Key takeaways Email personalization is no longer optional. Segmentation, and dynamic content are the pillars of inbox success in 2026. AI now acts as a gatekeeper between your message and your subscribers. Marketers need to optimize their content for humans and machines. Treat quality assurance as a core skill. With AI handling production, strategic human oversight is what separates great email programs from broken ones.

 

The air in the email marketing world feels a little different in 2026. We’ve moved past the initial shock of generative AI and the scramble of new privacy regulations.

Now we’re in the era of refinement. Today’s subscribers are savvier and more skeptical than ever—they can spot obvious AI content from a mile away. Striking a balance between cutting-edge automation and human touch is crucial.

In this article, we’ll break down the tactical shifts you need to master this year—from advanced lifecycle strategies to the rise of “intelligent gatekeepers”—to ensure your email program remains your brand’s most powerful growth engine.

Let’s get started!

Table of contents

• Bring personalization to the forefront
• Design for the AI-gatekeeper
• Shift to minimalist and structured design
• Leverage annotation schema
• Become an email orchestrator
• Enhance the customer experience with AI
• Use AI beyond email copy
• Invest in specialized design and automation tools
• Integrate email tools and prioritize data management
• Optimize for accessibility and inclusivity
• The future of email

1. Bring personalization to the forefront

In order to connect with subscribers, messages in your campaigns need to be relevant, timely, and personalized. This isn’t just true for email campaigns; it’s true for every touchpoint in your marketing campaign.

Effective personalization rests on these pillars:

• Segmentation: dividing your audience lets you customize what and when you send.
• Dynamic content: creates ultra-personalized emails without the impossible task of building countless versions by hand.

2. Design for the AI-gatekeeper

One of the most significant changes in 2026 is that your subscribers aren’t the only ones reading your emails — AI is, too. Tools like Apple Intelligence and Gmail’s Gemini now summarize your content for the user before they even open the message. (This is a big contributor to why open rates are no longer reliable.)

This shifts the question email marketers need to ask. The question is no longer just “did my email land and look great?” but “did the AI surface the right topics in the summary?”

Take a similar approach to your emails as you do with SEO. Front-load your email content with keywords and ensure your most important value proposition is clear and easy for a machine to “scrape” and summarize accurately in the inbox preview.

If your email is image-heavy, include a thorough description in the alt attribute of your image tags. But none of these tips matter if you are just guessing how AI is going to summarize your email. Using tools that provide a preview of how your messages are summarized can help you tailor your messages accordingly.

In 2026, the most creative writer doesn’t win. The marketer who makes their content with the machines in mind will be victorious.

3. Shift to minimalist and structured design

You might have heard that humans have an 8-second attention span (shorter than a goldfish!). While mostly a myth—goldfish actually have excellent memories—the principle that users gravitate toward the quickest possible win still holds.

Move away from giant, text-heavy emails. Modern aesthetics are trending toward leaner builds that load faster and are easier for AI tools to interpret and summarize.

Facilitate reading by leveraging known structures for content hierarchy, like the Inverted Pyramid, or the Z or F-patterns. Use heading tags properly (H1 for section titles, not just big text) to signal to AI which information matters most.

4. Leverage annotation schema

Years ago, Gmail introduced support for structured data in emails—small code snippets using JSON-LD or Microdata that give mailbox providers richer information about a message’s content. This allows Gmail to render special UI elements directly in the inbox, like image carousels or a banner showing a discount code and its expiration date—features that appear exclusively for messages landing in the promotion tab.

While there’s no official confirmation that structured data feeds directly into Gmail’s AI summarization process, it’s part of the message body and is parsed by AI. At a minimum, structured data gives the AI engine meaningful, organized signals about your content. Since most senders still aren’t taking advantage of this, adopting it now is a straightforward way to get a leg up on competitors who haven’t made the move yet.

5. Become an email orchestrator

The role of the email marketer is changing; in 2026, you aren’t just a builder—you are an orchestrator. AI is taking over the heavy lifting of coding tables, drafting subject lines, building audiences, and interpreting results. You will be hired for your ability to manage that output.

With AI handling production, your primary job is quality assurance—making sure the automation doesn’t “hallucinate” or stray from brand guidelines. A “human-in-the-loop” approach is a great way to work with AI-generated content, often generating 40% higher quality.

Take time to review AI output in an email rendering preview, flag stakeholders when needed, and always check links and images. Delegate labor, never liability.

6. Enhance the customer experience with AI

The novelty of AI-generated copy has worn off. In 2026, the goal is to use AI to enhance to enhance the customer experience as subscribers grow more skeptical and ignore obvious AI content. Some examples we’ve seen work well include:

• Analyzing how your audience is reacting to your tone.
• Sharing personalized product recommendations based on customer data and interest signals.
• Optimizing send times to meet customers when they are most likely to engage.
• Tailored messaging for win-back campaigns.

Remember: Always edit AI outputs to ensure they feel human and aligned with your unique brand voice.

7. Use AI beyond email copy

Written content is the most popular GenAI output for marketers. However, there’s so much more you can do:

• Test, find, and fix rendering, code, and compliance risks.
• Generate on-brand copy and variants for subject lines, body, and CTAs.
• Monitor subscriber experience and deliverability so you can catch issues early, avoid surprises, and keep critical programs out of trouble.
• See how you stack up against competitors, where you’re losing attention, and what to change next, turning performance data into clear next steps.

8. Invest in specialized design and email automation tools

You need a dedicated email designer—ideally, one with the right tools for the job. As email continues to grow and develop into its own medium and remains one of the marketing channels with the highest return, specialization is essential.

Beyond having an email designer on the team, marketing teams should also take a hard look at their automation tools.

To speed up design and development: use templates, email building tools  that cut development time, reusable HTML modules, and AI design tools for generating layout and style variants. For lifecycle gaps, lean on automation—a single automated email works far harder than one-off sends.

9. Integrate email tools and prioritize data management

Data management is a recurring obstacle, and it will only grow more critical as personalization demands increase.

Try using BriteVerify from Validity to validate addresses at the point of entry, protecting sender reputation from soft bounces. Then narrow your focus:

• Focus on one lifecycle phase at a time: re-engaging cold subscribers or recovering abandoned carts, for example.
• Audit what you have: data you own now, data you can easily get (preference centers, polls), and data you’d love to have (browsing history).
• Brainstorm personalization: match available data to your goal; working within constraints often sparks the best creativity.

Customers vs. prospects	Personalized campaign ideas	Data you need
Customers who purchase products in multiple categories	Gift guide or come visit our store	Purchase behavior Stated preferences Geolocation
Customers who have purchased one product but not a second	Product recommendations	Purchase behavior Browsing history Stated preferences
Customers who have purchased 3+ products (your superfans)	Ask for a review or shoutout on social media	Purchase behavior Sentiment
Prospects who have been on site browsing in the last 24 hours	Back in stock or “get it before it’s gone”	Browsing history
Prospects who haven’t engaged with an email in 30 days or more	Re-engagement campaign	Email engagement Browsing history
Prospects who are so close to making a purchase	Abandoned cart or abandoned browsing	Interest signals Browsing history

Integrating your email platform with your CRM, CDP, analytics tools, and marketing automation unlocks more insights, better personalization, and clearer results. Even without a robust tech stack, signup forms, preference centers, and in-email polls can surface useful data.

10. Optimize for accessibility and inclusivity

Accessibility is now a legal requirement under the European Accessibility Act and similar laws—and it’s simply the right thing to do. Key best practices:

• High-contrast colors; font size 14 or larger
• No flashing GIFs or single-image email designs
• Semantic heading structure for screen readers
• Large, thumb-friendly buttons on mobile
• ALT text on all images
• Easy-to-find unsubscribe links
• Inclusive language throughout

Test before you send using tools for robust accessibility checks, including visual impairment filters, automatic checks for alt text, text justification, and table roles, and an NVDA screen reader preview. What your email service provider (ESP) offers is usually not enough.

Some email testing  tools, like Litmus, have built-in accessibility checks. Reviewing your content before hitting send helps you maximize the impact of every email. Accessibility testing includes:

• Visual impairment filters to see what your email designs look like to people with different visual color deficiencies.
• Automatic accessibility checks that look for elements like alt-text, text justification, table-roles, and more.
• NVDA screen reader preview.

Check out this great session about email accessibility from Litmus Live 2026.

The future of email in 2026

The roadmap for 2026 is an interesting blend of efficiency and humanity. While we explore ways to use tools like automation and AI to work faster, we must prioritize humanizing our messages through inspiring personalized emails and accessibility.

• Verify your data: use BriteVerify to ensure your personalization is built on a clean foundation.
• Optimize for AI: make your content “scannable” for the intelligent gatekeepers summarizing your emails.
• Prioritize trust: focus on reply rates and authentic engagement over noisy, outdated metrics.

It’s easy to think that a high delivery rate means your email campaigns are hitting their mark. Since your emails aren’t bouncing, they must be getting to your subscribers, right? Not quite. In fact, this is a common deliverability myth, leading many marketers to celebrate a metric that only tells half the story.

Simply reaching a mailbox provider isn’t enough. The real win is landing your email in the inbox, where your audience can actually see and engage with your message. That’s why measuring inbox placement is essential for understanding the reach and impact of your email marketing efforts.

What’s the difference between delivery rate and inbox placement rate?

Delivery rate refers to whether your email is accepted by the recipient’s mailbox provider. If an email doesn’t get delivered, it means it bounced—either a hard bounce, which means the address doesn’t exist, or a soft bounce, which is a temporary issue, like a full inbox. A high delivery rate is one positive indicator of a healthy email list.

Inbox placement, on the other hand, measures whether your email, once it reaches the mailbox provider, actually lands where the recipient will see it. This placement is heavily influenced by your sender reputation, email content, recipient engagement, and other factors. Mailbox providers use a mix of these factors to decide if you’re trustworthy or not.

The key difference is that delivery rate tells you whether your email reached the mailbox server, while inbox placement tells you if it made it past the spam filters and into the inbox—where subscribers are most likely to open it. This important distinction directly impacts your marketing success. When emails are actually seen, you increase engagement rates and conversions, making measuring inbox placement essential.

Why you need to measure inbox placement

Making sure your carefully crafted emails land directly in the inbox is how you truly maximize their impact, driving higher visibility, engagement, and conversions. Every improvement in inbox placement directly strengthens your audience reach and boosts lead generation. Plus, tracking this metric provides an early signal of your sender reputation, so your team can get ahead of any issues and ensure a trusted, high-performing email program.

Visibility is revenue. Emails that consistently land in the primary inbox are much more likely to be opened, clicked, and acted upon. This directly translates into sales, sign-ups, or whatever your campaign’s ultimate goal might be. Without inbox placement, even the most compelling offer or update becomes invisible, which can render your marketing efforts and budget ineffective. That’s why it’s so crucial to understand where your emails land. It empowers you to switch up your strategy to get the most revenue.

Why email service providers (ESPs) care about engagement

ESPs like Gmail and Outlook rank and filter emails based on user behavior. This means messages that are opened, read, and interacted with are much more likely to appear in the inbox for future sends. In contrast, emails that are never opened, marked as spam, or deleted without reading show ESPs that they aren’t relevant. This affects your sender reputation over time.

Strong engagement tells providers that your subscribers value your messages. It makes you look trustworthy, improving your future inbox rates. It’s a continuous feedback loop, where positive user interaction ensures a healthy sender score.

How to measure your inbox placement

Your ESP’s “Delivered” metric is a blind spot. To see what your customers actually see, you’ll need a testing strategy. Here are a few steps to measure true visibility:

Step 1: Deploy a seed list test

A seed list test is the standard way to measure deliverability. It involves sending an inbox tracking email to a seed list—a collection of test email addresses across all the major mailbox providers, like Gmail and Yahoo. You should send your actual campaign content to this list just as you would to your real subscribers.

Step 2: Analyze folder placement

Using diagnostic tools, check to see where your email ends up in each of the test mailboxes. Did it hit the primary inbox, land in promotions, or get filtered to spam? Because you own these test inboxes, you get an unbiased view of exactly where the email lands:

• Primary inbox: Success. Your message is visible.
• Tabs or promotions: Partial visibility, common in Gmail.
• Spam or junk: A signal that your sender reputation or content needs to be adjusted.
• Missing: Your email was blocked entirely at the gateway.

Step 3: Calculate your inbox placement rate (IPR)

This inbox placement test provides a precise view of your actual reach, allowing you to calculate your IPR—the percentage of emails that successfully reach the inbox. This metric—not delivery rate—should be your true north for campaign performance.

• Formula: (Emails in Inbox / Total Emails Delivered) x 100 = IPR

Strategies to improve your inbox placement

Use these strategies to improve your inbox placement, build lasting subscriber trust, and drive revenue:

1. Ensure proper authentication

Authentication is like a digital ID card—without it, you’re an anonymous stranger knocking on the door. Authenticating your emails is the first step in building trust with mailbox providers. It ensures your messages aren’t immediately flagged as suspicious. It’s about proving you are who you say you are. Make sure that the following are set up correctly to prove your emails are coming from a trusted source:

• Sender policy framework (SPF): Your SPF is the Domain Name System (DNS) record that lists which IP addresses are allowed to send email on your behalf. If an email arrives from an IP address not on your SPF record, the receiving server will view it as a spoofed email, rejecting it or flagging it as spam.
• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): This is the encrypted signature that proves the email content wasn’t tampered with during transit. This cryptographic signature protects the message as it goes from sender to recipient. It prevents unauthorized alterations, further building trust with mailbox providers.
• Domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance (DMARC): This is the policy that tells the receiving server what to do if SPF or DKIM fail, either rejecting or quarantining it, for instance. DMARC dictates that these unauthenticated emails should be handled, while also reporting them so it’s easily visible to you to fix the issue.

As of 2024, Google and Yahoo now require these three authentication steps for bulk senders. Not having them will cause your emails to go to spam. Having them ensures your emails are delivered, avoiding disruptions and ensuring a successful email marketing campaign.

2. Keep subscribers engaged

Your subscriber engagement has a big impact on your sender reputation. Subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in over a year, for instance, signal to mailbox providers that your content isn’t relevant. Providers turn these old, abandoned email addresses into spam traps. If you hit one, it tells the provider that you aren’t managing your email list. This can harm your reputation and push your emails to spam, even for active subscribers.

To avoid this, run re-engagement campaigns when needed. You might send out messages like, “Do you still want to hear from us?” for instance, as a last-ditch effort to re-ignite interest from dormant subscribers. If they don’t click, simply delete them from your email list. Regularly removing them will keep your list healthy and responsive, demonstrating high engagement to mailbox providers.

You might also use a verification tool at the point of signup to protect your sender reputation from the start. These tools can prevent typos, like invalid or misspelled email addresses, from entering your database. They can save you from future bounce issues and make sure your emails only get to those who will engage with them.

3. Smart Segmentation

A personalized, relevant approach is crucial in today’s email landscape. For users to truly engage with your content, your messages should reflect their actual interests and past behavior. Segment your audience to send specific content only to the people who are most likely to click it. You’ll dramatically increase the chances that users open, click, and positively interact with your messages—all crucial signals to mailbox providers that your emails are valued by recipients.

For example, instead of sending a product update message to 50,000 people, send it to the 10,000 active users who actually use that feature. A targeted approach keeps your content relevant to recipients, increasing your engagement metrics. The better open rate can signal to mailbox providers that your content is popular, boosting your reputation for future sends.

High engagement means high placement. Providers notice engagement, and they reward senders who consistently deliver content their audience actively wants to receive. This will improve your inbox placement across the board.

Advanced strategies for scaling placement

If you have high sending volumes or a global footprint, pristine inbox placement will take more advanced strategies. For true enterprise-level deliverability, you need to be able to solidify your sender reputation while also being able to adjust to ever-changing mailbox provider filtering. These strategies can help you reach the inbox consistently while also elevating your brand’s visibility and helping you grow:

1. Sender certification

Certification is a whitelist program where vetted senders essentially get special treatment. It uses a strict testing process to confirm that you follow best practices. With certification, you stand out as reputable in the eyes of participating mailbox providers. There are numerous benefits to getting sender certification:

• Bypass filters: Certified IPs usually skip the strict volume limits and content filters that standard IPs face. It means your emails are much more likely to land directly in the inbox, even during peak sending times or with content that might otherwise signal less reputable senders.
• Image unblocking: As a certified sender, your images are automatically displayed. This can improve engagement. When images load by default, your emails become more visually appealing and impactful. They can lead to higher interaction rates and make your brand appear more professional.

Certified senders get 27 million more emails to the inbox annually compared to non-certified peers. This shows the advantage that sender certification can provide in boosting your email reach and effectiveness.

2. Brand indicators for message identification (BIMI)

BIMI is the standard that puts your brand logo next to your subject line in the inbox. It visually confirms your brand to recipients before they even open the email, adding another layer of authenticity that’s crucial in an era of increasing email fraud. BIMI can help your subscribers quickly see that you are legitimate, and that emails are real—not phishing. It can instill confidence in your brand and make it more likely that your emails are opened, not ignored or marked as spam.

BIMI can also help you stand out in a crowded inbox. With a distinctive brand logo showing, your email can be more easily visible in a sea of text-only subject lines. It can draw users’ attention and encourage them to open your message over others.

Note that to use BIMI, you’ll need to have DMARC at “quarantine” or “reject” enforcement. This is so that only brands with strong email authentication policies in place can use BIMI, showcasing just how strong a trust signal it really is.

3. Real-time feedback loops (FBLs)

To further ensure your email placement, sign up for FBLs. They’re offered by Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDs. These crucial tools offer insights into how your subscribers perceive your emails, specifically when they actively mark your messages as spam.

When a user marks you as spam, the mailbox provider will automatically tell you who did it, letting you pinpoint the specific email addresses generating complaints. This can help you improve your list hygiene and content strategy. For instance, you can ensure that you don’t email that user again. High complaint rates are a red flag for mailbox providers. Keeping these users out of your email list ensures a healthy sender reputation and deliverability for the rest of your recipients.

Make sure your emails reach the inbox

It’s time to shift the focus from delivery rates to the email deliverability metric that truly counts—inbox placement. Knowing exactly where your emails land is the biggest difference between sending messages to the void and connecting directly with your audience. With Litmus Deliverability, you get insights into your email marketing to pinpoint exactly what’s affecting your sender reputation. You can refine your email strategy and boost your campaign impact with data-driven confidence.

Whether you’re a growing team or an established enterprise, we have tailored solutions for you. Our tools can transform your email program and deliver the visibility and results your business demands. Get started today to take control of your email program’s true reach and drive meaningful engagement.

Key takeaways Making your emails accessible ensures more people can engage with your content, including people with significant spending power. Accessibility isn’t optional—it matters legally and for business. Following recognized standards—like WCAG—helps you stay compliant. Make small design and writing tweaks, like good color contrast, clear heading structure, and descriptive alt text, to help everyone—not just people with disabilities.

 

You strive to deliver the perfect email experience to your subscribers. But if you’re glossing over email accessibility, you could be alienating those with visual, physical, cognitive, and neurological disabilities.

Read on to learn how to make your emails more accessible for all of your subscribers.

Table of contents

• What is email accessibility?
• Why does email accessibility matter?
• Types of disabilities to consider in email marketing
• Accessibility best practices for email marketers
• Educate your teams to scale accessibility adherence
• Email accessibility in action
• Accessibility tools for email marketing

Key takeaways Deliverability isn’t getting easier—but good senders who follow best practices have a clear path forward. AI is reshaping the inbox experience, from relevancy sorting to AI-generated summaries, and marketers need to adapt their content strategies accordingly. Email metrics are getting fuzzier as opens become less reliable, making it more important than ever to look beyond surface-level engagement signals. AI-generated email code looks polished at first glance but can break across real inboxes, underscoring the need for rigorous testing. Implementing DMARC is one of the most important things senders can do to stay identifiable as a good, legitimate sender.

 

Litmus Live 2026 was packed with expert insights across two action-filled days. One of the most popular sessions titled “Where Is Email Marketing Headed in 2026?” was a 30-minute deep dive hosted by Validity’s own Guy Hanson and Danielle Gallant. Valimail’s Al Iverson also joined the fun!

If you didn’t catch it live, here’s a quick recap—plus answers to the questions from the live chat that the trio didn’t have time for during the session. You can also watch the session recording on Litmus’ website and YouTube.

Table of contents

• Deliverability is not getting easier
• Relevancy sorting is changing inbox behavior
• AI summaries are forcing a content shift
• Metrics are getting fuzzier
• AI-generated code looks good…until it doesn’t
• Questions from the live chat—answered

Deliverability is not getting easier

The panel wasted no time getting into the hard truths. Email deliverability is getting more complex. Mailbox providers keep refining their filters—and legitimate senders are feeling the impact.

The good news? Following responsible sending practices are still the most reliable path to inbox placement. As Al Iverson put it: “Good marketers are never the target of mailbox provider spam filters. Good marketers get caught up in a mailbox provider’s best efforts to stop the really malicious stuff. Implementing DMARC with an actual level of protection is what keeps you identifiable as a good sender.”

The practical takeaway: don’t just set and forget DMARC. Moving to a p=quarantine or p=reject policy isn’t just a compliance checkbox—it’s what signals to mailbox providers that you’re a trustworthy sender.

Relevancy sorting is changing inbox behavior

One of the most significant trends the panel explored is how mailbox providers use AI to sort and prioritize messages by relevance. It’s no longer enough to land in the inbox—your email needs to earn visibility at the top of the inbox.

This means engagement signals matter more than ever. Senders who consistently deliver value to their subscribers are rewarded; those who send to unengaged or poorly segmented lists will see their visibility erode over time. This means that regular list hygiene, strategic segmentation, and permission-based sending aren’t just best practices—they’re marketing survival strategies.

AI summaries are forcing a content shift

AI-generated summaries are already changing how subscribers interact with email. Instead of reading your full message, many recipients may only ever see a machine-generated synopsis. This has significant implications for how marketers write their emails. their emails.

The panel highlighted the need for senders to think about the “summary layer” of their content: What does your email look like when distilled into two or three sentences by AI? If your value proposition, offer, or call to action isn’t immediately clear, you risk being skipped entirely.

This is a strong argument for leading with clarity in your emails. Front-load your subject lines and preview text and include the most important information first. Write for humans but structure for algorithms.

Metrics are getting fuzzier

Opens have been unreliable ever since Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) arrived in 2021, and the problem has only compounded since. Clicks are more and more affected by bot activity and security scanners. The panel underscored the need for marketers to look beyond these top-level metrics and build a richer picture of engagement.

More meaningful signals include downstream conversions, site visits originating from email, time spent on site, and behavioral actions like replies, adding items to a cart, or completing a form. You can also look at your offline performance like foot traffic in your physical location that can be attributed to your email program. These metrics can be trickier to collect, but they tell a far more accurate story about whether your email program is actually driving results.

AI-generated code looks good…until it doesn’t

The session touched on a cautionary note for marketers and developers: AI tools make it easier than ever to generate email code, but that code doesn’t always hold up across real inboxes. A template that looks flawless in a preview can fall apart in Outlook, Gmail app, or dark mode environments.

The message was clear: AI is a useful starting point, not a finish line. Email testing across mailbox providers and environments remains non-negotiable.

Questions from the live chat—answered

The session generated a lot of great questions in the Litmus Live chat that the panelists unfortunately didn’t have time for. Lucky for us, they met up offline to tackle a few of the leftovers.

1. For your prediction that DMARC requirements will be further tightened, do you think p=quarantine will be enough for compliance or will you need a p=reject record?

Guy Hanson: Mailbox providers want to tighten up on all the senders who still rely on p=none because this policy implies the sender isn’t taking any action based on their DMARC reporting data. In the context of our prediction, p=quarantine will be fine, although we recommend moving to p=reject when you’re confident all your legitimate email traffic is accounted for.

Al Iverson: I personally think “reject” is better than “quarantine” when it comes to DMARC protection—block that bad stuff at the edge! Check out Valimail’s new DMARC report for more!

Danielle Gallant: In addition to a p=reject requirement for DMARC, I expect there will soon be requirements for strict DKIM and SPF alignment too. Make sure everything is aligned to save yourself future frustration.

2. Are text-heavy emails now better than image-heavy for AI inboxes? Does that conflict with keeping CTAs above the fold?

Guy Hanson: Balanced is best. Make sure the text you want AI summaries to surface is accessible—use headings, alt text, meaningful CTAs, and semantic HTML. These are all accessibility best practices anyway, so the benefits extend well beyond AI.

Al Iverson: Just be careful not to blow up your email code for AI summaries. Balanced text and imagery were already best practice before AI inboxes arrived—this just reinforces the need for them.

3. When AI email summaries are generated, does this involve a bot open?

Guy Hanson: Yes, we’ve seen research that backs this up.

Danielle Gallant: Thankfully, there are ways to identify bot clicks through time-to-click analysis, honeypot links, and ESP support. Our fantastic colleague Megan Farquharson recently wrote about this!

4. Would clicking a “mailto” link serve the same purpose as clicking reply in terms of metrics? Or would mailbox providers place more value in an actual reply click?

Guy Hanson: A mailto link is a great way to encourage two-way dialogue, but it won’t send the same strong intent signal to mailbox providers that an organic reply does. Be intentional about designing emails that invite real replies—encourage subscribers to respond and make it easy for them to do so.

Al Iverson: Just to second what Guy is saying, mailbox providers are firm in their guidance that replies help, so I would definitely encourage them.

5. Regarding the metric of engagement offline or outside of the email ecosystem, how does this affect the MBP engagement metrics that will determine reputation?

Guy Hanson: Mailbox providers, especially Google, already have cross-channel visibility. A subscriber who receives your email in Gmail, searches your brand on Google, browses your site in Chrome, and watches a product review on YouTube before buying? Google can connect all of those dots.

6. How could some of your points apply to B2B email marketing?

Danielle Gallant: Guy and I recently recorded a live episode of our podcast at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum diving deeper into this topic. We cover how B2B email success hinges on strong consent practices, ongoing list maintenance, reputation management, and realistic performance measurement—all through the lens of the unique challenges B2B senders face, from higher churn and stricter filtering to longer buying cycles. You’ll see a few similarities with what we discussed in the Litmus Live session and the specific B2B nuances. Definitely check it out!

Sending with confidence in 2026

While the challenges persist, so does our community of email marketing experts. You can watch the full “Where Is Email Marketing Headed in 2026?” session on Litmus’ website and YouTube.

Want to stay ahead of email deliverability and engagement trends? Check out Validity’s 2026 Email Deliverability Benchmark report to see how your performance stacks up.

Key takeaways Sender reputation suspensions result from poor email practices, including high subscriber complaints and invalid addresses. Fixing immediate suspensions involves three main steps: diagnose the specific campaign and issues causing the problem, take corrective actions, and thoroughly test before sending.  Beyond fixing immediate problems, your actions can prevent them. Practicing email list hygiene and implementing technical authentication can avoid future suspensions.

 

Experiencing a sender reputation suspension can feel incredibly challenging, often disrupting your email communications and business operations. It happens when your email practices cause dissatisfaction among recipients or trigger technical issues. Fortunately, you can fix it with a practical, step-by-step approach. Discover the root causes of suspensions, learn actionable strategies to lift them, and gain insights into proactive measures that protect your sending reputation.

Table of contents

• What caused your sender reputation suspension
• 3 steps to fix your sender reputation
• Don’t just fix it, prevent it

What caused your sender reputation suspension

Sender reputation suspensions often arise from email practices that negatively impact the recipient experience, such as:

• High rates of subscriber complaints, where recipients mark messages as unwanted.
• Delivering emails to invalid addresses.
• Sending content that is not personalized or does not engage recipients, leading to lower positive interactions.

These elements collectively shape your sender reputation data and trigger a suspension when they consistently fall below acceptable thresholds.

3 Steps to fix your sender reputation

Fixing your sender reputation suspension involves three main steps.

1. Diagnose the immediate cause

Review your most recent email campaign report and carefully examine the data for specific indicators of your reputation challenge. Find the campaign that coincided with the issue and see if the bounce rate increased sharply following a particular send. Did you use a new list segment or one that had been inactive for a significant period? Investigate the exact origin and collection methods of that specific list. This focused review helps you pinpoint the immediate trigger for the suspension.

2. Take corrective action

If high bounce rates caused the issue, quickly remove the problematic list segment from campaigns. If an old list is the cause, stop sending to that group and create a plan to either re-engage its subscribers with consent verification or thoroughly clean it.

Then, contact your email service provider’s support team and explain the steps you have taken. Request that they review your account status and lift the sender reputation suspension. Your service provider can help validate your configuration, but if it is not the reason for your suspension, it won’t help much.

3. Test before sending again

Proactive testing can help prevent similar incidents. Deliverability in Litmus scans your outgoing emails against major spam filters and common blocklists before sending. Identify potential delivery obstacles and make adjustments so that your campaigns reach the inbox and keep your improved sender standing.

Don’t just fix it, prevent it

Focus on your email list hygiene. Remove invalid and unengaged addresses from your database to reduce bounce rates and avoid spam traps. Before adding recipients to lists, obtain explicit consent to email them. This way, you build a foundation of trust and compliance. Also, remember to make the unsubscribe process clear and straightforward to reduce recipient frustration and prevent unnecessary spam complaints. 

Then, monitor how recipients interact with your emails. If engagement isn’t high, adapt your content and mailing frequency to complement subscriber interests. Use email authentication protocols such as Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC), Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to reinforce your legitimacy as a sender.

Hitting “send” doesn’t have to be stressful

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Key Takeaways By implementing SPF, you protect your sender reputation, verify legitimate sending sources to prevent domain spoofing, and build trust with recipients and mailbox providers. Properly configured SPF records improve email deliverability, increasing the likelihood that your messages reach the inbox by authenticating your domain with receiving mail servers. Combine SPF with DKIM and DMARC for stronger protection against phishing and better control over your domain’s email security posture.

 

Whether you’re announcing a product launch or nurturing customer relationships, email is an essential channel for reaching your audience. However, making sure your messages actually arrive in your audience’s inboxes is more challenging than ever. Increasingly sophisticated spam filters, growing concerns about phishing and spoofing, and the ever-present need to build trust with mailbox providers like Google and Yahoo make mastering Sender Policy Framework (SPF) essential. It lays the foundation for email deliverability and protects your brand’s reputation with every send.

Table of Contents

• What is Sender Policy Framework?
• Why SPF is essential for modern email
• How to set up your SPF record
• A complete approach with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
• Why choose Litmus for better email campaigns
• Always reach the inbox with Litmus

What is Sender Policy Framework?

Sender Policy Framework is a simple but effective email authentication protocol that helps ensure only authorized servers can send emails on behalf of your domain. Setting up SPF protects your brand from spoofing and phishing while improving email deliverability. It also builds trust with subscribers and mailbox providers, like Google and Yahoo.

Why SPF is essential for modern email

Setting up SPF creates a record that lists the mail servers authorized to send emails on behalf of your domain. The receiving email servers check this record to confirm that incoming emails come from a legitimate source. Here’s why that’s important:

• It gets your email to the inbox: By passing this SPF check, your emails are more likely to be recognized as legitimate and reach the inbox.
• It protects your email sender reputation: Your authorized list of mail servers prevents impersonators from sending emails that appear to come from your domain, protecting your sender reputation.
• It improves your sender score: SPF maintains your sender score—a rating that determines your inbox placement, helping you reach your audience and build their trust in your brand.

How to set up your SPF record

Here’s how to set up your SPF record:

• Collect sending IP addresses: Gather every IP address that sends email on your domains’ behalf. Include servers for internal mail and any mailbox providers your recipients might use for forwarding.
• List all your sending domains: Make a complete list of your domains, even those you don’t actively use for sending email. It’s important to create SPF records for every domain you own to help prevent spoofing of your non-sending domains.
• Create your SPF record: Work closely with your IT team and email service provider to build your SPF record. Make sure all authorized sending sources are included.
• Publish your SPF record to DNS: Add your SPF record to your domain’s DNS settings. Your DNS administrator, IT department or email service provider can help with this step.
• Test your SPF record: After publishing, run an SPF check to confirm that your authorized IPs are listed correctly. If any senders are missing, update your record immediately.

A complete approach with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

When the SPF record is vague or non-existent, the SPF check doesn’t work and you need additional email authentication standards. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) give several layers of authentication. Use these email authentication standards together for stronger protection and deliverability:

• SPF lets you specify which mail servers can send emails for your domain to stop emails pretending to be from you.
• DKIM adds a digital signature to your emails, proving the message hasn’t been changed and comes from your domain.
• DMARC connects SPF and DKIM, tells receiving servers what to do if an email fails authentication, and reports suspicious activity.

Why choose Litmus for better email campaigns

Litmus gives you the confidence to hit send, ensuring your carefully crafted messages actually reach the inbox. Test across all major email clients and devices before you send, and catch deliverability issues before they impact your sender reputation. Discover helpful advice to improve every campaign for better engagement.

Always reach the inbox with Litmus

Key takeaways DKIM verifies email sender authenticity and ensures the message content has not been tampered with. There are several possible reasons Google fails your DKIM, including failed authentication checks, message forwarding invalidating the DKIM signature, and poor sending practices. Google’s increased security against phishing and spoofing protects senders’ brands and recipients from fraud.

 

If you’ve ever spotted a “failed” DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) message in Gmail, you know the feeling of panic it brings. While you might think your DKIM is set up correctly, there are several possible reasons that could be causing DKIM failure. Surprisingly, Google’s strict validation is ultimately a positive development for email security.

Table of contents

• What is DKIM? A quick refresher
• Why DKIM fails
• Why a stricter Google is good for email
• How to check your DKIM record

What is DKIM? A quick refresher

DKIM is a method that applies a digital signature to verify that an email is authorized by the domain that signed it and that its content has not been altered after signing. DKIM intentionally separates the identity of the signer from the visible “From” author domain.

This method helps email providers, like Gmail, confirm the sender’s identity and prevents threat actors from impersonating your brand. It builds trust with your recipients and improves email deliverability. A special DKIM record, stored in your domain’s settings, contains a public key that helps email servers verify this signature.

Why DKIM fails

Google could be failing your DKIM for various reasons:

• Your DKIM might not be set up correctly.
• Sent messages are not passing DKIM authentication checks.
• Message forwarding can alter email content, invalidating the DKIM signature.
• Poor email sending practices can land DKIM-signed emails in spam folders.
• Your domain provider’s TXT record character limits might truncate or disorder your DKIM key.
• Having too many DKIM signatures can lead to the authenticating signature being ignored by receivers like Gmail.
• Receiving email servers might reject valid DKIM-signed messages for their own reasons. You might need to contact the administrator.
• Using the DKIM length tag (l=) can introduce vulnerabilities and cause failures if you’re not using Google Workspace for email.

Why a stricter Google is good for email

Google’s stricter approach benefits the entire email ecosystem. It directly combats activities like phishing and email spoofing, and it prevents unauthorized parties from impersonating legitimate brands. Stronger safeguards protect your business reputation and subscribers from fraudulent messages. Recipients can feel more confident that the emails they receive are genuinely from the senders they expect them from.

With stronger authentication rules, Google contributes to a much more reliable and trustworthy inbox experience for everyone.

How to check your DKIM record

Understanding the status of your DKIM record is essential for the best email performance. Instead of a stand-alone DKIM checker, which offers limited uses, check out Deliverability in Litmus. It includes an assessment of your DKIM settings as part of its deliverability and infrastructure checks.

Within the Litmus report, you will find information detailing your DKIM record’s status. The primary point of review is to confirm that the domain specified in your DKIM record corresponds precisely with the domain in your email’s visible “from” address. This alignment supports DMARC authentication, which is necessary to prevent the “failed” messages from appearing for recipients.

Stop stressing about email deliverability

Litmus takes the guesswork out of email deliverability thanks to their industry-leading deliverability insights and infrastructure checks. 

Key takeaways AI in email marketing is picking up steam. Nearly 70% of email marketers expect up to half of their email work to be AI-driven by the end of 2026, signaling a shift from experimentation to everyday use. AI works best as support, not a substitute. AI can speed up tasks like drafting and automation, but it still needs human judgment before going out the door. Teams have to focus on outcomes over features.Teams that connect AI to real pain points like speed, quality, insight, or scale can find tools that actually help.

 

AI isn’t the new kid on the block or the hypothetical use case anymore. Our 2025 State of Email research found that nearly 70% of email marketers expect up to half of their email operations to be AI-driven by the end of 2026.

But jumping on every new feature or buzzword without thinking through how it supports your goals and workflows just costs you time, budget, and strategic focus. Instead, teams have to start with a clear sense of what they’re trying to do before they throw AI tools into the mix.

This guide helps you gauge where AI can genuinely move the needle in email—and where it’ll just create noise. We’ll cover key use cases, how to evaluate AI tools for email marketing, and how to integrate AI responsibly.

Table of contents

• How email teams are actually using AI now
• What AI actually brings to email
• Why human oversight still matters when using AI
• Where AI helps across the email workflow
• How to pick the best AI tools for email marketing
• Popular AI email tools
• Best practices for implementing AI in email marketing

How email teams are actually using AI now

In 2024, artificial intelligence (AI) mostly showed up on email marketers’ radar as a somewhat helpful sidekick. While nearly half of teams were already experimenting with AI in email, most use cases were low-stakes content creation, like:

• Brainstorming ideas
• Drafting email copy
• Generating subject lines

By the time the State of Email Report 2025 was released, the tone had changed. While the more straightforward use cases are still around, AI is becoming part of how email campaigns are created, from start to finish. Nearly 70% of email marketers now expect up to half of their email operations to be AI-driven by the end of 2026, and 18% predict that 50-75% of their email marketing will be AI-driven.

What’s different now:

• AI is evaluated as part of the core email workflow, not a one-off tool
• Teams are looking for repeatable efficiency gains, not novelty
• The focus has shifted from “Can we use AI?” to “Where does AI actually help?”

AI adoption is moving quickly, but its value still depends on how you use it and where it fits into the workflow.

Beyond basic automation: what AI actually brings to email

AI has earned its place in email marketing not because it’s creative or visionary, but because it’s fast and good at working with large amounts of information. That means there are areas where AI can help and others where it still needs human judgment.

Where AI shines

• Speed: First drafts of email copy, performance summaries to share with the team, and flags on small issues happen faster with AI helping.
• Scale: AI can analyze large datasets, monitor engagement across programs, and support personalization efforts that would be difficult to manage by hand.
• Starting points: AI gets teams past the blank page by suggesting subject lines or making it easy for non-designers to mock up concepts to share.

In these areas, AI doesn’t replace marketers. It helps them spend less time getting started and more time refining what matters.

Where AI struggles

• Original strategy: AI can remix what already exists, but it can’t define goals, positioning, or creative direction.
• Inclusivity and accessibility: AI-generated content can reinforce bias or overlook accessibility best practices.
• Context and nuance: There’s still something special (and necessary) about human help to understand situations and get the brand voice right.

Why human oversight still matters when using AI

AI isn’t built to understand what’s true or appropriate in a specific situation. It’s built to guess what sounds right based on patterns it’s seen before. That’s why AI-generated content can feel awkwardly stitched together or not quite right for the situation. Since the outcomes are only as good as the inputs, you can also run into issues with accessibility or bias.

Generally, a bit of human editing and email testing can clear up issues. When you know how to work with AI in email you can improve performance and easily test new angles.

Where AI helps across the email workflow

AI can’t replace human judgment, but it can reduce friction across the workflow. Below are the areas where AI is having the most practical impact today, along with what to keep an eye on as you adopt it.

Email function	Why teams use AI here	When it makes sense to implement	What to watch out for
Idea generation	Speeds up brainstorming and helps overcome the blank-page problem	When planning campaigns or filling a busy send calendar	Outputs can feel generic without strong prompts and human refinement
Editing and proofreading	Cleans up drafts faster and reduces back-and-forth review cycles	Before QA and stakeholder review	May miss nuance or compliance requirements
Visual content creation	Generates concepts or placeholders quickly (even for non-designers)	When design resources are limited or timelines are tight	AI visuals usually aren’t final version ready
Hyper-personalization	Makes dynamic content beyond basic merge tags possible at scale	When you have solid first-party data and clear segments	Poor data or over-targeting can feel intrusive
Advanced automations	Triggers smarter workflows based on behavior or predictions	When lifecycle journeys get complex	Over-automation without strategy can increase fatigue
Data-driven insights and prediction	Spots patterns and ways to optimize campaigns	During performance reviews and planning cycles	Insights need validation; correlation doesn’t mean causation

AI is great for idea generation

If you’ve ever stared at a blank page willing your brain to come up with something (anything!) then you’ll understand what a boon idea generation is. From subject line ideas to draft outlines, AI tools can quickly create starting points that you can add your magic touch to. Copywriting use cases are among the most common today. In 2025, 49% of marketers use generative AI for static email copy, and 41% use it for dynamic written content, such as real-time personalization.

Editing and proofreading is quicker with AI

AI can be a first-round reviewer of your email content that spots grammar issues or spots that need simplification. Quick checks at this stage can catch small issues before they head to QA or stakeholder review.

AI can assist with visual content creation

While image generation is still finding its footing in email, it’s clearly picking up steam. Litmus data shows a 340% increase in marketers using generative AI for image creation between 2024 and 2025.

We don’t recommend turning your entire design process over to AI, but it can be helpful for tasks like exploring visual directions or themes early in the campaign process or creating rough placeholders to pass along.

Hyper-personalization is faster with AI

You want to create relevant emails, but only so much is possible by hand. The scale of AI makes it easier to dynamically show different products, tweak a headline, or change a call-to-action between customers. For teams with clean data, AI can also help generate small copy variations, so emails feel more relevant without creating everything from scratch.

Use AI to create advanced email automations

AI builds on standard automation by helping teams decide when and how emails are triggered. Instead of relying only on fixed rules, AI can spot patterns in engagement and suggest workflows to try based on what could work next.

In past years, 62% of teams reported spending two weeks or more to produce a single email. In 2025, that number dropped to just 6%, which might reflect time savings from AI and automation tools.

Data-driven insights and predictive analysis

AI is especially good at sifting through large amounts of email data and calling out patterns most teams wouldn’t catch on their own. Today, at least 41% of companies are using AI-driven analytics in some way. Many start with basics like segmentation and targeting, then move into things like send-time optimization (34%), behavioral prediction (32%), and journey mapping (30%).

Instead of guessing or reacting after performance drops, these insights help teams decide where to test, tweak, or step in next.

How to pick the best AI tools for email marketing

There’s no shortage of AI tools promising to “transform” email marketing. The real challenge is figuring out which ones are worth your time, budget, and attention. There are three phases to evaluating AI tools for email marketing:

• Align: Get clear on the problem you’re solving and who owns the decision.
• Assess: Evaluate tools against your actual workflow and preferences.
• Apply: Pilot tools with real campaigns and measure the impact.

1. Align: Start with your real needs (not the tool)

Before you look at demos or pricing pages, take a step back and get specific about what you’re trying to improve. The goal at this stage is to decide which part of your workflow needs help, like content creation, quality control, automation, or insight, so you can evaluate tools with a specific use case in mind.

A few questions to ground the conversation:

• What problem are we actually trying to solve? Is it speed? Scale? Quality? Insight? Consistency?
• Where is our biggest bottleneck today? Idea generation, production time, QA, personalization, or analysis?
• Who owns review and accountability? If an AI-assisted email misses the mark, who’s responsible for catching it?

When you tie AI use cases directly to these pain points, it becomes much easier to get buy-in. “This saves us X hours per campaign” or “This helps us spot trends we’re currently missing” lands better than “We want to try AI.” It also helps to tailor your pitch to your audience or industry.

Different teams tend to value different outcomes:

• B2B teams often gravitate toward generative AI tools because headcount is tight, and content demands are high. Faster drafting and iteration can free up limited resources.
• B2C teams are more likely to prioritize AI-driven analytics and insights, especially when proving ROI or identifying performance trends is a constant challenge.

 

2. Assess: Evaluate tools on how they fit into your workflow

Once you’ve narrowed your focus, look past flashy outputs and evaluate how a tool fits into your existing process.

Key criteria to consider:

• Workflow fit: Does the tool support how your team works today, or does it create a parallel process? Look at integrations and collaboration features.
• Brand control and guardrails: Can you set tone, style, and boundaries, or will everything need heavy rewriting?
• Transparency in data usage: Is it clear what data the tool uses and how inputs are handled?
• Explainability: Can the tool explain why it’s making a recommendation, or is it a black box?
• Accessibility and inclusivity: Does it help support accessible emails, or create more cleanup work?
• Is it AI or automation? Confirm if the tool offers prediction and insight, not just rules-based execution with new branding.

3. Apply: Test tools the way you’d actually use them

Once a tool looks promising, put it to work in real scenarios. This is where you’ll see whether it truly adds value or just looks impressive in a demo. A focused pilot usually runs one to two campaigns, or a single lifecycle flow.

A practical evaluation checklist:

• Test the tool using real or recent campaigns
• Compare AI-assisted output against your current process
• Review results with legal, brand, accessibility, and deliverability stakeholders to flag concerns
• Measure impact in practical terms: time saved, fewer revisions, clearer insights

What you’re looking for here are measurable gains. You want to see shorter production cycles, better quality, or better visibility into performance before you jump all in. Even if the results aren’t what you’re looking for now, you can always keep them as examples to learn from.

Best AI email marketing tools for enterprise businesses

Enterprise teams tend to get the most value by matching tools to specific use cases. However, AI is progressing so quickly that many AI companies are adding more and more offerings every day. Below are four AI tools, each representing a different category where AI is already delivering practical value for email teams.

AI tool for email copywriting and content generation

Tool: Jasper
Category focus: Generating subject lines, email copy, and content variations at scale
Why it wins:

• Purpose-built AI writing workflows for marketing use cases
• Strong controls for tone, brand voice, and content intent
• Makes it easy to generate and compare multiple copy variants
• Often used to ideate messaging angles that inform both copy and creative direction

Use it when your biggest bottleneck is getting content started and you want faster drafts and variants without handing off final decisions to AI.

AI email marketing platform for higher‑performing campaigns

Platform: Validity Engage
Category focus: network‑level intelligence, agents that act as a system, and proactive optimizations
Why it wins:

• Automatically find and fix rendering, code, and compliance risks before emails go out.
• Generate on‑brand copy and variants so more emails meet your standards by default.
• Monitor subscriber experience and deliverability so you can catch issues early and keep critical programs out of trouble.
• See how you stack up against competitors, where you’re losing attention, and what to change next.

Use it when you need more reliable and consistent email sends.

AI tools for email automation and lifecycle marketing

Tool: ActiveCampaign
Category focus: AI-augmented automation, lifecycle journeys, and behavior-driven workflows
Why it wins:

• Combines automation with AI-assisted segmentation and send-time optimization
• Uses behavioral signals to refine when and how emails are triggered
• Supports increasingly complex lifecycle journeys as programs mature
• Helps teams scale without relying solely on static rules

Use it when your lifecycle programs are growing more complex and you need automation that adapts based on behavior.

AI tools for email analytics, personalization, and prediction

Tool: Salesforce Agentforce Marketing 
Category focus: AI-driven analytics, predictive insights, and personalization at scale
Why it wins:

• Embedded AI across analytics, segmentation, and personalization workflows
• Surfaces engagement trends and prioritizes optimization opportunities
• Supports predictive send-time optimization and behavioral modeling
• Enables personalization across complex, multi-step customer journeys

Use it when you need help prioritizing what to optimize next, using predictive insights rather than relying only on historical reports.

Best practices for implementing AI tools in email marketing

Layering AI into email marketing takes time, with plenty of testing and refining along the way. Here are a few best practices to keep in mind as you start using (or expanding) AI across your email workflow.

Start small and scale purposefully

AI works best when it’s applied to a clear, well-defined use case. Instead of rolling out a new tool everywhere at once, start with a single part of the workflow—like idea generation, copy refinement, or performance analysis—and build from there.

This approach makes it easier to:

• Evaluate whether the tool is actually saving time or improving quality
• Identify where guardrails or review steps are needed
• Build internal confidence before expanding usage

If you’re looking for a step-by-step walkthrough, we cover this approach in more detail in A Practical Guide to Using AI in Email Marketing.

Maintain human oversight and brand voice

AI can generate options quickly, but it doesn’t understand your brand, audience, or business context the way your team does. As Karen Talavera, Founder & Principal at Synchronicity Marketing, puts it, “We still need human oversight. We are not ready. It’s the wild west. We are not ready to give up human input, but especially human oversight.”

Prioritize data privacy and responsible use

AI tools are only as responsible as the way you use them. Take time to understand how it handles data and whether that aligns with your policies. Clear guidelines and transparency go a long way in building trust.

Measure, learn, and iterate

Treat AI adoption like any other change to your email program: measure the impact, learn from what works (and what doesn’t), and adjust.

Helpful metrics often include:

• Time saved in drafting, editing, or review
• Fewer revisions or less rework during QA and approvals
• Clearer, more consistent messaging across campaigns
• Performance improvements, such as engagement or response rates

Avoiding common AI implementation mistakes

Even well-intentioned teams can run into trouble when AI is introduced too quickly or without guardrails. A few pitfalls to watch out for:

• Publishing without review. AI output should never go straight to send without human oversight.
• Over-personalization without consent or context. Relevance matters, but personalization that feels invasive can erode trust.
• Blind trust in AI insights. AI can surface patterns, but it can’t explain business context. Use the insights as one reference point instead of the end-all-be-all.
• Ignoring accessibility. AI doesn’t automatically account for inclusive language or accessible design. Those checks still matter.

Give your email strategy a boost with AI tools

AI is already changing how email teams work. It helps them move faster, spot patterns sooner, and spend less time stuck on repetitive tasks. But the biggest gains don’t come from handing everything over to AI. They come from using it with intention to support strategy and free up human time for higher-value thinking.

Because at the end of the day, email marketing is all about connection. The tools are meant to support the people who do the work, so they can add the magic touch that makes it all worth opening.

Eric Stelle summed it up nicely, saying,“So long as email remains both an art and a science, we won’t be replaced.”

Key takeaways Your images might be hurting your deliverability. Images aren’t the enemy—but oversized files, image-only emails, and missing alt text can create a poor experience and raise red flags with mailbox providers. Broken or sketchy links instantly damage trust. Spam filters actively check your URLs, and broken links, unsecured pages, or generic shorteners can make your email look suspicious. Relevance is the real inbox MVP. Even perfectly tested emails won’t perform well if the content doesn’t resonate with subscribers. And low engagement signals tell mailbox providers your messages don’t belong in the inbox.

 

Mailbox providers (MBPs) are relentlessly raising the bar for email marketers. They’re no longer just asking, “Is this sender authenticated?” Instead, the question has become, “Does this message deserve to be in this subscriber’s inbox?”

AI-driven mailboxes and snippet digest views mean that email content optimization is back to the forefront of the conversation—and this optimization plays a major role in a campaign’s success or failure. If you’ve nailed your authentication setup, consent processes, and bulk sender rules, but still see deliverability issues, it may be time to check the email content itself.

Recently, industry expert LoriBeth (LB) Blair joined Guy Hanson and me on Validity’s Email After Hours podcast for a deep dive into the content issues she sees all too often. In this blog post, we’re recapping the episode by breaking down the top four ways your email content may be killing your deliverability.

Table of contents

• Images: optimize or pay the price
• Links: broken = suspicious
• Rendering: If it looks broken, it’s risky
• Relevance: the ultimate filter
• Test before you send

Let’s dive in!

1. Images: Optimize or pay the price 

Images don’t automatically send your emails to the spam folder, but poorly optimized ones can hurt your email program’s inbox performance and engagement rates. As LB put it on the podcast: “If putting an image in your email causes it to go to spam, that is not your only problem.”

The issue isn’t the inclusion of images. It’s how they’re built and displayed.

MBPs are under increasing pressure to manage computing and storage resources. Oversized images and heavy GIFs create unnecessary strain and a poor user experience, particularly on mobile.

How should marketers be optimizing images in their emails?

• Compress images to reduce file size. Large images increase storage and processing demands for MBPs, and slow load times for subscribers.
• Avoid image-only emails. Filters can’t easily interpret image-only content and screen readers can’t access it without proper text.
• Maintain a healthy text-to-image balance. Text gives filters context and helps classify your message accurately. It also protects the experience if images don’t load, improving both accessibility and engagement.
• Ensure images load quickly. Fast-loading emails feel professional and capture attention quickly, while slow ones get ignored. Low engagement negatively impacts sender reputation.

Another critical note for images in emails: don’t forget about the alt text. Descriptive alt text isn’t just about ensuring accessibility—it can influence deliverability. When images are blocked (which happens by default when emails land in the spam folder), alt text becomes part of the visible message. In this scenario, the subscriber’s ability to digest the alt text becomes essential, especially if you want them to rescue you from the spam folder.

LB recommends a simple approach to writing alt text: describe what you see. “Look at the image and say aloud what it is.”

Marketers should ask themselves: “If someone couldn’t see the image, would they still understand the message?” If not, they’re missing opportunities to meet accessibility best practices, establish clarity, and promote critical engagement that can potentially impact inbox placement.

2. Links: broken links are suspicious

Broken links aren’t just an embarrassing marketing oops—they’re a cybersecurity red flag. Spam filters actively check links. If a URL leads to a 404 error page or behaves unpredictably, it raises trust concerns. Historically, malicious actors have sent emails with “clean” links and later swapped them for harmful content—which means filters are cautious by design.

Marketers should ensure they:

• Test every link before sending.
• Leverage HTTPS-secured URLs.
• Avoid public link shorteners, like tiny.url or bit.ly.
• Brand their tracking domain (e.g., link.yourdomain.com)—when your link domain aligns with your sending domain, you reinforce trust and reduce filtering complexity.

If you’re linking to a PDF? Avoid auto-download behavior, especially in B2B environments with strict security filters. A two-click experience (landing page first, then download) is safer and signals legitimacy. In email marketing, always build trust and reputation through transparency and predictability.

3. Rendering: If it looks broken, it’s risky

You can follow every infrastructure and segmentation best practice in the book and still lose if your email renders poorly. Today’s subscribers check email in multiple viewing environments—on mobile devices, desktops, tablets, and increasingly, in dark mode. If your message isn’t responsive, includes confusing or poorly placed calls-to-action, or becomes unreadable in dark mode, subscribers will feel a sense of doubt.

Doubt harms engagement, and low engagement hurts reputation. As Guy Hanson shared during the episode: “The most successful email programs are going to be the ones that start making trust visible, shifting from simply reaching the inbox to proving you belong there.”

That trust extends to design and rendering. With roughly half of mobile users now using dark mode, failing to optimize for it isn’t just a visual oversight—it’s a subscriber experience issue.

Marketers should confirm that their emails:

• Look good with images on and off.
• Render properly in dark mode.
• Include clear, visible CTAs (yes, even above the fold).
• Include quick-loading images.

LB was spot-on with her assessment and these rendering checks: “We all have to account for attention spans in the age of TikTok, which are short—perilously short.” Emails should be digestible and clickable, even at a quick glance or at first impression.

4. Relevance: the ultimate filter

Optimizing every image, securing every link, and perfecting your rendering are crucial—but relevance is still king. More than ever, MBPs are evaluating engagement signals at the individual user level. If a subscriber ignores, deletes, or fails to engage with your content, that behavior informs filtering decisions.

Deliverability is no longer just about technical compliance. It’s about sustaining proof that your messages matter to your subscribers.

Marketers should ask themselves:

• Is this email timely?
• Is personalization meaningful—and not just a merge tag?
• Is the offer providing value?
• Is the next step obvious?
• Does the subject line effectively state relevance and generate interest?

If subscribers aren’t engaging or interested, filters eventually notice. For Gmail in particular, users are prompted to unsubscribe from brands they fail to open emails from in the last 30 days:

Optimize your subject lines so they:

• Fit within a standard character limit on mobile (35-40 characters).
• Front load the primary offer, value point or incentive.
• Reflect known subscriber interests.
• Match the content inside.

In today’s email marketing world, misleading subject lines not only degrade trust—they can lead to costly legal ramifications. Simply put: sell it like it is in email subject lines!

Test before you send

Most content-related issues can be caught by thorough testing before a send goes live. Before launching a campaign, you should:

• Validate all links.
• Check rendering across devices and in dark mode.
• Review image sizes.
• Confirm accessibility elements (like alt text).
• Send inbox seed tests before deployment.

Content missteps (like broken links, oversized images, or rendering issues) can undo months of strong sending practices. Content testing isn’t optional; it’s a pivotal part of the deliverability process.

The bottom line: marketers and email programs that prioritize optimized, trustworthy, accessible, and relevant content will stand out in crowded mailboxes.

Want a fun deep dive for your ears?

Check out our fabulous Email After Hours podcast episode featuring LB Blair. You can listen to the episode on Spotify for all the nitty-gritty on how your email content may be killing your deliverability.

Key takeaways Litmus Live 2026 was a 100% virtual and free conference for email marketers and marketing leaders worldwide. Validity’s Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Mark Briggs, and Validity’s CTO, Matt Gore, announced Validity Engage, our new AI marketing success platform! The session recordings are available to view on the conference page and on YouTube.

 

Litmus Live 2026 was one for the books. We had nearly 40 email-loving speakers whose sessions were so good that our heads are still spinning with new knowledge. And the attendees! Marketers tuned in from 79 different countries, including Ecuador, Scotland, Germany, India, and Japan.

Table of contents

1. Authenticity meets AI: GaryVee on marketing’s next frontier
2. What to do differently in 2026 (the email edition)
3. From data to clicks: building personalized experiences that connect
4. Where is email marketing headed in 2026?
5. The inbox decoded: how mailbox providers really think about email
6. How to make post-event follow-up not suck for you (or your customers)
7. How to connect your email workflow for full funnel success
8. Live email optimization with the pros
9. Rewriting the future of email: Validity’s next chapter
10. The new edge in email: AI, omnichannel playbooks, and pitfalls to avoid
11. Cleared for takeoff: Virgin Atlantic’s’ high-flying email strategy
12.  Let’s go global: expert advice for connecting with international audiences
13. Retention redefined—a practical framework for profitable newsletters in 2026
14. Beyond the hype: real B2B email strategies for AI, automation, and inboxing
15. Embrace AI for your email campaigns in 2026
16. Accessibility is personalization: 3 email mistakes still breaking UX in 2026
17. Omnichannel subscribers and the growing urgency to manage them better

Day 1 of Litmus Live 2026

Authenticity meets AI: GaryVee on marketing’s next frontier

Litmus Live kicked off with a special session from Gary Vaynerchuk, AKA GaryVee. The Founder and CEO at VaynerX and VaynerMedia chatted with Validity’s Founder, Chairman, and CEO at Validity, Mark Briggs.

They covered topics like the relevance of email in 2026, how email and social media work together, and doing the right thing for your audience. One of the key takeaways in the session chat: be an “AND marketer.” If you stop saying or and start saying and in terms of testing variants, trying new channels, etc, you’ll see your results soar.

This was a live-only session, meaning that the recording is not available for viewing.

What to do differently in 2026 (the email edition)

Ann, Ann, Ann… she’s a top keynote speaker for a reason—because she’s that good! Even with internet issues delaying her session, she delighted everyone with a masterclass in storytelling. 

She walked us through the story of a classic cartoon called Mighty Mouse. It featured the rampaging sloth and the villainous cow—with parallels between their story and how we work today. It all came together with the ASAP Matrix showing impact over time and the growth potential. The sloth, of course, creates slow moments of high impact and high growth that benefits brands long into the future. 

 

Then Ann, like the absolute pro she is, tied it all back to modern email in the AI era.

*Ann’s session is only available for re-watching through mid-May, so get your viewing in while you can!

From data to clicks: building personalized experiences that connect

This fantastic personalization panel featured Anna Levitin, Israa Alrawi, Jay Oram, and Matt Harris. It was hosted by Validity’s Sr. Director of Professional Services, Laura Christensen.

They had an open discussion about practical tips for personalizing campaigns, what’s holding teams back from personalizing more, how to manage data collection so personalization benefits subscribers, and more!

Where is email marketing headed in 2026?

The dynamic email trio—Guy Hanson, Danielle Gallant, and Al Iverson—got back together.

They started with deliverability predictions for 2026, including how relevancy sorting is affecting inboxes and behavior, then moved into how inbox requirements are evolving.

And what kind of discussion about predictions would it be without discussing AI? Open time optimization, relevancy sorting, AI-generated summaries, and adoption for both consumers and senders… They could have talked for hours but managed to cram a fantastic discussion into 30 minutes.

The inbox decoded: how mailbox providers really think about email

This was one of our most praised sessions of day 1! Guy Hanson and Tom Bartel from Validity were joined by Ross Adams from Microsoft, Dan Givol from Google, and Marcel Becker from Yahoo.

The conversation kicked off by diving into how mailbox providers think, including their expectations for responsible senders.

Unexpectedly, all three speakers then gave us great bar analogies:

• Marcel compared behaving badly at a bar, getting thrown out, and not being allowed back (despite a great apology) to email reputation.
• Ross compared the quality of guest list recommendations for a party to mailbox provider expectations. Bad recommendations = a less fun party/a hit to your reputation.
• Dan compared the guy at the bar, who repeatedly asks someone out despite numerous rejections, to keeping it simple and only sending messages subscribers want to receive.

How to make post-event follow-up not suck for you (or your customers)

Leah Miranda worked through being sick to deliver a super detailed presentation—in the best possible way—about creating post-event workflows using AI agents. What made it especially valuable was that she didn’t just share theories—she showed us workflows she actually uses!

The efficiency created with her agents was mind-blowing and quite inspiring. Watch her session and I bet you, too, will start dreaming about saving hours of time using an agent like hers.

How to connect your email workflow for full funnel success

Lisa Wester is a longtime Litmus and Validity user.  She walked us through Copeland’s workflow—across teams—to create, deploy, and analyze emails. From migrating from three ESPs to one, to building an engagement scoring model, and testing their way to success, Lisa showed us how Copeland leads the way in email excellence.

Learn more about Copeland’s ESP migration in our case study.

Live email optimization with the pros

Danielle, Megan, and Julie from Validity’s Professional Services team were joined by Mark Robbins for this fan-favorite session. We received a ton of email submissions, but unfortunately only had time for three of them. The lucky companies featured were VSP, Matheny Arts Access, and the Regional Office of Education 4 (ROE4).

They covered what the companies are doing well, what can be improved, and how to make those changes. Some recommendations included copy to capture attention, accessibility tweaks, code modifications, and CTA optimizations.

Rewriting the future of email: Validity’s next chapter

Validity’s Mark Briggs, Founder and CEO, and Matt Gore, CTO, wrapped up day one with a very special announcement about Validity Engage: our new AI-powered email intelligence platform for marketers!

Engage is built on Validity’s vast data network featuring trillions of data points across industries and the globe. It premiered with four agents:

• Ignite: the foundational agent takes an email at any stage and optimizes it, so marketers achieve maximum inbox placement and engagement on every send.
• Guardian: the agent that protects your brand 24/7. It monitors brand reputation, inbox performance, and email content. If Guardian can’t automatically fix the issue it finds, it will recommend a fix.
• Expression: this agent delivers on-brand creative assistance. It works with the other agents to recommend and build on-brand email components to drive more ROI.
• Insight: the analytics agent provides deep market intelligence that helps you stand apart from competitors, better your strategy, and fine-tune your customer journeys.

Learn more about Validity Engage.

Day 2 of Litmus Live 2026

The new edge in email: AI, omnichannel playbooks, and pitfalls to avoid

Day two kicked off with the one and only Jay Schwedelson. Accompanied by movie memes and reality TV shoutouts, Jay walked us through his latest tips for omnichannel marketing—starting and ending with email.

Jay also declared that no one is an expert in marketing because we’re all learning and trying new things all the time—a growth mindset that everyone should adopt.

Some takeaways include:

• Content recency is king. Include dates with your offers to rank highly with search engines and LLMs.
• Try using “and,” “plus,” and “but” in your preview text to keep interest rolling.
• No more unlocking, discovering, and uncovering. Stop using jargon and keep things conversational.

How Virgin Atlantic uses Validity products

Virgin Atlantic is known for their bold, customer-first branding. They’re also a long-time Validity customer.

Virgin knows how important email is, and they’ve invested in their email program over the years to make sure it’s world-class. The results speak for themself, like their Sender Score of 100!

Tom Nowell and Reece Cohen from Virgin Atlantic joined Guy Hanson for a discussion about Virgin Atlantic’s email program, including the tools they use to make it shine. They covered:

• Litmus for email QA and rendering
• Litmus for collaboration and approvals
• MailCcharts for insights on their competitor landscape, especially send days, and full customer journeys and workflows

Let’s go global: expert advice for connecting with international audiences

Rodrigo Brandão and Fernando Rubino joined Validity’s Cynthia Price for a fantastic discussion about marketing to international audiences. It centered around truly understanding your international audience.

They also covered the complicated bits—international laws. It’s best to abide by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), even if you’re unsure whether or not it applies to your audience. If you break a rule—knowingly or unknowingly—you could get hit with unwelcome fines.

As a writer, I was extra attentive to the copywriting piece and how they approach copy in countries that speak different languages. They had great advice about when to use AI, translation services, and local speakers. You’ll have to watch it to get the details.

Retention redefined—a practical framework for profitable newsletters in 2026

Chase Dimond and Jimmy Kim co-host the Send It! Podcast and Ecom Email Marketer Newsletter. It was a no-brainer to have them speak about newsletters at Litmus Live!

Their talk centered around the profitable power of retention and how to shift your mindset so retention is always front and center.

They also outlined how AI can help marketers scale their email retention, including messaging, segmentation, delivery time optimization, identifying performance trends, and personalizing.

Throughout it all, they stressed the importance of human-to-human relationships on in retention. Be human. Period. 

Beyond the hype: real B2B email strategies for AI, automation, and inboxing

Jeanne Jennings is a highly-requested Litmus Live alum, and she crushed it yet again this year! Her session info-packed session focused on what she does best: B2B email.

Complete with real-life examples, she covered:

• Where AI fits (and doesn’t) in a high-performing B2B email program.
• How to optimize automation for longer, more complex B2B sales cycles.
• How to align email content to real buying stages, not just sales pressure.

She wrapped up by answering your fantastic questions in the chat.

Embrace AI for your email campaigns in 2026

Brian has it right: panels are so much more interesting when the presenters have differing opinions! And boy, did Beth O’Malley, Leah Miranda, and Larry Kim deliver.

Our internal AI expert, Rafael Viana, guided the back-and-forth conversation. They covered quality and trust of AI-generated content, if AI “magic buttons” are a dream or a nightmare, building internal AI agents vs buying Saas tools, how AI is affecting deliverability, and so many more great subjects.

Everyone’s favorite takeaway from the session:

Accessibility is personalization: 3 email mistakes still breaking UX in 2026

Lauren Castady and Tylor Loposser, both Litmus Live alums, gave us an email reality check: accessibility is for everyone. In real life, every single person experiences situational or temporary impairments at some point. By designing and writing emails for accessibility, you’re making your sends enjoyable for everyone.

They walked us through three common email accessibility mistakes:

1. Not believing accessibility is a priority
2. Believing accessibility weakens your brand
3. Thinking accessibility is overwhelming

Then they put their teachings to action by going over a couple of real emails submitted by our Litmus Live registrants.

I may be biased because accessibility is near and dear to my heart, but this is one session to watch, rewatch, and then watch again.

Omnichannel subscribers and the growing urgency to manage them better

Litmus Live ended with a speaker everyone knows Chad S. White. His omnichannel chat covered how email, SMS, and push work together to create positive, valuable experiences for subscribers. He outlined channel expectations, how to vary your message across channels, when to use channel- exclusive messages, how to reduce churn, and more. Honestly, the amount of information in this session was impressive, but not surprising since it’s Chad S. White.

One quote that stuck with me:

Cynthia wrapped it up by announcing the five winners of our social media contest. Thank you to all who participated!

Thanks for joining us!

That’s a wrap on Litmus Live 2026. Thanks for attending—or at least thanks for reading the recap blog.

You can watch the sessions on Litmus’ conference page and on YouTube as many times as you’d like. 

Keep an eye out for an announcement about Litmus Live 2027.