What if the email marketing rules everyone swears by aen’t working anymore?
- Tell me if you’ve heard any of these email marketing “rules”…
- Short subject lines are better than long subject lines…
- Don’t use emojis…
- Long emails don’t work anymore…
- Don’t use brackets or tags in subject lines…
- Don’t send too many emails or you’ll be marked as “spam”…
- Always ask people to add you to their “contact list”…
- Image-heavy emails are flagged as promotional communication…
- Using ALL CAPS, spam words and funky formatting in your emails kills your deliverability
So, which of these rules are still and which ones are false? You’re about to find out. In this blog post, I’m breaking down some of my best performing emails right now.
And I think you’ll be surprised that many of them completely break the traditional “email rules” marketers have been following for years.
But instead of watching my sales and deliverability tank, the opposite happened.
Open rates stayed strong. Click-through rates went up, with some emails generated more than 5x higher click rates than our average campaigns.
Turns out, a lot of what we think we knew about email marketing is completely wrong.
And I just had to share with you what I found.
Today I’m breaking down exactly what’s actually working in email marketing right now, the data behind it, and what you should do before you send another email.
And if you like this kind of behind the scenes stuff, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter because I do a “show, don’t tell” posts like this every single week on marketing, copywriting, branding strategies to help you grow your online business.
Now before I talk about the “new” email marketing rules, let’s talk about the #1 reason why the rules have changed.
It all comes down to one simple fact…
Inboxes Got Smarter
For years, marketers have been obsessed with deliverability (aka landing in their user’s primary inbox and avoiding the spam folder).
Of course, that’s nothing new, but the old deliverability rulebook sounded a little like this…
- Avoid spam words.
- Avoid too many images or emojis.
- Avoid all caps.
- Avoid “fancy” formatting.
- And whatever you do, don’t send too many emails or your IP will be flagged.
The old email game was simple: avoid spam trigger words, don’t send from a sketchy IP, keep bounce and complaint rates low.
And that advice made sense a few years ago. I mean, I used to religiously run my emails through tools that would flag spam words, fancy formatting and overly promotional language.
And I would tweak, test, tweak, test, until I had a somewhat diluted version of my original email that was “safe” to send. Yeah, that was fun.
I often felt like I was editing out all my personality in my emails like emojis and bracketed side bar comments and examination marks and all caps.
But here’s what changed…
Today’s inboxes are powered by machine learning, and the machines are getting smarter and smarter everyday.
Instead of following a simple keyword or rule-based filter like before. Email service providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook are using large language models (yes, AI) to determine whether an email should be delivered.
They look for unnatural tone, repeated patterns, or mass-generated templates (ahem, AI generated content), which often signals spam.
In fact, email engagement has now become the primary factor ESPs use to determine sender reputation, so when recipients consistently open, click, and – most importantly – reply to emails, providers interpret this as consent and interest.
According to Mailgun’s deliverability research, engagement metrics and sender reputation are among the strongest predictors of inbox placement today.
Instead of asking: “Does this email look like spam?”
The inbox is now asking: “Is this an email this person actually wants?”
Here’s why this is the best news for copywriters and marketers everywhere.
As long as you’re writing emails people want and engage with. You no longer have to worry about toning down your formatting, or punctuation, or promotional language.
Or asking people to add you to their “contact list” — I mean, who even knows how to do that!?!?
Take this email for example promoting my free email storying workshop.
I used funky formatting and emojis.
I used images.
It used promotional language.
And it still landed in the primary tab.
And generated a 52.2% open rate and an 8.4% click rate. So…
New Email Writing Rules #1: Write with Personality
That’s right, bring back the personality! Especially now in the age of AI where so many emails are bland, generic, AI slop.
It’s time to have fun with our emails again and stop diluting your copywriting to avoid the “spam police” (within reason of course… you still may not want to scream sales, sales, sales in the subject line).
Now, you might be wondering, ok Alex, but that’s just one email.
What happens when you send more emails?
Traditional email marketing rules would advise you to not send too many emails to your list, or you risk annoying them, running up your unsubscribe rate, or even being flagged as spam.
But when we started sending more emails, the opposite happened. But, and this is extremely important, we did not send more emails to everyone.
This isn’t a blanket “batch and blast” till the cows come home strategy.
In order to make sure the emails we were sending were emails our audience actually wanted.
We started emailing to smaller interest and behavior-based segments way more often than we send to our full newsletter list.
These are people who have actively shown interest in specific topics by signing up for a related lead magnet, engaging with a particular piece of content or taking some other sort of intent-based action.
Take a look at this. In February, we sent a total of 8 emails to our entire newsletter, and our average open rate was 32.3%.
But here’s what’s wild. In April, we sent a total 51 emails across different segments of our newsletter. 51!!!
And our average open rate? 31.1%.
So basically the same despite sending 6x as many emails, and here is where it gets even more interesting.
Our targeted segments generated a 4.19% click rate on average.
Compared to average full-list campaigns of 0.79% CTR.
That’s more than five times higher.
But it’s not just the click through rate that increases when you email more often to the right people.
Reports from Campaign Monitor consistently show segmented campaigns outperform broad email blasts when it comes to opens and clicks.
And increase revenue by as much as 760%.
Remember, people don’t unsubscribe because you email them too often. They unsubscribe because you’re emailing them too often about things they don’t care about.
New Email Writing Rules #2: Segment & Email More Often
My team and I have started ruthlessly segmenting my list.
And we plan on getting even better segmentation in the future so we can make sure our emails are as relevant to our subscribers as possible.
So segmentation helps boost deliverability and engagement because you’re emailing people who actually want your emails more often.
But what about getting them to actually open your email?
Yup, let’s talk about subject lines!! Because honestly? What we found here kind of surprised us.
Another rule I’ve believed forever: Keep your subject lines short.
The advice has always varied a little. But generally it has always been said to keep your subject lines around 30-40 characters because many people are reading your emails on small screens where long subject lines get truncated.
Makes sense right?
Mixpanel recently analyzed tends of thousands of subject lines. And they found a slight difference in open rate between shorter subject lines and longer ones, with shorter lines under 15 characters performing best.
But a 27.2% compared to 22.2% doesn’t mean “short is always better” does it?
So out of curiosity, I uploaded my own email report to Claude and asked it to analyze nearly 4,000 broadcasts for performance based on subject line length.
(BTW, this is one of the practical ways I love to use AI).
Well, what we discovered really surprised me. Turns out, my longest subject lines perform best in both open and click-thru.
Wild right? Now again, these numbers aren’t life changing. I mean 1-2% swing isn’t really enough to claim that “long is always better”.
But it does challenge the traditional “rule” that shorter is better.
New Email Writing Rules #3: Subject Line Length Doesn’t Matter
A good subject line that is relevant to the reader and generates curiosity will get the click, regardless of the length.
One of our strongest-performing subject lines was: “Looking for a copywriter to join my team” 💬– is 46 characters.
That email generated a 52.63% open rate across 34,919 recipients – making it one of the strongest non-launch/non-webinar subject lines we’ve ever sent.
Meanwhile, a much shorter subject line “I’m not mad about it 🤷🏻♀️” – which is only only 28 characters – generated a 34.7% open rate.
A compelling, interesting, or curiosity piquing subject line will almost always beat a vague one-liner.
Now let’s talk about yet another rule I’m so here to debunk.
“People don’t read long emails anymore. Attention spans are dead, nobody reads, nobody focuses, everybody just mindlessly scrolls.”
But, wait…
Aren’t these same “ruined attention spans” also bingeing 3-hour podcasts and true crime docuseries on Netflix?
Reading entire books? Subscribing to Substack.
And consuming long-form content every single day?
Yeah, the problem isn’t that your email is too long.
The problem was that it wasn’t interesting enough for your subscribers to want to read it.
Is it harder to write long emails that can effectively grab attention, keep attention, pull the reader in and keep them engaged?
Absolutely. It’s much, much easier to grab attention and keep someone engaged for a 30 word email than a 300 word email.
But just because it’s easier doesn’t mean it works better.
Here’s a perfect example…
This email I sent to my list was basically a mini blog post. It was long. I didn’t count, but I’d say it was probably over 1,000 words – easily.
Yet, it still generated a 43.6% open rate across more than 46,000 subscribers.
And even though there was only one link all the way at the very bottom of this email, we still managed to get a 0.71% CTR.
And while that CTR is lower than our average, those clicks are far more valuable than a click on a blind CTA in a short email.
What all this means is that people don’t have a problem consuming long content.
I love to mix up long and short form content to keep my emails dynamic and interesting…
New Email Writing Rules #4: Long-form Content Still Works
And it works even better, when there are, wait for it, images!
For years we were told that plain text emails win and that including images. Especially too many images can hurt deliverability.
But modern studies are showing that visual emails often generate more clicks.
Because inboxes are getting smarter, images and formatting are no longer a “filter” for deliverability.
If this email is something people want and engage with, images can actually boost your email performance.
Several recent email studies found emails containing images generated higher CTR than text-only emails.
One report from Tarvent found roughly 42% higher click-through rates for emails containing images.
When we announced the Copy Posse rebrand last year.
We sent this email that literally broke almost every single “rule” there is when it comes to email formatting for a personal brand.
Lots of images, promotional graphics, multiple different calls-to-action, and even ALL CAPS.
And yet…
This email still racked in 34.3% open rate and 2.6% clicks. And this backs up exactly what I said earlier in this post.
Formatting isn’t what deliverability is based on anymore…engagement is.
When your subscribers engage, the ESP gods reward you.
Here’s another example…
You can see the image at the top of the email is doing a lot of the work for us.
It says “Spark is now open. Get the tools, strategies & step-by-step roadmap you need to go from stuck side hustler to fully-booked freelancer. Doors close soon”.
This one got a 44.1% open rate and 2.6% click rate.
New Email Writing Rules #5: Images Boost CTR
And when you use images strategically they are super, super effective.
Now, I have one more email “rule” to bust and this one really surprised me when I took a look at my data.
Using [bracketed prefix text] in our subject lines. Like this example we sent out to our Posse Week segment in April.
I know right?!? Listen, I always believed that you want to optimize your subject line real estate and quickly open a loop to entice people to click. Forget about using a bracketed prefix.
And sure, that makes sense for a general broad interest email.
But because so many of us are on so many email lists and segments, it got me thinking.
In certain circumstances, where we know someone took a positive intent-based action to receive specific content.
Let’s add a prefix to the subject line to say to our subscribers.. HEY! This ISNT’ a generic “for everyone” email… this is for YOU!
And look at these open and click rates.
We tested our theory by using a bracketed prefix on one of our list-wide emails. And sure enough, this strategy wasn’t as effective as it is used generally or broadly.
Because it’s not the “tactic” of using brackets that works.
The old era of email marketing was about “gaming” the system.
If your subject line was the perfect length. If you used no spam words or emojis or images and got your formatting just right, you could win.
But none of that matters anymore.
The new era of email marketing is all about personalization and relevancy.
New Email Writing Rules #6: Personalization Wins
Sending relevant emails your audience actually looks forward to.
That’s why I created Inbox Income, my email marketing mini-course.
In it, you’ll get over 400 email ideas & proven campaign frameworks to boost your income all year long for just $27.
I’ll see you next week. Until next time, I’m Alex. Ciao for now.
