Email Marketing RulesAdapting to the Most Active Inbox Provider Environment Ever
Posted on June 5, 2026
The launch of Mail Privacy Protection by Apple in 2021 kicked off the largest wave of inbox changes in more than a decade. Hide My Email, Link Tracking Protection, Deal Annotations, Deal Cards, AI Summaries, Brand Message Groupings, Branded Mail … It’s a wave of innovation that continues strong to this day. However, much of this innovation has created serious challenges for marketers.
Join us as we break down the biggest and latest changes made by inbox providers and share concrete to-dos for how to adjust. We’ll also steer you away from actions that might seem wise, but will actually make things worse for you.
Which Email Marketing Trends Are Truly Worth It?
Posted on June 4, 2026
Is the juice worth the squeeze? That was the central question in the session by Scott Cohen and Ryan Phelan at the ANA’s The Next Chapter of Email Evolution event in Chicago last month. The duo asked the audience to give a variety of trends a thumbs up or thumbs down, and then called on people to defend their views.
Of course, the majority of the trends they asked about fall in between a simple yay or nay—because there are circumstances when they’re not worthwhile, developments that are undermining their effectiveness, or other caveats.
Let’s dive into some of them. I’ll share some pros and cons, plus my verdict.
The Last Word on May 2026
Posted on June 1, 2026
A roundup of digital marketing and email marketing articles, posts, and social buzz you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
A DMARC Record Is Only a Suggestion (Spamtacular)
Why Customer Identity is Moving to the Enterprise Data Layer (Email Vendor Selection)
Accessibility Report 2026 (Email Markup Consortium)
Meta Is Dying. It’s About Time. (The New York Times)(gift article)
The Generation That Grew Up With A.I. Hates It (The New York Times)(gift article)
Insightful & entertaining social posts
Noteworthy subject lines
Fanatics, 5/21 – Gear Up for the Global Game
Gap, 5/29 – Introducing FIFA Classics
Redbubble, 5/12 – Stickers for Class of 2026 🥳 Relatable, Motivational
Urban Outfitters, 5/30 – Get the dorm of your dreams (now 30% Off)
Fanatics, 5/8 – NFL x YETI Soft Coolers–Perfect for Dad 🏈
Goldbelly, 5/2 – 🍰 Mother’s Day Dessert Guide 💝 Ina Garten + Martha Stewart + More!
Michaels, 5/8 – Mother’s Day is Sunday! ⏰ Get up to 60% off at our Mother’s Day Sale.
Macy’s, 5/10 – Up to 40% off handbag gifts for Mother’s Day
ECCO, 5/10 – Mother’s Day: Find Her Perfect Pair For Summer
kate spade, 5/2 – Little bag, big summer energy
IKEA Family, 5/12 – New must-haves for endless summer fun 🏄🏻♀️😎
Urban Outfitters, 5/23 – This season’s star baseball graphics ⚾ →
Bed Bath & Beyond, 5/19 – Need a patio refresh for less? ☀️
IKEA Family, 5/17 – Summer party planning? ☀️ You need to see this. 👀
Wayfair, 5/4 – Your apartment balcony 🤝 these outdoor picks
Huckberry, 5/29 – Art of the Summer Sneaker
Goldbelly, 5/30 – 🍑 It’s Peak Georgia Peach Season! 🍑
Lane Bryant, 5/29 – 10/$39.50 panties 🍑cut for every butt
Macy’s, 5/20 – Spotlight on: the polo shirt 👕
Clinique Online, 5/23 – Just for you, get this exclusive train case.
Bass Pro Shops, 5/10 – Vote For America’s Best Aquarium 🐋
Clinique Online, 5/29 – ✨ 5 shortcuts to glowing skin.
Williams Sonoma, 5/4 – The essentials for crisp, beautiful salads
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
The Underutilized Superpower Hidden in Loyalty Data
The Gap between Modern and Legacy ESPs Is Widening
Designing for Impact: Our Top Digital Marketing Creative Tips
Email Marketing Underperforming? Let’s Troubleshoot It
The Underutilized Superpower Hidden in Loyalty Data
Posted on May 29, 2026
Customer loyalty data is one of the most strategic assets in the enterprise today—yet only 17% of surveyed marketers feel “very confident” in their ability to use the data. That gap between what loyalty data could do and what it actually does is the focus of new research from Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Zeta.
The study surveyed 310 customer loyalty and marketing decision-makers and high-level practitioners to understand how organizations are collecting, integrating, and acting on loyalty data, and where the opportunities for growth are hiding. The study dives into:
- The barriers to using loyalty data effectively, and how to overcome them
- Why only 26% of respondents rate their customer loyalty programs as “very effective”
- The behavioral metrics worth tracking alongside CLV and retention
- How to unlock the full potential of your customer loyalty data
The Gap between Modern and Legacy ESPs Is Widening
Posted on May 15, 2026
Artificial intelligence represents a functionality leap that is fundamentally changing how marketers execute their campaigns.
AI is prioritizing high-propensity audiences, adjusting timing based on observed behavior, recommending content variations, suppressing low-likelihood responders and bringing newfound visibility to past performance to inform future plans. The result is fewer wasted impressions, stronger engagement and clearer visibility into what drives acquisition, repeat purchase and long-term value.
However, the rising tide of AI is not lifting all boats equally. While brands using modern email service providers (ESPs) are experiencing big gains in functionality, brands still on legacy ESP platforms are realizing only a small fraction of the gains. The disparities are the result of structural and architectural differences between modern and legacy platforms.
So, if your brand is struggling to capture gains from AI, it may not be your fault. It may just be the limitations of your email marketing platform. Here are four signs to watch for that separate modern from legacy platforms.
Designing for Impact: Our Top Digital Marketing Creative Tips
Posted on May 12, 2026
Campaign design is constantly evolving, driven by tech and inbox innovations, changing consumer preferences, and the growing need to capture attention and serve customers well. In practice, those shifts don’t show up in big strategic overhauls. Performance is shaped by the details. Campaigns underperform because of small creative decisions that compound—things like layout, hierarchy, interactivity, and mobile usability.
That’s why we pulled together the 2026 Digital Marketing Lookbook, which highlights 20 standout campaigns from among the hundreds of thousands that our team sees each year. Across those campaigns, we identified seven creative trends we think are driving performance. And because we think there’s always room for improvement, we shared 79 pieces of advice on potential improvements to those campaigns, both from the experts in our Creative Studio and from Athena by Zeta™, our superintelligent agent.
With so much inspiration and information packed into the Lookbook, we wanted the opportunity to unpack it at greater length. That’s exactly what we did in the on-demand webinar below. In it, we talk more about our inclusion criteria, dive into five of the creative trends, and spotlight several campaigns in the Lookbook, along with additional on-trend campaigns.
The Last Word on April 2026
Posted on May 11, 2026
A roundup of digital marketing and email marketing articles, posts, and social buzz you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Unspam 2026 recap (Really Good Emails)
Gap’s Chief Entertainment Officer Must Deliver More than Viral Moments (EMarketer)
Massachusetts Officially Proclaims April 23 as Email Day in Honor of Email Pioneer Ray Tomlinson (ZeroBounce)
Insightful & entertaining social posts
Visible AI in marketing is four times more likely to cost brands trust than build it
📊Subscribe to the Chart of the Day newsletter: https://t.co/9PwiRisjmq#ChartoftheDay #newsletter #AI #marketing #brands pic.twitter.com/wP7PMQIkFN
— EMARKETER (@eMarketer) April 10, 2026
Noteworthy subject lines
PINK 🦋Big Spring Sale, 4/12 – Today Only: $25 Sweats When You Buy 3
Fandango, 4/3 – Your Friday Movie Premiere 🍄🪐
IKEA Family, 4/29 – Easy ways to celebrate Earth Month 🌎
Neiman Marcus, 4/28 – The Roundup: Mother’s Day Gifts
YETI, 4/10 – Find Must-Have Gifts For Mom
Michaels, 4/28 – 🧑🚀 Get up to 50% off gifts for out-of-this-world Moms →
Williams-Sonoma, 4/12 – For Mom, with love 💝
NFLShop.com, 4/12 – 🌷Soft Colors. Strong Team Pride.
Wayfair, 4/2 – G-A-R-A-G-E-S-T-O-R-A-G-E-C-A-B-I-N-E-T-S
Clinique Online, 4/13 – Get 3 free gifts when you spend $65
Top Deals at GameStop, 4/12 – Buy a Switch 2 & Super Mario Galaxy 1+2 for $499 🌟💸
Abercrombie & Fitch, 4/2 – Extra 20% OFF purchases of $125+* in the app with code: AF20.
Olive Garden, 4/13 – Delivery. Is. Now. FREE!
Nintendo, 4/16 – Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream brings the series back to life
Bass Pro Shops, 4/13 – Enter The Dream Boat Giveaway
Huckberry, 4/28 – What to Wear From Relwen Spring ’26
MASS MoCA, 4/8 – Summer starts here!
Patagonia, 4/6 – Breathable tech tees that won’t leave you sticky
Wayfair, 4/28 – Our best gazebo deals
Gap, 4/23 – Basquiat. On you.
Huckberry, 4/10 – Mike Tyson Said It Best
Patriots Member Services, 4/23 – NFL Draft Tonight!
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
2026 Digital Marketing Lookbook
In Defense of Mother’s Day Opt-Outs (and Empathy in Marketing)
Email Marketing Underperforming? Let’s Troubleshoot It
Posted on May 7, 2026
While no one has claimed email marketing is dying for many, many years, some marketers have become increasingly concerned with performance declines, despite the channel generating returns on investment that are often at least twice as high as most other channels. If your organization is concerned about your email marketing performance, here are some of the root causes we’ve been seeing with our clients that go beyond the usual economic or competitive pressures.
First Quarter 2026 Marketing Benchmark Report
Posted on May 5, 2026
Zeta Global’s latest Marketing Benchmark report shares aggregated data on SMS click rates and on email sends, open rates, click rates, click-to-open rates, and unsubscribe rates from Jan. 1 through Mar. 31, 2026, including year-over-year changes. The email benchmarks are broken down by industry (e.g., retail; travel, hospitality & entertainment; financial services & insurance; and media) and by email type (e.g., promotional and triggered).
The report also includes:
- Commentary and context from our digital marketing experts so you can understand performance changes
- Tips on how to use benchmarks effectively
- Discussions of the latest inbox provider changes from Gmail and Yahoo Mail and how they affect marketers
To get the report via a free, no-form download…
The Last Word on March 2026
Posted on April 9, 2026
A roundup of digital marketing and email marketing articles, posts, and social buzz you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
The AI-Search Adoption Survey: 6 Charts Show Where (and How) People Search (Digital Marketing Tips
First Take on The Forrester Wave Email Marketing Service Providers 2026 (Email Vendor Selection)
6 Post-Purchase Moments that Shape Customer Lifetime Value (Holistic Email Academy)
Amazon Wins Court Order to Block Perplexity’s AI Shopping Agent (CNBC)
What’s an ‘E-shaped’ Economy — and Where Do You Fit in It? (MarketWatch)
This Is What Work Looks Like in a (Not So) Future World (VKTR)
Interactive Emails: Pros and Cons, Tips & Examples [2026] (Moosend)
Insightful & entertaining social posts
When there is little effort, you get sarcastic humor from me. pic.twitter.com/8C8ToHXNuQ
— Keith Kouzmanoff (@emailmp) March 31, 2026
Noteworthy subject lines
Really Good Emails, 3/17 – You’ve earned 12 fake points and our respect
Goldbelly, 3/19 – Peep This 💐🐇🐣 Top Easter Eats
Williams Sonoma, 3/26 – Sweet details for a joyful Easter 🐰🌸
Michaels, 3/31 – We’ve got it: NEW! PEEPS x Hello Kitty and Friends Easter collection 🐤 🎉
Nintendo, 3/10 – Happy MAR10 Day!
Burlington, 3/6 – Happy National Dress Day!
Goldbelly, 3/13 – Pi Day Pie Sale ENDS TOMORROW! 🥧
IKEA Family, 3/9 – Lost an hour 🥱? Gain big savings on sleep essentials 🛏️!
NFLShop.com, 3/20 – Perfect Layers For Changing Weather 🌿
Wayfair 3/15 – Your vertical garden need-to-knows 👉
Overstock, 3/12 – Make your patio pop ✨
West Elm, 3/26 – A functional entryway
IKEA Family, 3/2 – Sofa savings you’ll want to sit down for 🛋️
IKEA Family, 3/22 – Water-saving tips your wallet will soak up
Allrecipes Tonight, 3/12 – The Only Hot Dogs You Should Buy
Priceline, 3/9 – Hack #3: These filters = savings!
Chubbies After Party, 3/26 – Introducing Chubbies AFTERPARTY
adidas CONFIRMED, 3/22 – The wolf awakens
Duluth | Underwear Sale, 3/30 – ALL. UNDERWEAR. ON. SALE.
Home Depot, 3/25 – FIFA World Cup 2026™ 🏆Experience It IRL
PINK, 3/19 – NEW Desert Looks Loading 🌵🤠🎶
Urban Outfitters, 3/19 – BAGGU + UO 🍒 Cherry Land Collection
adidas, 3/15 – Explore the new Bob Marley collection
Quiksilver, 3/10 – New Collab Alert
Nitya from Lonely Planet, 3/10 – You’re invited: Become a Founding App Member!
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
What Makes Enterprise Email Marketing Different
Less Copy, More Clicks: 9 Proven Ways to Improve Marketing Message Performance
How Marketers Can Adapt to Gmail’s ‘Manage Subscriptions’
Litmus Live: Omnichannel Subscribers + Email Accessibility Mistakes
How Ethical Are Your Digital Marketing Tactics?
Don’t Discount These Four Trends Driving Innovation in Restaurant & Hospitality
3-Year Anniversary of the 4th Edition of ‘Email Marketing Rules’
Welcome! Email Marketing Rules is your guide to understanding the best practices of this complex, often misunderstood channel as you craft the best executions for your brand. Every week, we’ll explore strategies and tactics, discuss tips and inspiration, and dig into industry news and trends.
Chad S. White
GVP of CRM Strategy
Zeta Global
Author of Email Marketing Rules and nearly 4,000 articles about digital and email marketing
