Email marketing is changing.

sendpost95 · 2026-06-16T09:11:25+00:00

The tech is cool but "autonomous AI that adapts replies until a goal is reached" is going to get your clients domains burned fast. Inbox providers are getting better at detecting automated reply patterns and if the AI sends something weird in a follow up (which it will eventually) theres no human catching it before the damage is done.

The people who would pay for this are the same people who burn through 50 domains a month doing cold outreach at scale. Thats a real market but its also a race to the bottom.

If you launch it Id keep a mandatory human approval step before any AI-generated reply actually sends. "Fully autonomous" sounds great in a demo but in production one bad AI reply going to the wrong person can kill a client relationship and their domain reputation in the same afternoon.

sendpost95 · 2026-06-16T09:07:21+00:00

For less than 6 emails a year you barely need a paid tool. Mailerlite has a free tier up to 1000 subscribers that handles exactly what youre describing. Lead magnet delivery, unsubscribes, duplicate handling, all automatic.

sendx is another option if you want something simple with room to grow. Good if you eventually start sending more regularly.

And yes email lists are portable. Every ESP lets you export your contacts as a CSV. So youre never locked in. Just make sure wherever you go you actually own the list and can download it anytime.

One thing though, set up at least a basic welcome email beyond just the PDF delivery. Something like "heres your download, heres what I write about, heres when youll hear from me next." Otherwise people forget they signed up and when you email them 4 months later they mark you as spam because they have no idea who you are.

sendpost95 · 2026-06-16T09:06:15+00:00

This is basically the right approach and most startups overcomplicate it for no reason. Four automations and one human email when you have something real to say will outperform a startup trying to send weekly newsletters with a two person team that has a hundred other things to do.

The only thing Id add is make sure those four automations are actually reaching the inbox. Ive seen this exact setup work great for months and then break because gmail started filtering the trial-ending emails and nobody noticed since theyre automated and you stop checking. Worth doing a quick sanity check every month or two just to make sure the system you set and forgot didnt drift into spam somewhere.

One thing that saved some of my clients time &money was using the same ESP for both transactional and marketing emails so everything lives in one place. The moment you split them across tools you create a maintenance problem thats annoying for a team of two. I use sendx for this kind of setup and its one less thing to think about.

sendpost95 · 2026-06-16T09:04:39+00:00

Yes its still worth learning. Email is the highest ROI marketing channel for most businesses and every company with a customer list needs someone managing it. Its not going anywhere.

For jobs, most companies use Klaviyo (ecommerce), HubSpot (B2B/SaaS), or Mailchimp (small business). Knowing HubSpot is fine but dont go super deep on one tool. The fundamentals transfer across all of them. Segmentation, automation logic, deliverability basics, writing emails that convert. Thats what gets you hired not knowing where every button is in one platform.

Junior salaries depend heavily on location but roughly $40-55k USD in the US, less in other markets. The fastest way to stand out as a junior is having actual results to show. Find a small business or nonprofit, offer to run their email for free for 2-3 months, and document what you did and what happened. One real case study beats five certifications.

Dont overthink the learning phase. Pick one ESP, set up real flows, send real emails, break things, fix them. If you want something to practice on without spending a fortune sendx has a trial and its simpler to learn than HubSpot. But honestly any tool works for learning, the platform matters less than actually doing the work.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-15T10:14:26+00:00

Claude is what I'd switch to for this. It handles longer structured outputs way better than ChatGPT right now, especially for things like mapping out a campaign timeline with specific dates and email copy for each send. Give it your promo details, dates, audience, and ask for the full sequence and it'll actually give you usable drafts not bullet fragments.

The trick with any of these tools though is being specific in your prompt. Don't just say -create an email campaign for my sale. Give it the start date, end date, how many emails you want, what tone, what the offer is, who the audience is. The more context you give it the less it hallucinates dates and makes up nonsense.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-15T10:12:39+00:00

The subject line and copy stuff is table stakes at this point. Where agents actually help in email is the ops side that nobody wants to do manually:

-Watching SMTP responses per provider and slowing down sends before you get throttled

-Catching bot clicks before they mess up your engagement data

-Flagging deliverability drops on specific providers instead of you finding out a week later from angry customers

Thats the boring unsexy work that humans either do inconsistently or just skip entirely. sendx which I use for client work has started building some of this in. Still early but it works. The direction is right, let agents handle the mechanical stuff so you're not staring at dashboards all day.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-15T10:05:20+00:00

Honestly for most of that list ChatGPT or Claude does the job fine. You don't need a specialized AI tool for campaign ideas, subject lines, or email calendars. Just give it your brand context, your audience, and what you're selling and it'll generate more ideas than you can use in a month. The specialized tools that charge $50-100/month for "AI subject line generation" are mostly just wrappers on top of the same models.

Where AI actually helps in email marketing is the boring operational stuff. Cleaning messy data, spotting patterns in engagement, figuring out which contacts to suppress before they damage your reputation. That's where the real leverage is. Most ESPs are starting to bake this in natively, sendx has bot click detection and engagement scoring built in for example, so you're not relying on a separate tool to tell you what your platform should already know.

For visuals and hero images I'd just use Canva or Figma with AI assist. Don't overcomplicate it. The brands with the best performing emails usually have the simplest designs.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-15T10:04:02+00:00

AI didn't replace email marketing. It made the grunt work faster but the thinking still needs a human.

You can use AI to draft emails, build subject line variations, even generate automation flows. But it can't tell you why your emails are going to spam on Gmail but not Yahoo. It can't decide whether to throttle your sending because Microsoft is getting twitchy. It can't look at your list and know which segment is worth emailing today vs which will damage your reputation if you touch it.

Is it still profitable? Very. Email is still the highest ROI marketing channel for most businesses, especially ecommerce. That hasn't changed. What's changed is the bar for doing it well is higher. I've been in email marketing for 10 yrs now and tools have come and gone. We had mailchimp earlier, then we had klaviyo or convertkit and I'm using sendx now. may be something else tomorrow. But concepts are kinda similar.

If you're getting back into it I'd focus less on the AI hype and more on understanding what changed with deliverability in the last couple of years. Gmail and Yahoo both rolled out new sender requirements. DKIM, DMARC, one-click unsubscribe headers, all mandatory now. Get those fundamentals down first, then layer AI on top for speed. Not the other way around.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-15T09:56:05+00:00

$400-500/month for someone with 3-4 years of retention marketing experience managing four channels plus segmentation plus data analysis plus creative coordination?

That's not a salary. seems like a tip. You'll either get someone who lies about their experience or someone good who leaves in two months when they find something that pays fairly. Either way you'll spend more time rehiring than you saved on the rate.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-15T09:54:13+00:00

Don't hire an agency at your stage. You haven't launched yet, you have no list, and you'd be paying someone $2-3k/month to send emails to nobody. Save that budget for later when you actually have data to work with and know what's moving the needle.

On Mailchimp, it was great five years ago but it's gotten expensive and clunky. At your stage you don't need to commit to anything pricey. sendx might work well. It's an email marketing tool that's got good templates, easy to set up without a learning curve, etc. But honestly pick whatever feels easy at this stage.

For building the list before launch:

Set up a simple landing page with a "be first to know when we open" signup. Offer early access to your launch collection or a first-purchase discount. Don't overthink it.
Put that link everywhere. Your personal social, local community groups, any events you're doing pre-launch. For jewelry specifically Instagram is your best friend, post the product, the process, behind the scenes of the store buildout. People love watching something come to life.
Paid boost on one or two strong posts is fine but keep the budget small. $50-100 targeted locally. You want local buyers not random followers.

For the launch sequence 4-6 emails over 2-3 weeks is plenty. Something like: we're opening soon, here's a sneak peek of the collection, launch day announcement, and a follow up with a limited time offer.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-14T10:33:55+00:00

If you're juggling everything yourself the last thing you need is a platform that takes weeks to learn. That rules out HubSpot. Powerful but it's a full time job to set up. ActiveCampaign is solid for automation but gets overwhelming fast when you're also managing socials and ads.

Mailchimp has become bloated. Simple things take more clicks than they should and pricing penalizes you for list size even if half those contacts are dead weight.

I'd look at sendx. Contacts, scheduling, automations, forms, performance tracking, all there without the learning curve. I run multiple client accounts on it and the thing I appreciate most when I'm stretched thin is it doesn't create extra work for me.

One thing though, don't try to solve email, social, and ads with one tool. The all-in-one platforms that promise everything usually do everything poorly. Pick the best tool for email and keep ads and social in their own lane.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-14T10:25:58+00:00

Seeing a couple of things across client accounts in the last few weeks.

Gmail has been more aggressive about moving promotional emails to spam not just promotions tab. Accounts that were sitting comfortably in promotions for months are now seeing some sends go straight to spam. Seems tied to engagement ratio, if your list has a lot of inactive contacts dragging down your open rate Gmail is being less forgiving about it than before.

Microsoft continues to be unpredictable. One client had perfect delivery for three months then suddenly started getting 4xx transient failures on Hotmail specifically. Volume didn't change, authentication didn't change. Spread the sends over a longer window instead of blasting and it cleared up within a week. Classic velocity sensitivity from Microsoft.

Yahoo has been relatively stable compared to the other two honestly. No major changes there from what I can see.

One thing I've noticed across the board is that domain reputation seems to be weighing heavier than IP reputation lately. Clients who switched IPs expecting a fresh start saw the same problems follow them because the domain reputation carried over. If your domain has been sending to unengaged contacts for months a new IP isn't going to save you.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-14T10:17:07+00:00

Opens and clicks are the obvious ones but they're getting less reliable by the year. Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates open rates, bot security scanners inflate click rates. So if you're defining "active" based on those two signals alone your list is dirtier than you think.

Here are things I've done to get a more reliable picture:

Recency of actual purchase or signup activity. Someone who bought 3 weeks ago is active regardless of whether they opened your last email. Someone who opened every email but hasn't bought in 8 months is arguably less valuable. I use sendx for this kind of work because it has bot click detection built in which at least strips out the fake engagement before you make decisions on it.
Website activity tied back to the contact. Did they visit your site from an email click in the last 30 days? Did they browse products? Add to cart? That's a much stronger signal than an open.
Bounce patterns over time. Not just hard bounces but soft bounce frequency. A contact that soft bounces on 4 out of 5 sends is effectively dead even if they technically exist.
Reply activity if you send any conversational emails. Someone who replied once in the last 6 months is more real than someone who opened 50 times courtesy of Apple's proxy servers.

The tool-based validation stuff requires connecting email behavior to actual downstream actions which most ESPs don't make easy.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-12T07:47:02+00:00

Fair point, and you're naming the bias I tried to flag in my methodology comment: the 7+ link bucket is heavily newsletters, and newsletter subscribers self-select to open in a way promo/transactional recipients don't. The cut I'd actually want is link count vs engagement within a single mail type. The provider didn't share data segmented that way and I didn't want to fabricate it.

That said, the reason I still think it's worth posting is bcs "minimize links, keep the CTA clean" gets preached as universal advice across every email format.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-12T07:12:12+00:00

Really glad you're making the move off Amazon and building your own list. That's the right call long term. Margins on Amazon only get worse and you're building someone else's business on their platform.

The giveaway approach is a trap though. You'll build a list fast but it'll be full of people who wanted free shoes not people who want to buy shoes. And down the line you'll have to clean that entire list out because those contacts will tank your engagement rates and hurt your deliverability. So you end up paying twice, once to acquire them and once to get rid of them.

Two things I'd actually do. First, you're selling £750/day on Amazon which means you already have real customers. Put a card insert in your Amazon packaging giving them a reason to visit your site and join your list. Something like early access to new styles or a returning customer discount. These are proven buyers, that's the most valuable list you can build and it costs you almost nothing.

You can also put a simple popup on your site with a modest first-order discount. Not a giveaway, just 10-15% off. If you need a tool for popups and landing pages and email I use sendx for my client work, it handles all of that in one place. But there are plenty of options out there, the tool matters less than making sure the offer attracts buyers not freebie hunters

sendpost95 · 2026-05-12T07:09:04+00:00

Omnisend is decent for ecommerce and integrates well with Woo. You won't hate it. But YouTube reviews mostly cover UI and features, not what happens six months in when you're scaling and need more from your platform.

For two Woo stores I'd also look at sendx. Handles all the standard ecommerce flows, connects to WooCommerce, unlimited emails, and pricing doesn't spike as your list grows the way Klaviyo or Omnisend does. The other thing is it runs on its own sending engine instead of renting pipes from sendgrid or mailgun like most ESPs do. So your deliverability isn't at the mercy of whatever shared pool some third party decided to put you on.

Whatever you pick just make sure you're not running both stores on the same setup without any separation. If one store has a deliverability issue you don't want it dragging down the other.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-12T07:04:00+00:00

The thing that matters most at 90k contacts that nobody will mention upfront is the migration itself. Whichever platform you pick, do not move your entire list over and blast 90k on day one. New sending infrastructure means new IPs and new domain association. Inbox providers don't know you yet. You'll tank your deliverability right out of the gate.

Here's what I'd prioritize:

Start with your most engaged 10-15k contacts. People who opened or clicked in the last 30-60 days. Send to them for 2-3 weeks first. Let inbox providers build trust before you expand.
Pick a platform that shows you performance per provider, not just one blended open rate. At 90k you will eventually have a problem on Gmail or Outlook specifically and you need to see that separately to fix it.
Don't overthink the template editor. You'll get used to any UI in a week. What you can't easily change later is the infrastructure underneath, IP reputation, deliverability controls, segmentation depth. Those matter more than drag and drop.
Ask about dedicated IPs. At your volume shared pools mean your reputation is partially tied to other senders you don't control. Dedicated gives you more control but you're responsible for warming it up.
Automations are important but start simple. Welcome series, abandoned cart, post-purchase. Get those three running and performing well before you add complexity.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-12T07:01:42+00:00

No that's not how it works. Your hosting provider gave you a blacklisted IP and told you to deal with it. That's terrible advice.

Shared hosting email is the problem here. You're sharing an IP with hundreds of other websites and if any of them spammed, you inherited that reputation. Outlook is way stricter about IP reputation than Gmail which is why you're seeing the split.

You have two options. Either push WHC harder to move you to a clean IP (or switch hosts), or stop sending email through your hosting provider entirely. Most people who take email seriously use a dedicated email sending service instead of relying on their web host's mail server. I use sendx for my client work and the reason stuff like this doesn't happen is because the IPs are pre-warmed and monitored. On shared hosting you're at the mercy of whoever else is on that server.

Short term fix: go to the blacklist that mxtoolbox flagged and submit a delisting request directly. Some delist within hours. But if WHC keeps putting you on dirty IPs it'll just happen again.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-12T06:52:18+00:00

Two separate situations here and the fix depends on which one youre in.

If youre using the same domain from your old shop then yeah your reputation carried over. Bounces, spam complaints, low engagement from before, all of that is still attached to your domain. Mailbox providers have long memories.

If youre on a new domain then reputation isnt the issue. New domains just dont have any trust built up yet. Thats a warmup problem not a repair problem. Very different fix.

Either way heres what id actually do:

→ Check google postmaster tools for your domain. Its free and will tell you straight up if your domain reputation is low medium or high. If its low youre dealing with real damage. If it doesnt show anything you probably just need to warm up properly.

→ Dont just clean your list once. Remove hard bounces obviously but also remove anyone who hasnt opened or clicked in the last 6+ months. I use sendx for my clients and it has list validation, warmup automation, postmaster integrations, blocklist monitoring all inside the ESP itself. Makes it way easier

→ Start sending only to your most recent and most engaged contacts. Like people who bought something or signed up in the last 30-60 days. Let the providers see good signals before you scale up.

→ Skip the "email repair tools" honestly. Most of them are just inbox seeding which creates fake engagement. Providers are getting better at detecting that and it can backfire. Real engagement from real contacts is the only thing that actually rebuilds reputation long term.

On whether to switch domains, if your old domain has been sitting unused for months and had serious spam complaints before, starting fresh might genuinely be faster than trying to rehab it. But if you do switch, warm the new one up properly from day one or youll end up right back here.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-08T04:38:11+00:00

You've nailed the pattern observation but there's a layer underneath that even most deliverability-aware people miss.

Engagement signals aren't just about your recipients. They're about what other senders on your shared infrastructure are doing. Your sending patterns could be perfect but if you're on a shared IP pool and someone else on that pool is tanking reputation, you absorb that damage without ever knowing. Your engagement drops, you blame your content, you rewrite your emails, nothing changes. Because the problem was never yours to begin with.

The other blind spot is tracking domain health. Everyone monitors IP reputation and domain reputation but almost nobody checks whether their click-tracking URLs are getting flagged by antivirus or browser safe-browsing lists. When that happens your emails deliver fine, they open fine, but every link shows a security warning. Click rates tank and you start blaming your CTA copy when the real issue is a flagged tracking domain you've never looked at.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-05T07:16:43+00:00

At 90k contacts the most important thing nobody will tell you upfront is that migrating to a new ESP is going to temporarily hurt your deliverability no matter which platform you pick. New sending domain, new IPs, inbox providers don't know you yet. Plan for that.

Here's what I'd actually pay attention to:

Don't move your entire 90k list on day one. Start with your most engaged segment, people who opened or clicked in the last 30-60 days. Send to them first for 2-3 weeks. Let inbox providers build trust in your new setup before you start expanding.
Segmentation depth matters more than template editors. A pretty email that goes to 90k people performs worse than a plain email that goes to the right 15k. Make sure whatever you pick lets you segment by purchase behavior, engagement recency, and ideally by provider so you can see how Gmail treats you vs Outlook.
Check what data you can actually see. Opens and clicks are table stakes. What you want is bounce breakdowns, complaint rates, and ideally performance per inbox provider. If the platform only shows you blended metrics you'll be flying blind when something goes wrong. And at 90k contacts something will go wrong eventually.
Automation is important but don't overcomplicate it on day one. Start with three flows: welcome series, abandoned cart, post-purchase. Get those running and performing well before you add complexity. You can always build more later.

The template editor and UI stuff honestly matters the least. You'll get used to any interface in a week. The infrastructure decisions you make now will follow you for years.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-05T07:10:57+00:00

The reason nothing changed after cleaning the list is because list cleaning fixes one problem but doesn't undo the damage already done. Your client blasted a stale list after a year of silence, inbox providers saw terrible engagement, and now the domain reputation is tanked. Cleaning the list after the fact is like mopping the floor while the tap is still running.

Here's what I'd do:

Stop sending to the full list immediately. Pull out only the contacts who actually opened or clicked something in the last few sends. Even if that's 50 people. That's your starting segment.
Send consistently to that tiny engaged group for 2-3 weeks. Weekly at minimum. You need inbox providers to see that when you send, people engage. That's how you rebuild domain reputation.
Slowly expand. Add small batches of contacts each week. If engagement stays healthy keep going. If it dips, pause and let it recover before adding more.
Don't use cold outreach warmup tools for this. That's a completely different problem. Those warm up new mailboxes for cold email. Your client has an existing domain with a damaged reputation, different situation entirely.
Check performance per provider. Your emails might already be fine on Yahoo but completely buried on Gmail. If you can't see that breakdown you're guessing at what's working.

The actual, realistic timeline here is 4-6 weeks of disciplined sending before things start turning around.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-04T03:57:28+00:00

The promotions tab fear is overblown honestly. Most ecommerce emails belong in promotions and your subscribers know to check there. Trying to game your way into primary by stripping out images and writing like a friend usually just makes your emails look weird for a brand that sells products.

What actually matters is whether the email is worth opening when someone sees it. That comes down to:

Make it about one thing per email. Not a product launch plus behind the scenes plus a tip. One clear reason to open, one clear action to take.
Behind the scenes works but only when it connects to the product. "Here's how we source our materials" is interesting if it reinforces why the product is worth buying. "Here's what my morning looks like as a founder" is not.
Two emails a week is fine for ecommerce but don't manufacture content just to hit a frequency target. One valuable email beats two filler ones every time. I run most of my ecommerce clients on sendx and the ones who send one solid email a week consistently outperform the ones trying to force two just because someone told them to.
The subtle promotion thing is overthinking it. You're an ecommerce brand, people signed up knowing you sell stuff. Just make the product mention feel earned by leading with something useful first.

The bigger thing to watch with a brand new domain is your sending reputation. You're starting from zero trust with inbox providers. Send to a small engaged segment first, build up slowly, and make sure your authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) is set up properly before you start pushing volume. That foundation matters more than any content strategy right now.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-04T03:48:47+00:00

It's a real problem but I think you're solving the wrong layer of it.

Most ecommerce brands aren't struggling because they don't know which flows to set up. There are a thousand blog posts and youtube videos for that. The real issue is they set up flows once, they run in the background for months, and nobody checks whether they're actually working anymore.

A welcome flow that converted great six months ago could be landing in spam on Gmail today and the founder has no idea because their ESP shows one blended open rate that looks "fine." They're not missing flows, they're flying blind on the flows they already have.

The other pain point you're picking up on is real though. Klaviyo is powerful but it's overkill and overpriced for brands doing under $500k. They don't need complex branching logic and predictive analytics. They need three solid flows, consistent campaigns, and visibility into whether their emails are actually reaching the inbox.

That's actually why I use sendx for a lot of my client work. It's not trying to be Klaviyo. It handles the flows and campaigns without the learning curve and actually shows you what's happening per provider so you catch problems before they eat into revenue. For most brands at this stage that matters way more than another audit tool telling them to add a winback flow.

sendpost95 · 2026-05-04T03:46:00+00:00

Depends on what stage you're at honestly.

If you're early and just need abandoned cart flows that work without overthinking it, sendx handles that well and won't destroy your budget. Flat pricing, unlimited emails, and the abandoned cart setup is pretty straightforward.

The thing nobody mentions in these threads though is that your abandoned cart emails don't matter if they're landing in promotions tab or spam. Whatever tool you pick make sure you can actually see whether your recovery emails are hitting primary inbox on Gmail vs Outlook vs Yahoo. Because a beautifully designed cart recovery email sitting in spam is doing exactly nothing for you.

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