In this edition:

→ Email marketing best practice is (mostly) wrong

→ How to build strong associations through email (scroll to blogs)

→ Tony's Chocolonely's emails for review (scroll to videos)

→ The state of email deliverability in 2026. And what I think happens in 2027 (scroll to end)

HIYA

It's August, which in email land means one of two things.

Either you're on annual leave and reading this on a sunbed, in which case put your phone down.

Or you're holding the fort while everyone else is on a sunbed, in which case - solidarity, and there's a biscuit here with your name on it.

Yesterday I ran two incredible FREE deliverability training sessions to over 300 people, was FAB & so fulfilling. PLEASE join the September session here

Here's something to think about:

The people you're comparing yourself to are guessing too

Email marketing best practice is (mostly) wrong

We've all been taught email backwards

Best practice is a phrase that smuggles in an assumption, which is that there exists one correct way to do this and it works everywhere.

What exists instead is a small set of things you would simply not do, a set of principles that point you in the right direction without dictating the execution

Things like....buying a list, fake urgency, trick people, hide the unsubscribe, promise one thing and say something else

In the blog:

→ Guiding principles instead and why principles survive a change of context when prescriptions don't

→ Why you want a benchmark, why that instinct isn't a professional failing, and why the answer is still no

→ The metrics I actually look at, and which ones are indicators rather than success metrics

→ The missing half: what nobody teaches you about the human on the other end

→ A long side-by-side of where I part company with the standard advice

→ Six questions to run any email advice throug, including mine

Bin best practice 🗑️

ENROLMENTS NOW OPEN

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https://weareastral.co.uk/emaildeliverability/training

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From the Vault

A blog a day keeps the spam filter away

⌚ 3 min read:

→ How to build brand associations through email

⌚ 7 min read:

→ Inbox psychology: why people stop seeing your emails. Repetition, awareness, and the filtering nobody measures

⌚ 6 min read:

→ Email is not a sales channel; it is an experience channel. How to build a CRM experience people remember

From the Queen’s Court

Voiceover video verdicts

Tony's Chocolonely email review

How Tony’s Chocolonely Improves Enquiry Emails

Hear the verdict

Why B2B Email Targeting Fails

I never signed up, not their ICP - so what the!?

Hear the verdict

The Inbox Drop

The state of email deliverability in 2026, and what I think happens in 2027

Roughly 15% of every campaign you send lands in spam. Across providers, across industries, across list sizes. About one in seven.

Your dashboard will say 99% delivered and nobody in your business will ever know that 15% went to spam!

That's the ordinary state of the channel in 2026.

The verdict

It's been the hardest year I can remember; the filters got stricter, yes. But what actually changed is that the tolerance disappeared.

For years you could run a sloppy list, half-configured authentication and a habit of mailing everyone, and the providers absorbed it.

Enforcement is now mechanical.

The same behaviour that was quietly tolerated in 2022 gets you rejected in 2026.

So most of the emergencies I get called into aren't new problems.

They're old problems that finally arrived, which is a much less comforting explanation than blaming Gmail.

Three gates closed this year:

→ Gmail moved from soft deferrals to hard rejections. Non-compliant bulk mail gets permanently refused now.

→ Microsoft won't accept a monitoring-only DMARC policy

→ Email engagement is plummeting for lots of businesses

And B2B has taken the worst of it. Microsoft hosts most corporate mail and Microsoft is now the hardest inbox to reach

What's coming in 2027

→ The baseline gets worse. I expect 15% to become 17–25%. More volume, more AI mail, faster complaint reflexes, stricter filtering.

→ AI-written email gets filtered - for a reason people will misdiagnose. The filters aren't detecting AI. Humans are recognising the patterns, disengaging, and the filters respond to the disengagement. The punishment is for being boring.

→ Warm-up tools become obsolete. Filters are too good at spotting the patterns they create (I do love a warm up but it's becoming risky if you user the wrong tools)

→ Cold email keeps dying. Finished by 2030

→ The deliverability market booms and gets noisier. More tools, more courses, more people claiming capability they don't have.

The state of email deliverability →

Get certified & stay equipped →

Quick win for you

How did you make them feel?

Open your last ten sends.

Next to each one, write a single word. Not the topic but the feeling somebody was left with.

Ask. Discount. Ask. Announcement. Ask. Deadline. Ask. Ask. Useful. Ask.

That column of ten words is the brand association you've been building

Every email is a pairing event. Your sender name starts out neutral, on the day someone subscribes it means nothing at all and then it gets paired, over and over, with whatever feeling arrives alongside it.

After twenty or thirty pairings, your name stops being neutral. It now carries whatever it's been arriving with.

Which means a emailcan be beautifully written, perfectly on brand, and still be training people to feel mildly hassled every time it shows up.

Most people do this exercise and find eight asks, one announcement and one thing that was actually useful (what I call a give)

Then do the sentence:

When I think about ______, I think of them.

Fill it in as your audience would.

If the only thing that fits is your product name, you've got a retrieval problem - you can only be remembered when someone's thinking about buying, and they're almost never thinking about buying.

If you can't fill it in at all, that's the neutral association. Nobody worries about that one and nearly everybody has it. It earns exactly the same as being disliked, while feeling considerably more comfortable.