Email Marketing RulesThe Last Word on October 2025
Posted on November 7, 2025
A roundup of digital marketing and email marketing articles, posts, and social buzz you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Yahoo’s AOL Sale Points to an Email-Centric Future (Email Expert)
Introducing “Insights”: A New Way to Understand Your Delivery Performance (Yahoo)
ChatGPT’s Atlas: The Browser That’s Anti-Web (Anil Dash)
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Instant Checkout: The Dawn of Conversational Commerce CX (CMSWire)
State of the Consumer 2025: When Disruption Becomes Permanent (McKinsey & Co.)
Say It Ain’t So! Why Emojis Undermine the Science of Good Email Marketing (CMSWire)
Bot-Generated Fake Brand Outrage Is a Rising Problem—What Marketers Need to Know (AdAge)
🎉 Because Every Customer Deserves a Celebration (Clinton Wilmott)
Younger Americans Are Ditching Apps for Activities (MarketWatch)
Insightful & entertaining social posts
Noteworthy subject lines
Wayfair, 10/3 – STOCK POTS, SOUP POTS AND MULTI-POTS 🏠 🥂 Holiday hosting = UP TO 60% OFF
IKEA Family, 10/22 – Get into the holiday groove with IKEA Live 💃 🎄
The North Face, 10/21 – Our holiday gift guide is here.
Fanatics.com, 10/28 – Give the Gift of Their Favorite Jersey 🎁
Staples, 10/22 – Shop holiday 🎁 early, stress less – so easy!
Spirit Halloween, 10/27 – $15 2-day shipping on orders over $50!
West Elm, 10/6 – Get your home Halloween-ready
Clinique Fall Gift, 10/25 – 10 treats for me? YES, please. With $85 order.
Michaels Custom Framing, 10/12 – 🖼️ Score 70% off custom frames to create a lasting display for your veteran.
Bed Bath & Beyond, 10/13 – Fall in love with an organized home 🍂
Banana Republic, 10/31 – The sweaters we’re wearing all season long
Columbia, 10/13 – This Omni-Heat™ Infinity gear is on fire.🔥
Columbia, 10/29 – Cold? Not in these jackets.
Brekke from Lonely Planet, 10/8 – Escape to Peru
Bass Pro Shops, 10/22 – Online Shopping + In-Store Pickup = 10% Savings!
Abercrombie, 10/27 – Last chance for code: NEWFORYOU.
GameStop, 10/31 – We made a game! Buy Buck and the Cursed Cartridge today 🐰🕹️🔫
NFLShop.com, 10/28 – luluemon NFL Collection | Selling Fast 🔥
Macy’s, 10/14 – Disney | Macy’s is back!
adidas, 10/3 – adidas x Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 🏁
YETI, 10/10 – YETI® x Howler Brothers
Zara Kids, 10/25 – Bensimon x Zara Kids
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
4 Trends Affecting Digital Marketing This Holiday Season
Posted on November 6, 2025
Every holiday season brings its own unique challenges. Here are four of the biggest ones affecting the 2025 holiday season and how marketers can adapt to those challenges.
- K-Shaped Economy
- Inflation Untamed
- Tariffs & Buying Local
- Social Media Influencers & AI Slop
AI & the Future of Email Marketing
Posted on November 4, 2025
At the same time that email marketers are using AI to transform their email programs, inbox providers are using AI to transform the inbox experience. In this hour-long on-demand webinar, Ortto’s Head of Email Deliverability, Travis Hazlewood, and I discuss the impact of all of these inbox changes on marketers and their email deliverability.
We discuss:
- How Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Apple Mail are replacing brand-crafted preview text and subject lines with AI-generated summaries, and how brand-crafted email content is being pushed out of the preview pane by Gmail’s Deal Cards and other AI-generated content
- How inbox providers are introducing more features that disrupt the traditional “last in, on top” chronological arrange of emails in inboxes
- How these changes are impacting deliverability and changing the email deliverability equation
Travis and I close out the on-demand webinar by each offering advice on how marketers should respond to these inbox changes.
The Last Word on September 2025
Posted on October 1, 2025
A roundup of digital marketing and email marketing articles, posts, and social buzz you might have missed last month…
Must-read articles, posts & reports
Zeta Global to Acquire Marigold’s Enterprise Business (Zeta Global)
Brands Are Using Your Inbox to Get Ready for a New Wave of Tariffs (Fast Company)
Relevance Comes to the Gmail Promo Tab (Spam Resource)
What’s the Most Effective Content Strategy in 2025? [New Report] (Orbit Media)
OpenAI Releases First-of-Kind Study Revealing How People Are Using ChatGPT for Everyday Tasks (CNBC.com)
When AI Sends the Layoff Email: Is Automation Killing Compassion at Work? (ZeroBounce)
BIMI Boost: DigiCert Acquires Valimail, Enters The $4B DMARC Market (MediaPost)
How I Targeted Nonprofits Using Domain Extensions (Email Love)
Insightful & entertaining social posts
Noteworthy subject lines
Spirit Halloween, 9/18 – Your Hogwarts letter from Harry Potter and Spirit Halloween is HERE! 🦉📨
Spirit Halloween, 9/27 – Sinister. Sadistic. Stylish. 🖤
IKEA Family, 9/22 – 🎃 Creep it real with Halloween décor for your whole house 👻
Williams Sonoma, 9/27 – Thanksgiving prep list – pre-order your Willie Bird Turkey today! 🦃
Uncommon Goods, 9/23 – The gifts everyone’s searching for
IKEA Family, 9/30 – Preview the new Gustaf Westman holiday collection!
Burlington, 9/23 – We’re hiring for the holidays!
Goldbelly, 9/9 – Jewish Holidays – Schlepped to You! 🥯
Patagonia, 9/18 – Essentials for late summer
MoMA Design Store, 9/28 – 2025 Fall Trend Report
West Elm, 9/7 – Inside: Our Fall 2025 Lookbook
kate spade, 9/23 – New season—new star-studded campaign
Quiksilver, 9/23 – Layer Up From the Chill 🥶
Everlane, 9/28 – Look Cool, Stay Warm
Duluth Trading, 9/9 – B3G1 FREE On First Layers
VSX: Victoria’s Secret Sport, 9/10 – The Only Five Sports Bras You Need
Google Store, 9/15 – It’s Google’s birthday! Join the party
Nintendo, 9/24 – It’s the 40th anniversary of Super Mario Bros.!
Burlington | Credit Card, 9/22 – [REMINDER] Save 10% off your first purchases with a Burlington Credit Card – Details Inside!
Uncommon Goods, 9/7 – 10 of our uncommon-est things
Huckberry, 9/21 – Your Favorite Sweatshirt of 2035
Crate & Barrel, 9/28 – Inside: “The best sofa I’ve ever purchased”
Columbia, 9/10 – Crikey! Robert Irwin is our newest ambassador.
NFLShop.com, 9/26 – Just Launched: Football x Football Collection
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Are We Approaching Peak Email Marketing Frequency?
We’ve Lost Preview Text for Email to AI Summaries. Are Subject Lines Next?
Are We Approaching Peak Email Marketing Frequency?
Posted on September 11, 2025
For the nearly two decades I’ve been in the email marketing industry, everyone has always fretted about whether or not they’re sending too much email—and then they’ve gone ahead and sent more email.
A few years ago, I spoke to a reporter who was convinced that email frequency was absolutely out of control. I explained that inbox providers and subscribers are the ultimate arbiters of how much is too much.
Inbox providers start junking and blocking a sender’s emails if they see too low of a positive engagement rate from their users, such as opens, dwell time, forwards, and foldering—or too high of a negative engagement rate in the form of spam complaints. And subscribers opt out if they get too little value from a sender’s messages. Email frequency has a huge impact on both of those perceptions.
That’s still true today, but there are now other forces at work that seem to be finally slowing email frequency growth—and in some cases even reversing it. Here are the four major trends at work:
We’ve Lost Preview Text for Email to AI Summaries. Are Subject Lines Next?
Posted on September 9, 2025
After a long period of relatively stable, if imperfect email inbox environments, the past few years have seen a flurry of investments by Apple, Google, and Yahoo, who impact the vast majority of emails sent. (Microsoft has been almost entirely quiet.) While the first wave of this innovation was all about privacy and the second all about deliverability, the current wave is all about AI.
Across industries and professions, marketers are among the biggest adopters of AI, but the AI that’s being used by inbox providers is largely working against marketers. Nowhere is that more evident when it comes to the various kinds of AI summaries, which are gradually replacing carefully crafted brand copy.
The Last Word on August 2025
Posted on September 2, 2025
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 Power of Default: Why Doing Nothing Still Gets Results — and When It Crosses the Line (Kath Pay)
Psychology-Powered Email Marketing (Rob Voase)
Intelligence at Scale: Data Monetization in the Age of Gen AI (McKinsey)
How Changing Our Email Newsletter Frequency Boosted Engagement by 500% [Case Study] (Only Influencers)
Insightful & entertaining social posts
Your ESP service provider tells you one thing, your consultant tells you another… Who are you going to listen to? pic.twitter.com/935xv7OTxh
— Keith Kouzmanoff (@emailmp) August 7, 2025
This is your annual reminder that there are thousands of people trying to read emails that look like this on plane wifi.
Using HTML text requires a little more thinking and compromise when it comes to design and fonts, but it’s worth it.
P.S. the @emaillove Figma Plugin lets… pic.twitter.com/LE9bAO7H5C
— Andrew King 📬 (@akingkiwi) August 20, 2025
Before coins clinked of stone, copper and gold, humanity traded on trust. Turns out? Well, trust is still and will always be, “the strongest currency in circulation.” 💪 make sure your email looks, taste, smells of the sweetest perfume, called trust.
— Keith Kouzmanoff (@emailmp) August 28, 2025
Noteworthy subject lines
GameStop, 8/7 – 🚨 🔜 Pokémon Legends: Z-A is coming soon! Pre-order today!
adidas, 8/3 – adidas x Minecraft: Every new world needs an explorer
Uncommon Goods, 8/20 – Yes, it’s early. But not *too* early.
Gap Labor Day Event, 8/31 – GapJeans 101
J.Crew, 8/6 – Order soon to get your Labor Day weekend outfits in time!
Eddie Bauer, 8/6 – Three Days Only! Save On Summer Essentials ☀️😎
Pacsun, 8/14 – Fit Check: HoCo 2025 Edition
Panty Party 🎃 at VS PINK, 8/27 – 8/$38 Panties Is On (F)right Now 🧟♀️
IKEA Family, 8/13 – Boo! 👻 Explore our new Halloween collection – costumes optional! 🎃 🦇
BARK X Peanuts, 8/30 – There’s still time to fetch Peanuts© Halloween
Macy’s, 8/30 – Up to 60% off go-tos for National Beach Day 🏖️
Neiman Marcus, 8/20 – Shop fall trends, beauty, fragrance & earn a gift card
Everlane, 8/7 – The Utility Family Just Got Bigger
Staples, 8/13 – 📍 $89 AirTag trackers — don’t lose this deal.
Uncommon Goods, 8/5 – You won’t find these on Amazon
Urban Outfitters, 8/21 – outlook good: new BAGGU exclusives 🎱
MoMA Design Store, 8/25 – Take a Break from Digital
Columbia, 8/16 – PFG: pretty f’ing good.
Banana Republic App, 8/27 – One. Day. Only. App exclusive early access
Everlane, 8/8 – Cleaner, Washable Silk
LEGO® News, 8/29 – Hedwig™ has a letter for you…
Levi’s, 8/7 – BEYONCÉ X LEVI’S® COLLECTION IS HERE
adidas, 8/31 – adiclub, something exciting is coming 👀
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
Alt Text: Best Practices & Evolving Concerns
The Bridge to an Omnichannel Digital Marketing Future
Survive the AI Takeover of Search — 5 Moves Every Brand Must Make
Alt Text: Best Practices & Evolving Concerns
Posted on August 28, 2025
On websites and in marketing emails, social posts, and other online content, alt text helps a wide range of people fully understand your content by providing a plain-text alternative to images. However, using alt text optimally isn’t as simple as just inserting a text description into an image’s alt tag.
But before we get into how to determine the most appropriate alt text to use, let’s clarify exactly…
Inbox Survival Guide
Posted on August 25, 2025
Email marketing is evolving, driven by changes at inbox providers and new technologies available to marketers. When I got together with Chintan Doshi, Mavlers’ Head of Email & CRM, for their Marketing Insiders Series, that was the focus of our conversation.
Over the course of an hour, we talked about:
- The most common reasons emails don’t make it to the inbox today
- The deliverability rule changes at Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft
- The 3 foundational pieces every digital marketing program will need in the years ahead
- Using consumer behaviors to respond appropriately based on signal strength
- How SMS and push programs are affecting email programs
- What teams should focus on now that open rates are less reliable
- The role of opens and clicks in performance reporting
- Where AI is actually useful in email marketing right now
- How AI is evolving
- And much more
The Bridge to an Omnichannel Digital Marketing Future
Posted on August 19, 2025
Consumers have been omnichannel in their behavior for at least a decade, seamlessly shifting from one channel to another on their journey toward getting what they want. And B2B buyers have also gone omnichannel. To their frustration, however, most brands have struggled to move beyond their siloed multichannel operations. That has meant disconnected experiences and outdated messaging, which has been to the detriment of customer satisfaction and profits.
Thankfully, brands now have the tools available to them to finally catch up to the channel-hopping speed of their customers. With the following three components in place, brands are finally able to use real-time customer data from cross-channel behaviors to drive coordinated and cohesive customer experiences across channels with visibility into the impact on customer lifetime value.
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
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