Interactive emails let users take action—like completing a survey or booking—without leaving the inbox. Fewer clicks mean less friction, better results, and a more enjoyable experience. From polls and quizzes to gamified product carts, interactive emails feel like mini apps people actually want to use. To enable this, most teams turn...

What is an email newsletter? That’s a serious question. Think about it for a minute. What is an email newsletter? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and here’s what I came up with: An email newsletter is a message format that mostly contains non-promotional content that’s of interest to...

If you have been following my posts here on the Only Influencers blog, you'll know that I'm just as fascinated by the psychology behind email marketing as I am about the mechanics. Maybe even more so! That's because I want to understand why our customers do what they do with our...

Picture this. It's 2027. You open your inbox and immediately get buried beneath an avalanche of AI-generated noise. Every brand knows your name, shoe size, breakfast choice, and probably the last embarrassing question you asked ChatGPT. Yet somehow, none of these emails feel remotely personal. It’s cluttered, overwhelming, exhausting. It’s the...

What if the "death" of cold B2B email has been greatly exaggerated, and you're just three strategic shifts away from doubling your response rates? Discover why the marketers seeing breakthrough results in 2025 aren't sending more emails, they're sending smarter ones, leveraging AI in ways you might not have considered. Ready...

If you’ve watched an ESP demo lately, chances are it began with a generative AI trick — “Write a subject line,” “Build a product description,” “Summarize this content.” And while the results are often impressive, most email marketers watching aren’t thinking, "Wow, I need that." They’re thinking, "Great. Now can it...

You designed a split test. You launched it. You waited patiently (or maybe not so patiently). You crunched the numbers... and came up empty. No statistical significance. No learning. Just... a shrug from your data. Sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone. You may not be “doing it wrong,” but you...

If you knew in 2020 that COVID was coming, what would you have done differently with your marketing? That's where we are today with tariffs and looming trade wars. Once again, we marketers are figuring out how to continue marketing amid turmoil and uncertainty. We need to connect with and reassure...

Circa 2004, Bill Gates suggested that every email sent should have a small charge, like a digital postage stamp — perhaps X seconds of compute time — for every message. He was responding to the early-ish days of email SPAM. (For context, Blackberry had around a million subscribers in 2004. The...

In the fast-paced world of email marketing, we often obsess over the wrong variables — open rates, emoji choices, subject line hacks. But one of the most powerful, yet underutilized tools for creating content that truly connects? Keyword research. Not in the SEO sense. I’m talking about using keyword research to...

In June of 2024, I presented at Email Innovations World alongside Paul Shriner (AudiencePoint) on emotional loyalty in email. At the time, I didn’t realize just how deeply personal that topic would become for me only a few months later, when fires swept through Los Angeles. To provide some context, I...

Email marketers love metrics. They give us tangible proof that what we’re doing is working (or not). But here’s the catch: applying the same success metrics to every campaign is like using the same measuring cup for every ingredient in a recipe. Sure, it works sometimes, but other times, you’re going...

Imagine losing 70% of your email audience overnight—not because your content isn't valuable, but because a tiny 0.3% triggered an invisible digital gatekeeper. In the high-stakes world of email marketing, this isn't a hypothetical scenario; it's the new reality imposed by Google's stringent spam rate policy. Your emails' journey from "send"...

I've always considered myself an enthusiastic early adopter, embracing new technology with unbridled passion. This was true with marketing automation, advanced personalization, and analytics of all kinds. So, when large language models (LLMs) became a thing, I quickly jumped on the bandwagon. At first, the results were underwhelming. But gradually, as...

The 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) finally dropped on Tuesday, March 25, 2025. Although it's not publicly available yet, I had the chance to review a copy and like another popular industry report, the 2024 Forrester ESP Wave™, it’s filled with a mix of valuable insights, conspicuous...

In the email industry, we have a lot of terms we use regularly. Deliverability, Open Rate, Inbox, Subject Line, Friendly From, Call-to-Action, etc. For the most part, we all have a consistent shared definition of what these terms mean. But there is one commonly used email term where the definition can...

It’s not that inbox providers sit between brands and their subscribers, but rather that brands need to satisfy both their subscribers and inbox providers. Just like brands have their own goals and desires, so do subscribers and so do inbox providers. For example, subscribers want content that’s valuable to them, doesn’t...

I've come across lots of email A/B testing tools in my career. Some are good. Most don't deliver on the reasons why you test in the first place: to get meaningful insights you can use to learn more about your customers, improve your messaging, and spend your marketing budgets wisely. I...

In January, I attended the Email Summit 2025 in Odense. One topic kept surfacing in our conversations—email localization. Participants from various industries and countries, especially from the Scandinavian region, shared their experiences in localization. These countries are connected economically, but their different native languages make localization a challenge. I have noticed...

My last post for Only Influencers highlighted some predictions for new roles AI will create. In the corresponding OI Live session, Paul Shriner (yes, the legend himself!) asked if I would also explore this from a different angle— what human skills are irreplaceable? Well, good news, Paul. I have delivered. And...