RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.
Every year, someone declares “this is it, email’s finished,” while quietly sending three more campaigns and launching a new newsletter (lol). Meanwhile, inboxes are getting fuller, privacy rules are getting tighter, and the gap between what brands, businesses and people think email does and what it actually does in people’s lives is getting bigger by the month.
2025 has already been a tipping point. We have had the tightening of sender rules, quiet platform changes, rising digital fatigue, collapsing attribution, and the slow realisation that “delivered” does not mean “seen” and “seen” does not mean “cared about.”
I have spent this year knee-deep in audits, deliverability, CRM rewires and real-life inbox experiments, and I can tell you with full confidence: email is not going anywhere. But the old way of doing it is.
So this blog is my honest, opinionated, slightly spiky look at what is coming next.
We are going to talk about the tech and platform changes that will actually matter in 2026, the shifts in human behaviour that most reports gloss over, how businesses and marketing teams will have to evolve, what is really happening with deliverability, and why I think B2B email is about to quietly overtake B2C in all the best ways.
If you are expecting a neat list of “10 trends” and some AI generated crap, this is not that.
This is my view and what I am already seeing now, and where I believe email marketing is really heading in 2026.
Everyone always wants the headline prediction!
“Is Gmail going to kill email?”
“Is there going to be a massive update that changes everything overnight?”
I do not think 2026 is going to be defined by one big dramatic change. I think it is going to be defined by about thirty small ones.
You know that big round-up blog I did of all the email updates in 2025 and beyond? That is the pattern we will keep seeing: constant small shifts and changes, configuration changes, UI tweaks and policy tightening that quietly stack up and change the channel, whether marketers are paying attention or not.
Gmail will keep doing what Gmail does best: constant incremental updates.
Microsoft, I think, will have the most visible shift.
Yahoo will follow behind, as they always do, tightening policy when Google and Microsoft have already set the tone.
None of this will be “you cannot email anymore”. It will be a slow tightening of what is allowed, what gets surfaced, and what quietly gets buried.
I do not think 2026 is the year AI takes over inboxes.
AI will absolutely be used to filter out cold email. There are already tools that sit on top of your inbox and nuke anything that looks automated, cold or irrelevant. That will only grow.
Which is why I keep saying this: cold email is on life support. I originally said 2030. I am revising it. I think it will be functionally dead for most people long before that. In reality, 2026 is the year where most cold email will be algorithmically ignored, even if it technically lands.
Quick hits there:
This is the big one for me!
I think 2026 is the year email platforms either evolve or get left behind.
Right now, most ESPs and CRMs are still obsessed with:
That is not what we need!!!!
What we actually need is:
We are stuck stitching together external tools for seed testing, reputation monitoring and inbox placement, while our ESP pretends everything is fine because the “delivered” rate says 99.5%.
The tools that will win in 2026 will be the ones that:
After first action (purchase/demo/attendance):
B2C: routine length, concern, repurchase window, “is this for a gift?”
B2B: main obstacle (budget/time/integration), tool stack, team size — only if it will change enablement.
At risk of disengagement:
Offer snooze (30/60 days), topic swap, or lighter cadence instead of another hard CTA.
If a question won’t change the next step, don’t ask it. You can always use indirect signals (what people read, pages they view, support tickets raised) to infer interests without adding friction.
You won’t collect everything explicitly and you don’t need to.
Content consumption: People who repeatedly read deliverability posts are telling you what to send next.
Page patterns: Pricing/demo pages = higher intent; comparison pages = solution search; help docs = onboarding gaps.
Cross-team signals: Sales calls, service tickets, returns - these are gold for topic planning and for exclusions (“don’t send generic promos while there’s an open ticket”).
Your job is to translate signals into decisions: send now vs later, proof vs promo, include vs exclude.
Match message to motivation. “Board pressure to fix email performance” needs commercial proof and timelines; “learning the basics” needs primer content and practical wins.
Protect new relationships. New or consequential subscribers shouldn’t get thrown into heavy promos; finish orientation and earn that invisible second opt-in.
Exclude on purpose. In an active sales cycle? Don’t broadcast. In a service issue? Send helpful enablement. Cooling off? Reduce cadence, offer snooze.
Plan by proven interest. If deliverability consistently outperforms “tool tips” for your audience, that’s your editorial bias — not a hunch.
Collecting trivia. If it won’t change what you send, it’s just noise.
Front-loading forms. Don’t interrogate too much!
Treating all sign-ups the same. Honour consequential vs intentional, or your metrics will lie to you.
Never closing the loop. If people tell you what they want and nothing changes, they’ll stop telling you.
Add a single WHY question for intentional sign-ups and use the answer to branch the next two emails.
In your welcome, include a one-click topic pick and reflect it in the very next send.
Create one simple exclusion rule (e.g., protect new subscribers from promos for the first x days/weeks).
Review your last 90 days of content and identify the top two performer topics - bias your next month toward them.
Btw, I've written a full blog here on data collection strategy that explains all.
Progressive profiling is one of the most powerful (and underused) techniques in email marketing. It’s how you build a full picture of your audience over time - without overwhelming them or scaring them off with a 10-field form.
Instead of trying to collect everything at once, you gather small, purposeful pieces of information at different touchpoints in the customer journey. Each interaction adds another layer of context, allowing you to refine your message, timing, and offers with surgical precision.
Think of it like a conversation: You don’t ask someone’s full life story the moment you meet them, you ask the right questions as the relationship deepens.
Most email programmes fail because they try to personalise without the data to do it. Progressive profiling solves that by letting you:
Build trust and context first. You earn the right to ask for more by giving value upfront.
Segment intelligently. You move from “everyone gets everything” to “this person gets exactly what’s relevant.”
Improve deliverability. More relevant content = higher engagement = better placement.
Trigger better automation. You can tailor flows based on what people reveal over time.
Keep data fresh. It’s easier to update fields organically than to rely on one static sign-up moment.
I do not think we are going to see another GDPR-level law suddenly appear in 2026. What we are going to see, and what we are already living through, is something I would call the year of losing permission.
Not visible permission, not unsubscribes, invisible permission.
People are still on lists. They are not unsubscribing. Their email is technically valid. But they are mentally checked out.
They never open or interact.
They have set rules.
They have separate inboxes (like me!).
2025 has been, in my world, the biggest year of “silent disengagement” I have ever seen. Everyone I speak to is feeling it. And this is before any extra tightening from Gmail on “let senders track me” toggles or inbox level privacy controls. Data privacy is not just about laws anymore. It is about attention. You can have consent on paper but zero permission in reality.
2026 will be the year you are forced to recognise that their lists are big, but your true addressable audience inside that list is much smaller, and shrinking if they keep treating email like a volume game.
The way the human brain works is not changing in 2026. What is changing is how humans feel about their inbox.
Consumers and professionals do not open their email to be entertained. They go in there with purpose.
They go in to:
They are not thinking “hmm, let me go for a lovely scroll through 100's of emails and see which brand inspires me to buy something on a whim today”.
Which is why things like:
I talk about this in much more depth in my Neuromarketing & Email blog, so link that in here.
We keep trying to force email into a channel it is not.
Email is not here to give people a dopamine hit. It is a purpose space!
Its job in most people’s lives is:
That role is not going to change and it shouldn't.
Which means if you are trying to turn email into Instagram 2.0, you will always feel disappointed.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha are not going to save email engagement.
They already live in:
They will absolutely use email when forced to by systems, work, logins and receipts, but they will not suddenly become the inbox super-engagers brands have been dreaming of.
If anything, I think:
Layer on top of that:
Brands and businesses who keep using trickery, fake forwards, clickbait, false scarcity and sneaky design patterns will keep getting dragged publicly on TikTok and LinkedIn. Screenshots travel fast.
Email will move further towards:
Information itself is not scarce. Trust and attention are.
This is one of my biggest predictions.
We are already well into the era where:
Direct attribution from email to revenue will keep declining. That does not mean email’s impact is declining. It means the one email = one sale narrative is breaking.
If your entire model for measuring email is still:
You are going to feel like email is dying, even when it is assisting all over the place in search, direct traffic, return visits, brand recall and referrals.
I genuinely think eCommerce & D2C email performance will keep eroding.
Why?
This year’s Black Friday has already shown signs of this. Many brands have had their worst year yet in terms of email attribution. There are other factors, of course, but email is absolutely feeling the consequences of years of over-sending and under-thinking.
The few brands that will stand out in B2C are the ones who:
Everyone else is just another “20% off, free shipping” in a sea of noise.
Here is the bold prediction....
2026 is the start of B2B email overtaking B2C as the most interesting, impactful part of the email world.
We are already seeing it:
Cold B2B email, I think, will die with the rest of cold email. But opted in B2B email marketing has huge potential.
If B2B marketers embrace:
Then 2026 will be the year B2B email becomes the space that innovates, leads and inspires. While large chunks of B2C keep burning their lists.
Inside businesses, things will change too.
Slowly, very slowly, more leaders are starting to understand:
There are still plenty of stakeholders stuck in the “send it to everyone, just in case” mindset. The batch and blast reflex is not gone yet.
But I do think 2026 will see:
I do not think the future is someone whose job description is “sends emails”.
The traditional “Email Marketing Executive” role that is purely about building campaigns, scheduling sends and pulling reports is too shallow for what email now touches.
At the same time, the CRM job market is a mess:
What we actually need in 2026 is closer to:
I think we will see:
Not every business will make this shift. But the ones that do will get compounding benefits over time, because they will build knowledge and context they do not lose when an agency contract ends.
I have spent the last three years living in deliverability. Teaching it, testing it, mapping it, and watching how the industry is reacting.
Short version: We are still at the very beginning.
End of 2025 and I am still having conversations with marketers who think:
Marketers are now at least aware of the word “deliverability”. They know it exists. They know they should care. That is progress.
But in terms of actual skills, processes and understanding, we have barely started.
2026 needs to be the year more teams:
Google Postmaster removing sender reputation dashboards in 2025 was huge.
That will not be reversed. They removed that visibility for a reason.
So we are going to have to get used to working more like this:
Deliverability tools right now:
I think 2026 will bring:
What will not happen is opens returning as a reliable KPI. That ship has sailed.
Open data is biased, inflated, masked and incomplete. You can still use it as a directional trend, especially when combined with other signals, but anyone treating it as the main KPI in 2026 is choosing comfort over reality.
To wrap everything together, here is my prediction:
The best email programmes in 2026 will look like the opposite of what most teams are doing right now.
The best teams will:
The actual sending will be the last step, not the first thought.
We will finally start saying out loud:
Which means success will look more like:
I honestly think:
This is a huge opportunity for B2B marketers who are willing to:
2026 will not magically solve the confusion around CRM, but:
Automation will still be everywhere, but the best teams will design flows with clear goals, not “because we saw a nurture flow template on Pinterest”
I am not neutral on this.
I genuinely believe frameworks like my PPPP™ Email Ecosystem and everything we have been building around email as an impact function, email as an ecosystem, are going to be crucial in helping teams adapt.
Because marketers do not need:
They need structure, language and tools that reflect how email really works now.
My prediction is that 2026 will be the year:
And I plan to keep pushing that shift as hard as I can.
If you want to be part of that next wave, you already know where to start.
Do it yourself:
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RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.
Work with me:
If you want me to design your schema, implement the collection plan, wire the automations/exclusions, and tie everything to deliverability and impact, I can embed with your team and build it properly.
RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.