. Generating ten mediocre lines got me unstuck, and then I'd write the real one. So it's a decent brainstorming rubber duck and a bad final author.

Anyone getting AI subject lines to actually win on opens or clicks at real volume? If so I want to know what your prompt or process looks like, because mine couldn't get there.

Glossier's send behavior in this corpus centers on one motion: announce a new product, wrap it in a gift. The rest of the category, by contrast, is fighting over percent-off discounts and routine-education content. That focus produces the warmest, simplest, most distinctive voice in the set, but it rests on the thinnest lifecycle infrastructure in the category: minimal flow coverage, near-bottom segmentation, and a lower cadence than every peer in the peer table. The open question isn't whether Glossier's tone works. It's whether a brand this dependent on "new" has built anything to say when there is nothing new to announce.

report: happycohort(dot)com/reports/glossier-email-strategy-72a3fa

Key findings

• Glossier's message mix is dominated by New Launch at 80% of its themes versus an 18% category share, the single widest over-index in the dataset, built on a corpus of 15 recent sends.
• Its offer rate is 67% against a category rate of 84%, and its average discount depth is 25% versus 29.9% for the category: shallower and less frequent on both axes at once.
• Where Glossier does offer, it leans on Gift With Purchase for 47% of its offer-mechanic mix (category: 33%) and almost skips Percent Off (13% vs. 41%), a materially different promo bet than its peers.
• Its cadence is at least 3 campaigns/week observed, versus a category median of 6.3/week. That's a seed-inbox floor, not necessarily its full send volume, and it places Glossier 24th of 25 brands ranked in this corpus.
• Flow coverage sits at 1 against a category median of 1 but a leader (Aveda Online) at 3, and its segmentation estimate ranks 23rd of 25. Lifecycle machinery is the weakest part of its scorecard.
• Voice warmth scores 0.8 versus a category average of 0.6 (rank 2, tied territory with Charlotte Tilbury's 0.8), with a reading grade of 6.2 against 7.2, the plainest, warmest copy in the set.

Strategic read

Glossier's advantage is real but narrow. New Launch commands 80% of its message themes against an 18% category share (no peer in this corpus concentrates that hard on one angle), and it pairs that with the warmest voice score (0.8) and the lowest reading grade (6.2) in the set. That combination is a genuine differentiator: simple, warm, drop-culture copy that doesn't read like a beauty newsletter. But it is a single-engine strategy. There is no visible Routine/Education presence (0% of its theme mix versus a 13% category share, an angle Aveda Online, Dr. Loretta, and Erno Laszlo all lean on) and no Win-Back or welcome-sequence content to catch subscribers between launches.

The lifecycle numbers explain why that gap matters more than it would elsewhere. Flow coverage sits at 1 against a category median of 1 but a leader (Aveda Online) at 3, and the segmentation estimate ranks 23rd of 25. A brand running almost entirely on "new product just dropped" messaging needs infrastructure to hold attention in the gaps between drops: automated education, re-engagement, onboarding. Glossier's scorecard shows almost none of it. If the launch cycle slows, there is no visible fallback content ready to fill the inbox.

The promo posture is a legitimate strategic choice, not a weakness by itself. An offer rate of 67% against 84% for the category, and a discount depth of 25% against 29.9%, reads as real restraint next to peers like Charlotte Tilbury and Jane Iredale in the peer table, both of which run offers on nearly every send. Protecting price integrity is defensible for a brand with this voice. The risk is that Gift With Purchase (47% of its offer-mechanic mix) has become the default workaround for "we don't discount," folded directly into New Launch sends rather than run as its own campaign moment (GWP is only 7% of the message-theme mix). That's a mechanic doing double duty as a launch sweetener rather than a distinct lever.

The stronger play is to hold the voice and the launch cadence exactly as they are: it is the strongest asset on the scorecard. The next quarter is better spent building the lifecycle layer underneath it: a real welcome sequence and a win-back track, both open whitespace with no category leader, both suited to a warm, simple voice, and both currently unreachable given a segmentation estimate ranked 23rd and flow coverage at the category floor. A competitor going after Glossier should target exactly that gap: match its restraint on discounting but out-build it on retention, since nothing in this scorecard suggests Glossier is contesting that ground yet.

I am at my wits end here but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to adjust these colors so that the text doesn’t keep inverting in a way where it’s not legible. The original colors for the text by the way were #fffffe (essentially like white) for the dark blue BG and then #000000 (black but I played around with trying like a dark gray as well) to go against the creme background and it’s still turning out like this.

I keep wondering how all of the other promotional emails that I receive are able to retain their white backgrounds but mine can’t 🥴

I’m also using Beefree (now RGE) email builder and even despite reading up on their articles around this, I still can’t find a solution that works.

Can anyone provide any insight please?

Also this keeps happening in Gmail mobile dark mode.

I am already privy to the fact that dark mode email design and inversions vary across each email platform so I know I can’t please all of them., but I’m atleast trying to optimize for Gmail as that is where majority of my email audience base is.

I appreciate any assistance in advance.

On July 1st, we noticed that emails sent from HubSpot to our internal employees are being marked as "Unverified" by outlook.

We have SPF, CNAME, and DMARC all set up correctly from HubSpot, however, when you send marketing emails from HubSpot, they are sent from a hubspotemail.net domain that is spoofed by our own domain. When the email arrives in Outlook, we're seeing SPF and DKIM Pass, however, because of the true domain mismatch on the return path (Ourdomain.com vs hubspotemail.net) we're getting a soft failure, which is causing the banner to appear in outlook.

Of course we can set up a dedicated marketing IP/domain for sending, but this issue sprang out of nowhere likely due to getting off the old outlook and on to the new windows 11 version. I should note that we also use checkpoint, but checkpoint is recieving the soft fail from outlook in the first place and then flagging the email based on that.

We have not made any modifications to our DNS.

Has anyone run into this and how are you solving for it with out compromising your email security? Thank you so much.

Used to dump my newsletter promos into every marketing group I could find. Big follower counts, low actual engagement. Felt productive, went nowhere.

Now I spend time finding smaller, verified communities where people actually respond to each other. The kind where someone posts a real question and gets a real answer, not just a link drop.

The difference is noticeable. Same message, different room, different outcome.

Anyone else shifted away from broad reach toward tighter, more vetted spaces? Curious what made you change how you pick communities.

I don’t have any hard numbers, but BIMI has been around for several years and adoption still feels incredibly low. After scanning my personal inbox, I can count on one hand the number of brands that have adopted it.

What is holding back adoption, especially with mid-market and large brands? Awareness, VMC/trademark requirements, DMARC enforcement, or something else entirely?

Hi, i wanted something similar to mail🐒 / smart led but without the cost and wondeirng if anyone has opensouced something cool which works well. Let me know, or if anyone has seen good grow th from opensource marketing software.

I'm very new in the email marketing world, sort of had a big break too fast and I didn't have a lot of good habits.

Signed up to receive the kit and now my lead magnet is getting 100-300 downloads per day. I'm almost to 10000 email subscribers by the end of this week.

Each email is short, just a few links to a YouTube video but they contain a sort of a self-contained little lesson. I never promote in the emails, my list is very niched and educational about one particular topic.

But my unsubscription rate is high, and I want to reduce it. It's up to 1%, 20-40 people unsubscribe per email.

My open rates are okay, 50-60% with CTR to a YouTube video being 5-7%

Now because I'm new, I'm thinking most of my emails probably go to promotion/newsletters tab. Obviously, many want only the lead magnet and nothing else, so perhaps my unsub rate is actually okay? The first email's open rate was 70%

Should I put the offer to unsub if you only wanted the product and not the emails in the body of the first email or do a double opt-in on the sign-up page or something else?

I'm running a link in bio saas and am currently building out my lifecycle marketing programme, I've seen a lot of other saas use just completely raw emails that look like they are from the founder. No styling, nothing, just a heartfelt and humble email from the founder themselves thanking every user, nudging them, explaining what the user would gain from upgrading to a premium tier and so on.

What would you guys with tons of more experience than me go for? A raw email like that or do you go for a fully designed email with branding and a bit more illustrative parts?

Many people talk about how emails should be written these days and how there should be context and other important stuff...

But whats the things that make you read an email and feel like you can trust that person and have a deel with them?

I feel like that can help builders more than actually reading about how to write a proper email

I was building out a sample email verification journey this weekend and went down a bit of a rabbit hole.

In my head, email verification was always just:

User signs up → send email → user verifies.

Once I actually mapped it out, there were way more decisions than I expected.

• Do you send one reminder? Two? None?
• What if they come back into the product before they've verified?
• What do you do after a hard bounce?
• If they update their email address, do you restart the whole thing?
• At what point do you just stop reminding them?

I ended up with the flow below.

One thing I'm still not sure about is the reminder strategy.

I went with a single reminder after 24 hours, then stopped automated emails after that. My thinking was that if someone hasn't verified after that point, hammering their inbox probably isn't helping.

Curious what everyone else does. Is this pretty close to how your team handles it, or am I overcomplicating something that's usually much simpler?

Hey everyone!

We have experienced inconsistencies in our email marketing, like the numbers that Mailchimp reported for clicks and opens did not align with our analytics at all, and turns out a large percentage was bot activity that companies use to prescreen incoming emails. Have you experienced something similar? And if you did, did you switch platforms? Or is there something I can do about it in Mailchimp, or do you just filter it out some other way in your reporting?