Email Marketing RulesAre 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.
Survive the AI Takeover of Search — 5 Moves Every Brand Must Make
Posted on August 13, 2025
Traditional search—and Google, in particular—is under serious threat of being dislodged as the starting point for many buyers’ journeys. In January, ChatGPT and other alternatives drove Google’s search engine market share below 90% for the first time since 2015, according to Statcounter. And the sharks are circling more aggressively now, with both OpenAI and Perplexity set to release browsers to compete with Google’s market-leading Chrome, and with at least a dozen AI startups also vying to gobble up some of Google’s market share.
To be fair, the biggest loser here isn’t Google, which has introduced its own generative AI search results in the form of AI Overviews. The biggest losers are website operators, who are having their content regurgitated by generative AI engines in exchange for a source link (sometimes) and are seeing their web visitor traffic plunge.
For instance, research shows that website traffic from Google has declined between 30% and 70% depending on the search terms used because of AI Overviews, according to AI magazine. That’s in line with Ahrefs research showing that an AI Overview in a search results correlates with a 34.5% lower clickthrough rate on average for the top-ranking page, compared to similar informational keywords without an AI Overview.
And the worst is yet to come. “Your website doesn’t need to go away,” says Chris Andrew, CEO & Co-founder of Scrunch, “but 90% of its human traffic will.”
Welcome Email Best Practices
Posted on August 11, 2025
When someone signs up to receive your promotional emails, it marks the start of what is hopefully a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Start it off right by sending the most effective welcome email possible.
Here are nine best practices to follow:
- Send welcomes immediately.
- Use a marketing-appropriate sender name.
- Use a high-value call-to-action.
- Keep your copy and design focused.
- Use a welcome email series.
- Send different welcomes based on acquisition source.
- Craft user-friendly welcomes.
- QA and optimize your welcomes often.
- Seasonally update your welcomes.
For a full discussion of each of those recommendations…
The Limitations of B2B Email Marketing Benchmarks
Posted on August 5, 2025
Email marketers put too much stock in external benchmarks, which can give them a distorted view of their performance and cause them to make ill-informed strategic and tactical mistakes. That was the core message of my closing keynote for MarketingProfs’ Modern Email Marketing Essentials.
Let’s explore that issue and what B2B marketers can do instead.
The Last Word on July 2025
Posted on August 4, 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
How the Attention Economy Is Devouring Gen Z — and the Rest of Us (The New York Times)(gift article)
Q2 2025 Email Patterns, Trends, and Outliers (Really Good Emails)
Rory Sutherland on the Fat Tail of Marketing (Future Commerce)
The Perfect Storm: How Two Major Industry Changes Impacted Email Engagement (Validity)
Your Favorite Model? Thanks to AI, They Might Not Be Real (CNN)
Yahoo Mail to Absorb Comcast Subscriber Mailboxes (Spam Resource)
Perplexity’s Comet Browser Challenges Chrome With AI-First Internet Experience (CMSWire)
OpenAI to Release Web Browser in Challenge to Google Chrome (Reuters)
Inside the Media’s Traffic Apocalypse (New York Magazine)
Nike Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over Misleading Email Marketing (EmailExpert)
Movable Ink Announces Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by STG (Movable Ink)
Ziff David Acquires Email Industries, Organizer of Inbox Expo (Ziff Davis)
Can Bloomingdale’s Bring the Magic Back to Department Stores? (McKinsey & Co.)
Insightful & entertaining social posts
Most consumers are seeing AI summaries in search results
📊 Subscribe to the Chart of the Day newsletter: https://t.co/9JA7P0G9dT#ChartoftheDay #newsletter #AI #search pic.twitter.com/kILtVkRxZ3
— EMARKETER (@eMarketer) July 25, 2025
Sam Altman says it’s insane that banks still accept voice prints for authentication.
AI has already broken most of the systems we use to prove who we are, and we’re sleepwalking into a synthetic fraud crisis.
“Right now it’s a voice call. Soon it’s gonna be video. It’ll be… pic.twitter.com/iqMaCjQpKG
— vitrupo (@vitrupo) July 23, 2025
Noteworthy subject lines
YETI, 7/17 – Support Kerr County, Texas.
Abercrombie, 7/24 – Have a Euro summer.
Levi’s, 7/19 – How to maximize your staple pieces
Spirit Halloween, 7/24 – 🚨 Krampus RETURNS
Dell Technologies, 7/9 – Black Friday in July savings inside.
Home Depot, 7/2 – Ready for the 4th of July? ♨️🎆😎
AutoZone, 7/4 – 🇺🇸 Road Trips & Rocket’s Red Glare – Let’s Go
Harley-Davidson, 7/4 – Freedom rides on two wheels
IKEA Family, 7/14 – Cramming. Not good for studying or for storage.
IKEA Family, 7/21 – Declutter your dorm with IKEA designers! 📚 🙌 😎
Wayfair, 7/20 – ⏱️Plus DORM DEALS ⏱️ Less than 24 HOURS ⏱️
Michaels, 7/22 – 🌈 ✏️ 🍎 Make back-to-school a celebration with awesome supplies and DIYs
DSW, 7/18 – It takes a village: 20% off for teachers & parents >>>
Staples, 7/3 – Got your 🧑🏫📝? Activate for 30% back today!
J.Crew, 7/21 – Too hot to think? Wear these dresses…
Duluth Trading, 7/20 – 25% OFF Heat-Beatin’ Gear!
Chubbies, 7/7 – Trunks So Good, You’ll Skip the Shirt
Uncommon Goods, 7/21 – The coolest backyard this summer? Yours.
VS PINK, 7/29 – We Live for a Comfy-Cute Moment
DSW, 7/21 – INSIDE: 6 NEW Fall Trends 👠👟🐆🤎🍂
Michaels, 7/8 – Warning: may cause extreme home envy! 😍
Williams Sonoma, 7/28 – Introducing Lotus: professional-grade appliances for your kitchen
Victoria’s Secret, 7/24 – Bras So Good, We Sell 1 Every 5 Seconds
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 7/17 – Closing Soon at The Met
Fanatics.com, 7/29 – Take a Fanatics survey for a chance to win $100 in FanCash!
Fandango, 7/3 – The Rotten Tomatoes App Is Here 🎉
Gap App Exclusive, 7/24 – We’re thanking you with 50% off
New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com
How to Use AI Subject Line and Copywriting Tools Successfully
Key Lead Nurturing Campaigns by Industry
The AI ROI Killer Lurking in Your Architecture: Data Access Charges
How One Button Can Reduce Email Unsubscribes by 80%
The Unsubscribe Experience Is Part of CX. Treat It That Way.
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
Head of Research
Oracle Digital Experience Agency
Author of Email Marketing Rules and nearly 4,000 articles about digital and email marketing
