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title: Edition 65
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Plus, in this edition: AI & deliverability, build important associations and build your email contingency pack ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­    ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  

| \> View all past editions here If this email looks weird click here In this edition: → The future of email marketing → Does AI-generated email hurt your deliverability?  (scroll to blogs) → How to build brand associations through email (scroll to inbox drop) → Build your email contingency pack (scroll to end) Howdy, hi, hello    How is it OCTOBER!? How did that happen? Who's speeding up time!?    I was with a friend this weekend, and we ended up talking about AI. How much of what we read now was written by nobody? Emails, posts, articles, comments.   You read more than ever and connect with less of it - what is going on??    If you're wondering how to stand out in an inbox where everything sounds the same, it probably isn't a better subject line.   It's being the one email that obviously came from a human being.   NEW FOR you: Download the updated Email Deliverability Guide here → The future of email marketing  My 2027 predictions 🔮 Everything around email changed this year, email didn't REALLY.    Predictions are opinions with a date attached, and they may not come true but I am very confident about these...   1. More of your email goes to spam The baseline moves from around 15% to somewhere between 17 and 21%. More volume, more AI-generated mail, faster complaint reflexes, stricter filtering.    2. Businesses will break their email with AI shortcuts My strongest one. And the mechanism isn't what people expect. Filters aren't detecting AI and punishing it. Humans recognise the patterns, disengage, and the filters respond to the disengagement. The punishment is for being boring and AI SLOP.    3. Competence stops being worth anything If anyone can produce a competent email in ninety seconds, competent emails are worth what they cost to make. What appreciates is knowing which thing to send. When not to send. That this segment needs leaving alone for a month.   4. The skills gap widens More people are able to run an email programme. Fewer able to explain why it works or fix it when it stops. Excellent news if you're willing to learn.   5. Deliverability becomes a board conversation When a fifth of your email isn't arriving, that's not a marketing inconvenience. It's a revenue line, and finance directors understand revenue lines!!!    6. The simplicity correction The one I'm most hopeful about. The businesses doing well are visibly not the ones with the most sophisticated stacks.   And the wildcard I'm watching: agentic inboxes. If assistants start triaging and answering email at any real scale, the question stops being whether a human wants your email and becomes whether an agent thinks it's worth surfacing. I don't think it lands properly in 2027. I'd keep an eye on it anyway. READ: I see the future → From the Vault A blog a day keeps the spam filter away  ⌚ 4 min read: → How to get reviews without asking. Why review request emails fail, and how to earn the review instead ⌚ 3 min read: → Does AI-Generated Email Hurt Your Deliverability? ⌚ 5 min read: → Is Substack changing email marketing? What you gain, and what you give up Live 4-week Email Strategy Bootcamp Build your email strategy that generates increased results Prediction six is the simplicity correction, and I'd quite like to help with that one!    This bootcamp will strip back to simple, with separate tracks for B2B and B2C and you'll leave with a strong, performance driven email strategy.    Plus free access to the Email Strategy Builder app, which isn't available anywhere else. Join the waitlist → The Inbox Drop How to build brand associations through email Every email you send is a pairing event.    Your sender name starts neutral. On the day someone subscribes it means nothing at all (well something, but not EVERYTHING).    Then it gets paired. Over and over, with whatever feeling arrives alongside it.   That's evaluative conditioning. Take something a person feels nothing about, pair it repeatedly with something they do feel about, and the feeling transfers.   It's been shown with images, words, tastes and sounds.    After twenty or thirty pairings, your name isn't neutral. It carries whatever it's been arriving with!    So what have you been pairing yourself with? An ask?  Constant emails about your products or services?  A discount for something they weren't thinking about?  A deadline that wasn't real? Something useful they didn't expect? Or nothing much at all?  There are two kinds of association you can build, and they behave completely differently.   1. A product/service association They sell shampoo. It only activates when someone's thinking about buying shampoo, which is roughly six times a year, at which point you're competing with everything on the shelf and whatever's on offer.   2. A subject association They understand my hair/hair experts. That activates every time someone looks in a mirror and is annoyed. Which is not six times a year, and which is nearly always the moment before a purchase eventually happens.   Same business. Same emails, more or less. Utterly different retrieval rate!    Get associated with the subject around your product, not the product.   You're choosing to be the answer to a question people ask often rather than one they ask rarely.   Works identically for a construction firm, a charity, a SaaS platform or a freelance bookkeeper.   How to build it on purpose Write down the association you want, in your audience's words.   Then check your last ten sends against it. How many were building that, and how many were building they always want something?   You're conditioning people, whether you meant to or not. The pairings accumulate!  Building associations with email → Quick win for you Build your email contingency pack Something will go wrong. The link will break, the code won't work, there will be something where you f\*ck up in the email or something else f\*cks up and you need to email people.    Get these sorted while nothing is on fire: → Pre-approved templates. Holding note, initial notification, update, resolution. Written with placeholders so you're filling gaps, not composing under pressure!!    → A named decision maker, and a deputy. One person who can authorise a send, plus someone who can do it when they're out of the country.    → Out of hours contacts for everyone involved. Incidents are disproportionately evenings and weekends.   → A confirmed sending route. Which platform, who has access, and proof someone can log in and send at 9pm. Test it.   → Saved audience definitions for your likely scenarios. Built in advance, so the segment is a click rather than a project.   → A holding statement that needs no approval. We're aware, we're looking into it, you'll hear from us by a stated time.   → An agreed approval shortcut. Written down now, because the normal chain won't work and someone will otherwise spend the first hour asking permission to ask permission. Email contingency planning What even is my job? I hardly talk about my services, so hope this helps: I'm an email and CRM consultant. 12+ years experience.   I work with in-house teams to fix and improve their email, rather than taking it off their hands.   That looks like: → Strategy workshops. A full day, in person, with your team. → Deliverability audits. Finding out how big your spam problem is and how to fix it → Training. Bespoke sessions for teams who need to level up. → Consultancy and 1-1s. Ongoing support, or just someone to think it through with. → HubSpot. Implementations and optimisation through my agency.   2027 diary is open. Get in touch to explore Nobody's inbox is waiting for you. Show up anyway.   Until next time!   Beth ✌️ I have ADHD (IFYKYK) so please excuse any typos and spelling errors in this email. What did you think about this email? Know someone who needs this in their inbox? Send them here. Astral Digital, 85 Great Portland Street, First Floor, London, Central London, W1W 7LT  Unsubscribe from RE:markable here |
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